I hardly knew what to reply, but managed to say: "Why, really, I
don't know: your Latin is about the same."

He brightened again. "No," he said, "being a dead language, it grows
in appropriateness. But please have the patience to wait: where I
am going there is perhaps a better tongue. Will you care to have a
message in it?"

The smile faded as he spoke, and as he concluded he was looking into
my eyes with a gravity that distressed me. Yet I would not surrender
myself to his mood, nor permit him to see how deeply his prescience
of death affected me.

"I fancy that it will be long," I said, "before human speech will
cease to serve our need; and then the need, with its possibilities of
service, will have passed."

He made no reply, and I too was silent, for the talk had taken a
dispiriting turn, yet I knew not how to give it a more agreeable
character. Suddenly, in a pause of the storm, when the dead silence
was almost startling by contrast with the previous uproar, I heard a
gentle tapping, which appeared to come from the wall behind my chair.
The sound was such as might have been made by a human hand, not as
upon a door by one asking admittance, but rather, I thought, as an
agreed signal, an assurance of someone's presence in an adjoining
room; most of us, I fancy, have had more experience of such
communications than we should care to relate. I glanced at Dampier.
If possibly there was something of amusement in the look he did not
observe it. He appeared to have forgotten my presence, and was
staring at the wall behind me with an expression in his eyes that I