“Quite so, Bickley.  But all she actually said was that she was of the same age as one of our women of twenty-seven, which may have meant two hundred and seventy for all I know.  However, putting that aside you will admit that they had both slept for two hundred and fifty thousand years.”

“I admit that they slept, Bastin, because I helped to awaken them, but for how long there is nothing to show, except those star maps which are probably quite inaccurate.”

“They are not inaccurate,” I broke in, “for I have had them checked by leading astronomers who say that they show a marvelous knowledge of the heavens as these were two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, and are today.”

Here I should state that those two metal maps and the ring which I gave to Yva and found again after the catastrophe, were absolutely the only things connected with her or with Oro that we brought away with us.  The former I would never part with, feeling their value as evidence.  Therefore, when we descended to the city Nyo and the depths beneath, I took them with me wrapped in cloth in my pocket.  Thus they were preserved.  Everything else went when the Rock of Offerings and the cave mouth sank beneath the waters of the lake.

This may have happened either in the earth tremor, which no doubt was caused by the advance of the terrific world-balance, or when the electric power, though diffused and turned by Yva’s insulated body, struck the great gyroscope’s travelling foot with sufficient strength, not to shift it indeed on to the right-hand path as Oro had designed, but still to cause it to stagger and even perhaps to halt for the fraction of a second.  Even this pause may have been enough to cause convulsions of the earth above; indeed, I gathered from Marama and other Orofenans that such convulsions had occurred on and around the island at what must have corresponded with that moment of the loosing of the force.

This loss of our belongings in the house of the Rock of Offerings was the more grievous because among them were some Kodak photographs which I had taken, including portraits of Oro and one of Yva that was really excellent, to say nothing of pictures of the mouth of the cave and of the ruins and crater lake above.  How bitterly I regret that I did not keep these photographs in my pocket with the map-plates.

“Even if the star-maps are correct, still it proves nothing,” said Bickley, “since possibly Oro’s astronomical skill might have enabled him to draw that of the sky at any period, though I allow this is impossible.”

“I doubt his taking so much trouble merely to deceive three wanderers who lacked the knowledge even to check them,” I said.  “But all this misses the point, Bickley.  However long they had slept, that man and woman did arise from seeming death.  They did dwell in those marvelous caves with their evidences of departed civilisations, and they did show us that fearful, world-wandering gyroscope.  These things we saw.”