"Perhaps just a legend. It isn't likely you would ever have heard of it. It's supposed to be a black stone, a huge, square block, set in the side of a mountain. If a man touches it, his hand sinks in, and he can get loose only by amputating. The queer part is, there seems to be some basis for the legend. All down through Iran's history there are disconnected references. The thing keeps cropping up. Vague reports from wandering tribes, with one or more cripples, minus an arm or leg, to verify the yarn. So, I may take a shot at locating the Ice Stone." Queer stories like that are quite common in Iran. Ordinarily I'd have laughed and forgotten it. But as I say, I'd taken a sort of liking to this serious-faced little Dr. Champ Chadwick. And when you like a man you're bound to think twice before discrediting what he believes in. "So you'll be taking a ride over this crazy railroad," I remarked thoughtfully, somewhat later. He nodded. "What makes you call it crazy?" Well, I told him. Of course he already knew quite a lot about Iran's new railroad--the many-million dollar toy of the "Brother of the Moon and Stars," as the fancy-tongued Iranians like to call their shah. This road writhes and twists and climbs through eight hundred miles of queer, mountainous country--a country of mud and rocks and salt-swamps--and carefully avoids all the important towns. You see, the "King of Kings"--another pet name for Shah Pahlavi--is afraid some of his neighbors might get control of the road and use it against him. These same neighbors sneeringly refer to it as the road that leads from "nowhere to nowhere." Perhaps they aren't far wrong. But this road was the reason for my meeting up with Dr. Champ Chadwick. The last spike, a gold one, had just been hammered into its tie by the "Most Lofty of Living Men" himself. That put our outfit out of a job temporarily. You see, I'd been working for McKardin-Malroy, an American contracting company, to whom the Shah had let out part of the constructional works on his railroad. So, in the end, I of course took the job this Chadwick had sort of dangled under my nose. The pay wasn't anything worth mentioning; but, as I found out later, he himself was supplying the cash for this trip out of his own pocket. He didn't have much, and so expenses had to be cut to the limit. Things moved fast after that. I'd always had an idea that such trips were planned carefully, months in advance, detail by detail. But this Doc Champ, as I got to calling him, didn't seem to plan anything--he just acted. The next day Doc and I rode back over that crazy railroad I'd helped build--a road that winds through a maze of tunnels, one a grotesque spiral affair, over high bridges and gorge viaducts. We passed through Dizful, famed city of rats; Sultanabad, city of rugs; and on to the holy city of Qum.