first for thousands upon thousands of years did living eyes look upon
the face of that chilly dead. It was a woman; she might have been
thirty-five years of age, or perhaps a little less, and had certainly
been beautiful. Even now her calm clear-cut features, marked out with
delicate eyebrows and long eyelashes which threw little lines of the
shadow of the lamplight upon the ivory face, were wonderfully beautiful.
There, robed in white, down which her blue-black hair was streaming, she
slept her last long sleep, and on her arm, its face pressed against her
breast, there lay a little babe. So sweet was the sight, although so
awful, that--I confess it without shame--I could scarcely withhold my
tears. It took me back across the dim gulf of ages to some happy home in
dead Imperial Kôr, where this winsome lady girt about with beauty had
lived and died, and dying taken her last-born with her to the tomb.
There they were before us, mother and babe, the white memories of a
forgotten human history speaking more eloquently to the heart than
could any written record of their lives. Reverently I replaced the
grave-cloths, and, with a sigh that flowers so fair should, in the
purpose of the Everlasting, have only bloomed to be gathered to the
grave, I turned to the body on the opposite shelf, and gently unveiled
it. It was that of a man in advanced life, with a long grizzled beard,
and also robed in white, probably the husband of the lady, who, after
surviving her many years, came at the last to sleep once more for good
and all beside her.

We left the place and entered others. It would be too long to describe
the many things I saw in them. Each one had its occupants, for the five
hundred and odd years that had elapsed between the completion of the
cave and the destruction of the race had evidently sufficed to fill
these catacombs, numberless as they were, and all appeared to have been
undisturbed since the day when they were placed there. I could fill a