Chapter IX

THE MYSTERIOUS CITY

IT was the dawn hour. A few early delivery trucks rattled in the streets, sounding like loose-jointed monsters galloping through the fog-crammed cracks between the beetling buildings.

In Doc’s eighty-sixth-floor quarters, five men waited patiently and watched the sixth, their chief, work.

Renny and Long Tom were dozing. Johnny, the archaeologist, was poring through massive books, scratching his head, using a pencil and paper. The homely Monk and the immaculate Ham sat apart, facing each other. From time to time, they swapped good-natured insults.

Just now, Monk was making a great show of reading a magazine of men’s fashions, which he had secured from an all-night news stand. Occasionally he read passages aloud, one eye on Ham’s sartorially correct attire. Ham’s garb was letter-perfect. But from time to time. \Monk misread a sentence to make it seem the dressy lawyer had violated some rule of correct fashion.

Ham took it patiently.

Disgusted. Monk discarded the periodical, got a pair of shears, and began cutting small paper pigs out of a newspaper.

Color crawled up in Ham’s neck. Any reference to parkers which Monk made invariably got his goat.

Doc Savage was working over the segment of hotel-room bathtub. He had sprinkled ordinary black finger-print powder over the enameled surface, applied a slight amount of heat, then blown off the surplus powder. The soap lettering, softened by the heat, had retained enough of the finger-print powder to make it readily seen.

The hieroglyphics themselves were strange.

To Johnny, with his profound knowledge of ancient languages, the characters were a mystery. Just now, Johnny was brushing up on his fund of information about the great and mysterious desert of Rub’ Al Khali, which covers most of southern Arabia. As an expert on geology and archaeology, this was his natural forte.

Doc had covered numerous scraps of paper with marks as he probed the message left by the whitehaired girl. He was jotting down characters from ancient tongues of the biblical days, and various vocabularies of modern Syrian, and comparing them with the stuff on the tub.

There was no resemblance.

“Chicken tracks!” Monk had called the marks - with no idea of making a wisecrack.

They did resemble the prints of a five-toed bird. Sometimes there was only one print - never did more than five appear.

Doc sat back abruptly. “That’s what I get for trying to make something hard out of ‘em!”

The others stared at him. “You mean you’ve got ‘em translated?” Renny boomed, awakening.

“Any one of you fellows can read them easily,” Doc said dryly.

“Holy cow!” Renny got up and lumbered over to peer at the hieroglyphics. “I still don’t see how!”

“Any one of you can read ‘em!” Doc repeated. “See if you can guess how! In the meantime, let’s hear Johnny give a lecture on this desert of Rub’ Al Khali.”

Johnny adjusted his spectacles with the magnifying left lens.

“The encyclopedia contains one of the most remarkable facts about this desert,” he began in a classroom voice. “Most individuals think the north and south polar regions contain the largest areas on the globe as yet unexplored. This is not the fact. The largest totally unknown region is this desert of Rub’ Al Khali.

“The southern half is entirely unexplored. It is reported to contain ruins of an ancient civilization, as well as great salt marshes.”

“What about inhabitants?” Monk demanded.

“A few savage tribesmen, it is believed,” Johnny announced. “There is no fresh water, only salty brine from the marshes. It is said there is a species of camel which can subsist on the salt water, and that the natives in turn live on the milk of these camels.”

“What else is known?” Monk persisted.

“Very little. An Englishman made perhaps the most ambitious attempt at exploration a few years ago, when he took an expedition across a portion of the desert. Others have gone in - and vanished.”

Monk wrinkled his pleasantly ugly face. “How come it ain’t been explored with airplanes?”

“Simply because a flight over this desert is more dangerous than one over the pole. There is no water over a tremendous area. A forced landing is almost certain to mean death by thirst. In addition, there are savage tribesmen along the coast.”

Doc Savage put in: “A further explanation can be attributed to human psychology. You fellows are highly educated. But how many of you knew this desert of Rub’ Al Khali was the largest unexplored region in the world?”

No one admitted previous knowledge of that fact.

“There you are,” Doc told them. “Explorers, public belief to the contrary, do their exploring for fame and monetary return from books and lectures. A flight over the poles is good for newspaper headlines everywhere. A hop over the desert of Rub’ Al Khali might rate a scant paragraph, providing there was no big gangster killing that day.”

“That is probably the real reason why the district is so unknown,” Ham declared, voicing a knowledge of human traits garnered in many a courtroom battle. “If this desert was as famous as the north pole, you can bet it would be full of explorers.”

Renny had been eying the fragment of bathtub during the dissertation.

“I can’t read that stuff!” he boomed. “I’ll swear I can’t!”

“You know the deaf-and-dumb sign language, don’t you?” Doc countered.

