among the mountains and in the desert, and of his explorations among the
buried temples, and, deeper, into the waste of the pre-historic sands,
when suddenly the doctor came to the desired point with a kind of
nervous rush, almost like a frightened boy.

"And you found--" he began stammering, looking hard at the other's
dreadfully altered face, from which every line of hope and cheerfulness
seemed to have been obliterated as a sponge wipes markings from a
slate--"you found--"

"I found," replied the other, in a solemn voice, and it was the voice of
the mystic rather than the man of science--"I found what I went to seek.
The vision never once failed me. It led me straight to the place like a
star in the heavens. I found--the Tablets of the Gods."

Dr. Laidlaw caught his breath, and steadied himself on the back of a
chair. The words fell like particles of ice upon his heart. For the
first time the professor had uttered the well-known phrase without the
glow of light and wonder in his face that always accompanied it.

"You have--brought them?" he faltered.

"I have brought them home," said the other, in a voice with a ring like
iron; "and I have--deciphered them."

Profound despair, the bloom of outer darkness, the dead sound of a
hopeless soul freezing in the utter cold of space seemed to fill in the
pauses between the brief sentences. A silence followed, during which Dr.
Laidlaw saw nothing but the white face before him alternately fade and
return. And it was like the face of a dead man.