Where We're At: Part 3.1: Bilocations

The Chums:

• Lindsay got sidetracked when his regular physical revealed Incipient Gamomania, the abnormal desire to be married. (Chums must remain single.)
• While in NYC previously, Lindsay heard about the "'Turkish Corner' that really was supposed, in some not strictly metaphorical way, to provide an 'escape nook to Asia.' Like, 'One minute you're in a horrible high-bourgeois New York parlor, the next out on the Asian desert, on top of a Bactrian camel, searching for a lost subterranean city.'" After being sidetracked when his regular physical revealed Incipient Gamomania, the abnormal desire to be married (Chums must remain single), Lindsay finds finds himself on a camel traveling to meet the Chums. The camel detects something out there.
• The Chums are on the subdesertine frigate Saksaul (captain is Toadflax), traveling under the sand; the Inconvenience is parked back at an oasis. Toadflax claims that it's under the sand that the lost city of Shambhala will be found. He mentions that German professors have been poking around, looking--but you need the Saksaul's paramorphoscope to find it.
• The Saksaul's mission is to find Saksaul ("be there fustest with the mostest' as your general Forrest used to say") . But has Toadflax already discovered it? Civilian Stilton Gaspereaux controls the navigation room of the Saksaul--talks about the Crusades as holy pilgrimages. (p 436)
• Cities on the Sfiuncino Itinerary as stations of the cross.
• Iceland spar lets all them see the Sfiuncino Itinerary as a map they can go inside except distances are based on a fourth coordinate axis--a fourth dimension (time).
• They dock at Nuevo Rialto (old Manichean city, destroyed by Jenghiz Khan, briefly occupied by Venice ca 13th century). They encounter talking sand fleas the size of camels. The Chums strap on their hypops gear and explore Nuevo Rialto.
• In a bar Chick overhears oil prospectors Leonard and Lyle talking about heading next for Sodom and Gomorrah--for oil there as foretold by the Bible ("fixin to be the next Spindletop"). Is oil the real reason for Saksaul's journey? They'd accept Shambhala but really want oil? Lionel and Lyle would pay off the Chums for looking in the ship's logbook and noting oil (coal? "bituminous") deposits. Randolph gets caught with dynamite in Toadflax's cabin, where the safe with the log books (which would show where oil is) are. Oops.
• Back on the Inconvenience, Miles talks about souls in battle--what Darby and Chick saw in the time machine in NYC.
• Something attacks the Saksaul--perhaps it's Germans or Austrians, or standard oil or the Nobel brothers. Toadflax sends Gaspereaux with hypops gear to London to warn them and tell of their demise--he's to tell Inspector Sands in Whitehall. Many under-sand vessels are attacked and destroyed (crews, too) as under-sand petroleum deposits are attacked. Parts of the ships end up throughout the eastern world and this will change history.
• Inspector Sands --the real one, not someone using the all-purpose counter-terrorism code name--picks up Gaspereaux as a potential anarchist. Turns out Gaspereaux is part of intelligence.
• Gaspereaux explains to Sands that they've (which side? he's not sure) found Shambhala and it's intact--there's a force field around it--even though other underground ruins have been destroyed. Anyone who knows where it is can now enter and occupy it--all the powers want to and will fight for it. Or maybe this is just Gaspereaux's imagination/hallucination.

(page 448)