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“It's interesting geologically,” he remarked, “but to enjoy that one needs to be on foot. I think we'll go back now and return for a closer look round tomorrow.”

The following day he haled me off alone. In the first part of the morning we had let ourselves be taken a trail ride. Then, on reaching where we lodged, Mr. Mycroft remarked, “This afternoon we'll do a little geology. We'll take along this bundle, as it has our gear for collecting specimens.” Then, turning to our guide, he said, “If you will come along with us, when we reach the spot where we were yesterday we'll take to our feet and meet you again at the same place, if you'll bring along the horses in the evening.”

When we were left alone we did not go far. That was perhaps the weirdest thing about this strange area—it simply had no scale. The air was so clear that there was not the slightest atmosphere to give any sense of distance. A broken rock six inches high and one sixty feet high have really nothing to distinguish them from each other unless you know how far you are away from them. Here there were nothing but broken rocks of all sizes, from one-inch pebbles to thousand-foot fragments of shattered mountains. And there was nothing else, not even a shrub. Heavens, what a desolation! So complete, so utterly unrelieved, that you had only to go round a single boulder and you were lost—you had left the known world as completely behind, you had as little sense of your bearings as though you had been marooned on the snow wastes of Antarctica.

So, after striking off the trail we were as much by ourselves as though we had been in the nothing-but-rock-strewn deserts of the moon. I was lugging along a bundle he had told me to carry. I left the direction, if there was one, to him. He walked slowly, stopping every now and then like a hound questing for a scent.

At last he seemed to have a direction or at least a fixed notion, and we trudged and stumbled over the rough ground for, I suppose, three or four hundred yards. As we advanced he quickened his pace, leaving me behind. I own I was getting bored and tired and very hot and I was stumping along not looking ahead (what was the use?) or, indeed, at anything in particular, for the prospect had no promise. I was surprised, then, suddenly to find Mr. Mycroft hurrying past me on his way back to the trail and evidently counting to himself. I mounted a boulder and stood watching him from that slight vantage point. I could then see back to where we had struck off from the trail. The moment he reached that he wheeled back and was standing by me in a few minutes.

“It was a bit of a guess,” he said, “but it's worked so far, and I think we're over the one difficult hurdle or gap. That was the step between the Great White Throne and the other designated area—what we may call the Friar's Heel area. We knew that it's 663 somethings and that is all, and that is not enough as a guide, but good enough for a mnemonic, which was all that old S. himself needed. So deduction just had to be used.” He twinkled at me, but I was in no counter-twinkling mood and waited dully like a mule expecting its saddle and bridle. “The White Throne is our base; our goal must be in the most desolate and untraveled area near it, for Sanderson's secret would otherwise have been blundered on by others. So this is the quarter to seek in. Next, Sanderson would use the trail as far as it went. He would, therefore, strike off at that point where the track began to bear away from this ultra-wilderness. So we strike away. When we had gone half a dozen hundred yards I looked for a clue. It was there all right. I then paced the area to be sure. It is 663 yards. Come here.”

I followed him with a revived interest. Sure enough, built up against a boulder on the side we had approached from, was a little heap of stones which would, to a casual glance, have passed as a trickle of fragments weathered off the parent mass. Indeed, even when we were close to it, I wasn't sure it wasn't that and nothing more. The top stone was smooth and white.

Mr. Mycroft picked it up. The underside was not so clean; there were a few scratches on it.

“Here's clear proof,” he said, pointing to the surface crackling.

“Those are simply weather crackings,” I said.

“No,” he replied. “They are, as it happens, Greek capital letters, which are scrawling things at best and are scrawlingly drawn here. But they show the seeker that he is on the right trail. For those Greek letters—as was the way in Greek, as in Latin—can be used as numerals; those three letters can be read as 666.”

“But, if that's so, what about the minus 3?” I asked, for this seemed to need clearing up.

