to the forgetfulness that hides the tomb, must we all come at last! Ay,
even I who live so long. Even for me, oh Holly, thousands upon thousands
of years hence; thousands of years after you hast gone through the gate
and been lost in the mists, a day will dawn whereon I shall die, and be
even as thou art and these are. And then what will it avail that I have
lived a little longer, holding off death by the knowledge that I have
wrung from Nature, since at last I too must die? What is a span of ten
thousand years, or ten times ten thousand years, in the history of time?
It is as naught--it is as the mists that roll up in the sunlight; it
fleeth away like an hour of sleep or a breath of the Eternal Spirit.
Behold the lot of man! Certainly it shall overtake us, and we shall
sleep. Certainly, too, we shall awake and live again, and again shall
sleep, and so on and on, through periods, spaces, and times, from æon
unto æon, till the world is dead, and the worlds beyond the world are
dead, and naught liveth but the Spirit that is Life. But for us twain
and for these dead ones shall the end of ends be Life, or shall it be
Death? As yet Death is but Life's Night, but out of the night is the
Morrow born again, and doth again beget the Night. Only when Day and
Night, and Life and Death, are ended and swallowed up in that from which
they came, what shall be our fate, oh Holly? Who can see so far? Not
even I!"

And then, with a sudden change of tone and manner--

"Hast thou seen enough, my stranger guest, or shall I show thee more of
the wonders of these tombs that are my palace halls? If thou wilt, I can
lead thee to where Tisno, the mightiest and most valorous King of Kôr,
in whose day these caves were ended, lies in a pomp that seems to mock
at nothingness, and bid the empty shadows of the past do homage to his
sculptured vanity!"