Renny nodded. Not only did he himself know the sign language, but Doc and the others could converse in it fluently. They often used it to exchange information when it was imperative that no sounds be made.

“Look!” Doc directed.

He formed a letter of the sign language with his fingers, and held it beside one of the hieroglyphic characters.

“Holy cow!” Renny grunted. “That’s the letter ‘M’!”

“Exactly,” Doc agreed. “The message is in English, although hardly understandable when translated. Wait, I’ll write it out.”

Doc printed the words on a fresh sheet of paper. When he was done, he held it up for the others to study.

“Huh!” Monk gulped. “What a mess!”

The missive read:

BD MAN SCARE, G HOM, BOT. TKE GIRL, PRSNER. BD MAN HOM, CRYIN ROK, SOUTH EDG WATR. HELP PESE. GIRL TKE YO PHANTOM CIT -

The weird message ended there.

“Probably she was interrupted.” Doc explained.

“Blast it!” Monk snorted. “I still can’t read it!”

“Here,” Doc said, and added omitted letters until he had the communication in a more coherent form:

BAD MAN SCARED, GOING HOME ON BOAT. TAKING GIRL, PRISONER BAD MAN HOME, CRYING ROCK, SOUTH EDGE WATER. HELP PLEASE. GIRL TAKE YOU TO PHANTOM CITY -

“The bad man is Mohallet,” Doc surmised. “And by ‘girl,’ the whitehaired young lady means herself.”

“I see it!” Monk grinned. “She tried to tell us that Mohallet’s hangout is at a place called Crying Rock, on the southern Arabian coast. But what’s that stuff about a Phantom City?”

“That,” Doc said thoughtfully. “probably explains what is behind this mess.”

Ham tapped the paper with the end of his sword cane. “This was in English if you could call it that. Yet the girl certainly did not speak English.”

Doc considered. “Suppose you came in contact with a deaf-and-dumb person of some race - Arabian for example - who could not read or write, and you wanted to teach him to talk on his hands. Couldn’t you do it. giving him the signs in English and pointing to the corresponding actions and objects as you did so?”

“Undoubtedly,” Ham admitted.

“Then, after the passage of many years, or in case that person taught the sign language to some one else, many of the letters might be omitted. Isn’t that possible. too?”

“That must explain it,” Ham agreed. “The whitehaired girl can talk English of a kind on her fingers, but can’t speak it!”

“Something like that. The tongue she spoke was some dialect from the interior of Arabia, I am certain. I only heard the three words which she cried when I seized her, but they closely resembled Arabian.”

“This thing is strange!” Johnny muttered.

“We’ll probably find it has a very simple explanation,” Doc assured him. “That is, providing you birds want to follow it up.”

Monk grinned with all his agreeably unlovely countenance. “You couldn’t keep me off it, Doc.”

“A pretty girl in distress would make Monk tackle anything!” Renny rumbled.

“Mention of a Phantom City is what intrigues me!” murmured the more scholastic Johnny. “That desert of Rub’ Al Khali is rumored to hold some very interesting things in the way of ancient ruins!”

WITH a heavy hammer, Doc Savage smashed the fragment of bathtub. He burned the papers on which he had scribbled. It was just as well that no one else get the whitehaired girl’s message. Its contents were indelible in his retentive memory.

“There may be a financial angle to this, too,” he told his companions. “To all appearances, this fellow Mohallet is the chief of a gang who make their living by robbery. He did not come all the way to New York and risk his neck trying to steal our submarine unless there was plenty of money at stake!”

Monk grunted explosively. “Say - we ain’t found out yet why he wanted the sub!”

Doc made no reply; if he had any theories, he was keeping them to himself.

He eyed his five aids, saw they were all anxious to get on Mohallet’s trail. He had expected that. This venture smacked of the thing they lived for, exotic adventure in a foreign land.

“We’ll head for Arabia by submarine!” he announced. “Since Mohallet came after the underseas boat, he must need it badly. We might find use for it.”

Monk groaned. “0. K. But I sure don’t fancy crossing the Atlantic in that thing! Grease and oil and pitch and roll! Even the grub tastes of grease! Or it did when we went to the pole.”

The dapper Ham smiled widely. He had just remembered that the contortions of the submarine kept Monk continually on the verge of sea sickness.

“I’m gonna enjoy the trip,” he decided aloud.

The ambulance from Doc’s strange institution in upState New York now arrived. Doc had summoned it earlier in the night.

Unnoticed by pedestrians about at this early hour, the four brown prisoners, still sleeping. were removed by way of the private lift and basement garage. Within a few hours, all knowledge of their past lives would be wiped out. In less than a year, four honest citizens and skilled workmen would be released from the establishment.

“We’d better start getting the submarine ready,” Doc decided.

Monk, Ham. and Renny were dispatched to initiate work on the Helldiver.