"Thou seest, oh Holly," she said, "this people founded the city, of
which the ruins yet cumber the plain yonder, four thousand years before
this cave was finished. Yet, when first mine eyes beheld it two thousand
years ago, was it even as it is now. Judge, therefore, how old must that
city have been! And now, follow thou me, and I will show thee after what
fashion this great people fell when the time was come for it to fall,"
and she led the way down to the centre of the cave, stopping at a spot
where a round rock had been let into a kind of large manhole in the
flooring, accurately filling it just as the iron plates fill the spaces
in the London pavements down which the coals are thrown. "Thou seest,"
she said. "Tell me, what is it?"

"Nay, I know not," I answered; whereon she crossed to the left-hand side
of the cave (looking towards the entrance) and signed to the mutes to
hold up the lamps. On the wall was something painted with a red pigment
in similar characters to those hewn beneath the sculpture of Tisno, King
of Kôr. This inscription she proceeded to translate to me, the pigment
still being fresh enough to show the form of the letters. It ran thus:

"I, Junis, a priest of the Great Temple of Kôr, write this upon the
rock of the burying-place in the year four thousand eight hundred and
three from the founding of Kôr. Kôr is fallen! No more shall the
mighty feast in her halls, no more shall she rule the world, and her
navies go out to commerce with the world. Kôr is fallen! and her mighty
works and all the cities of Kôr, and all the harbours that she built
and the canals that she made, are for the wolf and the owl and the wild
swan, and the barbarian who comes after. Twenty and five moons ago did
a cloud settle upon Kôr, and the hundred cities of Kôr, and out of the
cloud came a pestilence that slew her people, old and young, one
with another, and spared not. One with another they turned black and