He turned back to the brown desk and opened it without further delay.
His hand was firm now, and he took out the paper parcel that lay inside
without a tremor. It was heavy. A moment later there lay on the table
before him a couple of weather-worn plaques of grey stone--they looked
like stone, although they felt like metal--on which he saw markings of
a curious character that might have been the mere tracings of natural
forces through the ages, or, equally well, the half-obliterated
hieroglyphics cut upon their surface in past centuries by the more or
less untutored hand of a common scribe.

He lifted each stone in turn and examined it carefully. It seemed to him
that a faint glow of heat passed from the substance into his skin, and
he put them down again suddenly, as with a gesture of uneasiness.

"A very clever, or a very imaginative man," he said to himself, "who
could squeeze the secrets of life and death from such broken lines as
those!"

Then he turned to a yellow envelope lying beside them in the desk, with
the single word on the outside in the writing of the professor--the word
_Translation_.

"Now," he thought, taking it up with a sudden violence to conceal his
nervousness, "now for the great solution. Now to learn the meaning of
the worlds, and why mankind was made, and why discipline is worth while,
and sacrifice and pain the true law of advancement."

There was the shadow of a sneer in his voice, and yet something in him
shivered at the same time. He held the envelope as though weighing it in