usual, when I shattered the magic globe, but with their invariable indifference, and having handed the reviving Heru over to some women who led her away, apparently already half

ppets and the mockery of a town they dwelt in, for a sight of my comrades and a corner in the poorest wine-shop salon in New York or 'Frisco; idly speculating why, and how, I came here, as I sauntered down amongst the glistening, shell-like fragments of the shattered globe, and finding no answer. How could I? It was too fair, I thought, standing there in the open; there was a fatal sweetness in the a

heart beating a slower measure, the busy mind drowsing off to listlessness. Was I, too, destined to become like these? Was the red stuff in my veins to be watered down to pallid Martian sap? Was ambition and hope to desert

nt-heap until I chanced upon a curtained doorway which admitted to a long chamber, high-roofed, ample in proportions, with colonnades on either side separated from the main aisle by rows of flowery figures and emblematic scroll-work, meaning I knew not what. Above those pillars ran a gallery with many windows looking out over the ruined city. While at the further end of the chamber stood three broad steps leading to a dais. As I entered, the whole place was full of bustling girls, their yellow garments like a bed of flowers

stranger, and a marvel you did no

al forethought of your Government, I sup

we have set you a place at the table-head near Princess Heru, and tonight you dip and hav

his promises to be interesting; depend on it I will come; if you will keep me a place where I can hear the speeches, and not forget me when the turtle soup goes round, I shall be more th

k, in the l

for that, and a singular conjun

e can always fetch him if we want him, and su

of our reformers. Nevertheless, I will go to him. I have

the splendid litter of a noble library, presently amongst the ruck of volumes on the floor, amongst those lordly tomes in tattered green and gold, and ivory, my eye lit upon a volume propped up curiously on end, and going to it through the confusion I saw by the dried fruit rind upon the sticks supporting it, that the grave and reverend tome was set to catch a mouse! It was a splendid book when I looked more closely, bound as a king might bind his choicest treasure, the sweet-scented leather on it was no doubt frayed; the golden arabesques upon the covers had long since shed their eyes of in

learned, by its feel," and that maid, pursing up her pre

s had struggled hopelessly to come within the barest ken of that g

e or two," and propping the mighty volume upon a tabl

nk fingertips falling as lightly on the musty leaves as almond pe

here, but near the beginning. What says the writ

of the First Great Truth,

id so much, y

s all in ancient and crabbed characters going back to the threshold of my learning, but here upon this passage

er page, and try again; I have

d covertly into my own. "Why will you make me read it?

And with a little sigh at the heaviness of her task, Heru read out: "

, I k

aning towards me until her blushing cheek was near to my shoulder and the incense of her breath upon me. "Oh! Gulliver Jones," she said. "Make me read no more; my soul revolts from the task, the crazy brown letters swim before my eyes. Is there no learning near at hand that would be pleasanter reading than this silly book of yours? What, after all," she said, growing bolder at the sound of her own voice, "what, after all, is the musty reticenc

un, and looking down into two swimming blue lakes where shyness and passion were contending-books eas

ousand; and half ashamed and half laughing I let her escalade me, throwing now and then a r

this lovely interruption, yet I was flesh and blood, the gods could wait-they had to wait long and often before, and when this swee

iration of the neglected knowledge all about, and the stirrings of a new love, while Heru herself, lapsed a

ded by the coloured configuration of a world. Page by page we turned of crackling parchment, until by chance, at the top of one, my eye caught a coloured round I could not fail to recognise-'twas the spinning button on the blue breast of the immeasurable t

s? who Ammon Top

opped. "Why, here is something about thy Isis," exclaimed Heru, as though amused at my perspicuity. "Here, halfway dow

n in the ears of Isis; the wild cats littered in the stony lap of Ammon; ay, another thousand years went by, and earth was tilled of unseen ha

n," I

ce in their eagerness have been before y

zonry of initialed red and gold looks so like the carpet spread by the scribe for the feet of a sovereign truth-what says he here?" And she, ha

presently the primeval sigh that breathed the breath of life into all things. And that sigh thrilled through the empty spaces of the illimitable: it breathed the breath of promise over the frozen hills of the outside planets where the night-frost had lasted without beginning: and the waters of ten thousand nameless oceans, girding nameless planets, wer

s of a million barren worlds, when the light brightened again, and drawing in upon itself bec

ing of a vacuous fool, or something else-there rose the sound of soft flutes and tinkling bells in the corridors, as seneschals wandered pipin

of the Gods together and pushing the stately tome headlong from the

purposeless I dug my hands into my pockets, and somewhat sulkily refusing Heru's invitation to luncheon in the corridor (Navy rations h