“I think because our Scotch friends like scholarship—hence the Greek riddle—and they love accuracy, even in keeping their private accounts. I paced this and it is just short, I believe, by three yards of the full 666 when I walked straight from the trail to this point. This huge boulder, I take it, stood in the way, so our friend couldn't set up his sign-cairn exactly at the limit of his scale.”

“But how,” I said, “could you find your way over that litter of stones to as small and as concealed a mark as this?”

I asked, for though, of course, he struck at right angles away from the trail, there seemed no other guide to lead him and the whole thing was an almost uncanny piece of tracking.

“I must say,” he frankly confessed, “I thought we might fail and I have been helped by something which may be fancy, but which, if it isn't, puzzles and surprises me. I don't think I could even point it out to you. Try and see now,” he said directing my eyes along the way we had come; “do you see any suggestion of a trail here?”

“None,” I said.

“Well,” he allowed, “I may have been following a fancy but I certainly had the sense that there was a very faint track here. Anyhow, it has led us to clear evidence.”

“But how do we get any further?” I asked. For answer he put the white stone back in the precise position it had occupied on the top of the small cairn.

“Look,” he requested. It was naturally shaped a little like those earliest stone axes one sees in museums. “I am going,” said he, “another 666 or 663 yards in the direction it points.”

We plodded along counting and checking, for now I was almost as interested as he. As we reached 650 in our count the ground became a little more open, the boulders being smaller. It was slow work, for we had to round some big masses and then to be sure we had kept our line and made a deduction for our detour, in our reckoning. But, “Here,” cried Mr. Mycroft as we went forward a few more paces, “here, you see, he had room to let his full scale be used.”

“But where?” I asked.

“As it's in the open and so might be too noticeable,” he remarked, “there's no cairn at this halt and checkpoint, only another of these white quartzite pebbles—not so uncommon as to catch a casual eye but clear enough for himself to pick out. See,” he picked up another white stone rather like an elongated egg, and, turning it over, presented it to me. “He's put his code number on it again. Perhaps he wanted to be able to send someone else along this trail, if he ever found anyone he could trust and couldn't come himself.”

Certainly, scrawled, so that it might pass for chance veining on the stone, were again the three Greek letters.

Replacing it as it had lain, he took his bearings by it and we set off again.

“Look here,” I shouted to him, “how many of these hops have we to make?”

“I don't know,” came over his shoulder, as he ambled ahead, threading his way among the rocks which had again become almost as big as cottages. He was counting away to himself and making his checkings as I caught up with him. It was getting exhausting. I calculated that by the time we came to and found—if we ever did—the next check-point stone, we should have tramped over a mile on this exhausting terrain. Just before we reached 600, as far as I could check by my own counting, Mr. Mycroft had gone out of sight behind some stones even higher than any we had so far seen. We were, I judged, approaching the edge where some upreared strata had once made a crest, but were now split and shattered into a rough kind of cyclopean wall. As I trotted round the base of one of these, I nearly ran into Mr. Mycroft.

“I was wrong,” he said. “I was too fanciful about our Gaelic hero, may he rest in peace. He was not suffering from the Scotch form of scrupulosity.”

“What do you mean?” I said, meanwhile searching the ground for another white stone.

“I mean that when he wrote ‘dash three' he did not mean ‘minus three' and just because his first span could not be precisely 666 yards. He meant 666 yards for three times and then—”

“I don't see the white stone to show we have reached the third span's limit,” I said, still looking carefully over the ground.

“No need,” he said. “As with the great architect, Sir Christopher Wren, in his masterpiece, St. Paul's Cathedral, no need for a monument when the whole place is monumental. ‘
Si monumentum requiris, circumspice
.' Look up and around. If you want a monumental clue, look around.”

I looked, and must own that he was right and I was startled. Rounding that last immense boulder we had come into a huge circle of such stones cleft by a million years of weather and standing in a rough ring.

“Here,” he said, “is the circle with the big prongs standing round it. What's the time?”

