was either one, two, or three days after the arrival of the Boreal party at the Pole; and he concluded by saying that, if the facts were as he had stated them, then he could suggest no hiding-place for the race of man, unless such places as mines and tunnels could be made air-tight; nor could even they be of use to any considerable number, except in the event of the poisonous state of the air being of very short duration.

* * * * *

I had thought of mines before:  but in a very languid way, till this article, and other things that I read, as it were struck my brain a slap with the notion.  For ‘there,’ I said, ’if anywhere, shall I find a man....’

* * * * *

I went out from that building that morning feeling like a man bowed down with age, for the depths of unutterable horror into which I had had glimpses during that one night made me very feeble, and my steps tottered, and my brain reeled.

I got out into Farringdon Street, and at the near Circus, where four streets meet, had under my furthest range of vision nothing but four fields of bodies, bodies, clad in a rag-shop of every faded colour, or half-clad, or not clad at all, actually, in many cases, over-lying one another, as I had seen at Reading, but here with a markedly more skeleton appearance:  for I saw the swollen-looking shoulders, sharp hips, hollow abdomens, and stiff bony limbs of people dead from famine, the whole having the grotesque air of some macabre battle-field of fallen marionettes.  Mixed with these was an extraordinary number of vehicles of all sorts, so that I saw that driving among them would be impracticable, whereas the street which I had taken during the night was fairly clear.  I thought a minute what I should do:  then went by a parallel back-street, and came out to a shop in the Strand, where I hoped to find all the information which I needed about the excavations of the country.  The shutters were up, and I did not wish to make any noise among these people, though the morning was bright, it being about ten o’clock, and it was easy to effect entrance, for I saw a crow-bar in a big covered furniture-van near.  I, therefore, went northward, till I came to the British Museum, the cataloguing-system of which I knew well, and passed in.  There was no one at the library-door to bid me stop, and in the great round reading-room not a soul, except one old man with a bag of goitre hung at his neck, and spectacles, he lying up a book-ladder near the shelves, a ‘reader’ to the last.  I got to the printed catalogues, and for an hour was upstairs among the dim sacred galleries of this still place, and at the sight of certain Greek and Coptic papyri, charters, seals, had such a dream of this ancient earth, my good God, as even an angel’s pen could not half express on paper.  Afterwards, I went away loaded with a good hundred-weight of Ordnance-maps, which I had stuffed into a bag found in the cloak-room,