He got precisely one answer, from a down-on-his-luck character named Anthony Lucas, a onetime captain in the Austro-Hungarian navy who had become fascinated with the possibilities of a geologic feature known as a salt dome, literally domes of salt that poked up, pimplelike, in mounds all along the American Gulf Coast. Lucas thought salt domes often harbored caches of sulfur or sometimes oil. After meeting with Higgins, he judged the Big Hill a classic salt dome.
