position.Wanderers, soldiers of fortune, thrown together by chance and attracted
to each other by mutual admiration, he and Yar Ali had wandered
from India up through Turkistan and down through Persia, an oddly
assorted but highly capable pair. Driven by the restless urge of
inherent wanderlust, their avowed purpose--which they swore to and
sometimes believed themselves--was the accumulation of some vague and
undiscovered treasure, some pot of gold at the foot of some yet unborn
rainbow.Then in ancient Shiraz they had heard of the Fire of Asshurbanipal.
From the lips of an ancient Persian trader, who only half believed what
he repeated to them, they heard the tale that he in turn had heard
from the babbling lips of delirium, in his distant youth. He had been
a member of a caravan, fifty years before, which, wandering far on the
southern shore of the Persian Gulf trading for pearls, had followed the
tale of a rare pearl far into the desert.The pearl, rumored found by a diver and stolen by a shaykh of the
interior, they did not find, but they did pick up a Turk who was dying
of starvation, thirst and a bullet wound in the thigh. As he died in
delirium, he babbled a wild tale of a silent dead city of black stone
set in the drifting sands of the desert far to the westward, and of a
flaming gem clutched in the bony fingers of a skeleton on an ancient
throne.He had not dared bring it away with him, because of an overpowering
brooding horror that haunted the place, and thirst had driven him
into the desert again, where Bedouins had pursued and wounded him.
Yet he had escaped, riding hard until his horse fell under him. He
died without telling how he had reached the mythical city in the
first place, but the old trader thought he must have come from the
northwest--a deserter from the Turkish army, making a desperate attempt
to reach the Gulf.The men of the caravan had made no attempt to plunge still further
into the desert in search of the city; for, said the old trader, they
believed it to be the ancient, ancient City of Evil spoken of in the
_Necronomicon_ of the mad Arab Al-hazred--the city of the dead on which
an ancient curse rested. Legends named it vaguely: the Arabs called it
_Beled-el-Djinn_, the City of Devils, and the Turks, _Kara-Shehr_, the
Black City. And the gem was that ancient and accursed jewel belonging
to a king of long ago, whom the Grecians called Sardanapalus and the
Semitic peoples Asshurbanipal.       *       *       *       *       *Steve had been fascinated by the tale. Admitting to himself that it was
doubtless one of the ten thousand cock-and-bull myths mooted about the
East, still there was a possibility that he and Yar Ali had stumbled
onto a trace of that pot of rainbow gold for which they searched. 

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