that is done under the sun."


"There you have it, Hump," he said, closing the book upon his
finger and looking up at me. "The Preacher who was king over
Israel in Jerusalem thought as I think. You call me a pessimist.
Is not this pessimism of the blackest?--'All is vanity and vexation
of spirit,' 'There is no profit under the sun,' 'There is one event
unto all,' to the fool and the wise, the clean and the unclean, the
sinner and the saint, and that event is death, and an evil thing,
he says. For the Preacher loved life, and did not want to die,
saying, 'For a living dog is better than a dead lion.' He
preferred the vanity and vexation to the silence and unmovableness
of the grave. And so I. To crawl is piggish; but to not crawl, to
be as the clod and rock, is loathsome to contemplate. It is
loathsome to the life that is in me, the very essence of which is
movement, the power of movement, and the consciousness of the power
of movement. Life itself is unsatisfaction, but to look ahead to
death is greater unsatisfaction."

"You are worse off than Omar," I said. "He, at least, after the
customary agonizing of youth, found content and made of his
materialism a joyous thing."

"Who was Omar?" Wolf Larsen asked, and I did no more work that day,
nor the next, nor the next.

In his random reading he had never chanced upon the Rubaiyat, and
it was to him like a great find of treasure. Much I remembered,
possibly two-thirds of the quatrains, and I managed to piece out