imagination, compass within an area two miles in diameter the choicest
beauties of ancient Greece and Egypt, Rome and Persia; then brighten
them with natural surrounding scenery such as Homer and Dante and Milton
might have dreamed of--and you may feel a little of what Pym and Peters
felt when first they saw this glorious island. In ancient Greece a true
democrat would have been displeased with the extreme discrepancy between
the grandeur of public buildings, and the poverty of private dwellings;
but in Hili-li these two bore a perfectly just relationship of elegance,
each in its way being perfect.

"Yet mere inanimate beauties were the least of all. Even Peters, old and
dying--never a man to whom art spoke in more than whispers--even he was
aroused from the arms of death when he spoke of the women of Hili-li.
'Were they blondes?' I asked him. 'No.' 'Were they brunettes?' 'No.'
They were simply entrancing--never to be forgotten. Each and everyone of
them, like Helen, won by her mere presence the adoration of man. And the
men--even they must have been superb--were types of perfect manly
elegance.

"I spent many hours in trying to draw from Peters facts which I might
put together and so become competent to explain the perfection, physical
and mental--for they possessed both of these charms--of the Hili-lites.
And after combining what Peters could describe, and what he could recall
of Pym's sayings, with a statement or two of the natives that clings in
the old man's memory, I formed what I am able to assure you is a
reliable opinion of the origin of the Hili-lite race:

"At about the most trying period of the barbarian invasion of Southern
Europe--certainly preceding the foundation of Venice, and I think in the
fourth century--when the enlightened peoples of the Mediterranean were