“Twenty-five past three,” I said, glancing at my watch.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “It is a bit too late to go further today. But tomorrow we shall know. Yes, we can leave your bundle, as in Pilgrim's Progress, here. No one will, I wager, disturb it. Tomorrow we will start early and be here when the signal tower gives its beckoning.”

We tramped back and found the trail quickly enough. The guide had, as we'd arranged, brought the horses out for us to the bend where we had left him.

“Any luck with your geology?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Mr. Mycroft. “Some interesting formations in their way, at least to specialists, don't you think, Mr. Silchester?”

“To specialists, certainly, certainly,” I agreed.

The next morning I was awake almost as soon as Mr. Mycroft in the small cabin which gave us quarters and we were still at breakfast when we heard the horses outside. After a silent jog, as we dismounted at the bend of the trail Mr. Mycroft said, “If you'll have the horses here again for us at sundown, that would be best. We want, maybe, to get a few rock specimens from one or two points and will make a full day of it.”

We walked off slowly, Mr. Mycroft glancing at a stone every now and then and pausing even to pick up one or two, until the horse hoofs were audible no longer. Then we mended our pace. We had no difficulty in picking out our two white stone clues and, in spite of the rough going, we emerged from among the big stones into the giant circle in about half an hour. There lay the bundle just as I'd dropped it, the afternoon before.

“We've plenty of time,” said Mr. Mycroft, sitting down, “so let us look to our stores.”

His capacious pockets had our eatables. I carried, slung over my shoulders, our two flasks of cold coffee. We placed all these in “the shadow of a great rock” in what was indeed a “weary land.” Then he pulled the bundle that I had carried yesterday, toward him and unwrapped it. Out came those objects which had surprised me so much on our first desert trip—the huge black rubber gloves.

“One hardly needs winter clothing in a place like this,” I remarked facetiously.

“Oh, it can be cold enough here in winter,” was his noncommittal counter. Well, I would let him keep his secret a little longer, if he wished, seeing we were really right on the goal. “Now,” he said, “let's get our bearings so that at the right time we shall be in the right place.” And he was right to take that precaution; I was wrong in thinking we had practically arrived.

“There must be an outstanding rock,” he said, “which holds a position in relation to this huge natural ring somewhat similar to that held by the Friar's Heel to the Stonehenge circle.”

“If so, it should lie east,” I said.

We crossed over to that side and went through the huge rough natural columns that enclosed the area. Emerging, we saw a tumble of rocks stretching away, but sure enough, to the east there was an outstanding peak, almost a mesa, a huge shaft of stone, its sides looking as sheer and smooth as a wall. Mr. Mycroft consulted his watch and a compass.

“At twenty minutes to three,” he remarked. But a thought had flashed into my mind. How had we been so stupid as to overlook it!

“It's no use our being here,” I said, “whether there's anything to find or not. We'll never find it in this wilderness for we don't know the
day
.”

“You mean,” he said, “that I had overlooked the fact that though Sanderson gave time of day and place, he didn't give day of month or year? No,” he continued easily, “no, I noticed that, and the answer was pretty clear. Sanderson was using Stonehenge as his code system. Well, what is the whole meaning and
raison d'être
of Stonehenge? Like all megalithic circle-temples, it is built for sun worship and the Friar's Heel, which has given us a little trouble, owing to its folk-disguised name, here is literally as plain as a pikestaff. It points for one day of the year and one only—the sun-rising on midsummer day, when sacrifice was made as the rising sun made the tip of the
Freas Heol
cast its fatal shadow on the victim on the altar. Whatever Sanderson's code points to, it was meant to point by the shadow of that rock at twenty to three
P.M.
on midsummer day, June 21.”

“But this isn't June 21.”

“That presents no difficulty. A simple calculation will show where it would fall at two-forty today. The indicative shadow won't point at another angle of the horizon. At worst, as we are some months past the summer solstice, and therefore the sun's inclination is increased from the zenith, the shaft of shadow will run past and over the spot we want pointed out.”