It is time for me to step out of the shadows and introduce myself. I am Sam Nevis. I was along on this expedition because I knew more about treasure-hunting, wilderness excavation, and survival in the rough than the rest of Sebastian's helpers put together--which was not saying much. And by the time that we were assembled in Sebastian's hotel room in Rawalpindi, ready to head north-east out of Pakistan, I already knew that the expedition was going to be a disaster.
It was not a question of funds, which is where three of my own efforts had failed. Gerald Sebastian had enough silver-tongued persuasiveness for a dozen people. How else could a man raise half a million dollars for an expedition, without telling his backers what they would get out of it?
I had seen him cast his spell in New York, three months earlier, and knew I had met my master. He was a bantamweight, silver-haired and hawk-nosed, with a clear-eyed innocence of manner I could never match.
"Atlantis," he had said, and the word glowed in the air in front of him. "Not in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, as Colonel Churchward would have you believe. Not at Thera, or Crete, in the Mediterranean, as Skipios claims. Not among the Mayans, as Doctor Augustus Le Plongeon asserts. But here, where the world has never thought to look." He whipped out the map, placed it on the table, and set his right index finger in the middle of the great bowl of Xinjiang Province. "Right here!"
There were half a dozen well-dressed men and two women sitting at the long conference room table. They all craned forward to stare at the map. "Takla--Makan--Shamo," read one of them slowly. He was Henry Hoffman, a New York real estate multimillionaire who also happened to be Mr. Jackie Sands. He was seventy-five years old, and she was his third wife. He leaned closer to the map, peering through strong bifocals. "But it's marked as a desert."
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