wolf and the owl and the wild swan, and the barbarian who comes after.  Twenty and five moons ago did a cloud settle upon Kor, and the hundred cities of Kor, and out of the cloud came a pestilence that slew her people, old and young, one with another, and spared not.  One with another they turned black and died—­the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the man and the woman, the prince and the slave.  The pestilence slew and slew, and ceased not by day or by night, and those who escaped from the pestilence were slain of the famine.  No longer could the bodies of the children of Kor be preserved according to the ancient rites, because of the number of the dead, therefore were they hurled into the great pit beneath the cave, through the hole in the floor of the cave.  Then, at last, a remnant of this the great people, the light of the whole world, went down to the coast and took ship and sailed northwards; and now am I, the Priest Junis, who write this, the last man left alive of this great city of men, but whether there be any yet left in the other cities I know not.  This do I write in misery of heart before I die, because Kor the Imperial is no more, and because there are none to worship in her temple, and all her palaces are empty, and her princes and her captains and her traders and her fair women have passed off the face of the earth.”

I gave a sigh of astonishment—­the utter desolation depicted in this rude scrawl was so overpowering.  It was terrible to think of this solitary survivor of a mighty people recording its fate before he too went down into darkness.  What must the old man have felt as, in ghastly terrifying solitude, by the light of one lamp feebly illuminating a little space of gloom, he in a few brief lines daubed the history of his nation’s death upon the cavern wall?  What a subject for the moralist, or the painter, or indeed for any one who can think!

“Doth it not occur to thee, oh Holly,” said Ayesha, laying her hand upon my shoulder, “that those men who sailed North may have been the fathers of the first Egyptians?”

“Nay, I know not,” I said; “it seems that the world is very old.”

“Old?  Yes, it is old indeed.  Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been and passed away and been forgotten, so that no memory of them remains.  This is but one of several; for Time eats up the works of man, unless, indeed, he digs in caves like the people of Kor, and then mayhap the sea swallows them, or the earthquake shakes them in.  Who knows what hath been on the earth, or what shall be?  There is no new thing under the sun, as the wise Hebrew wrote long ago.  Yet were not these people utterly destroyed, as I think.  Some few remained in the other cities, for their cities were many.  But the barbarians from the south, or perchance my people, the Arabs, came down upon them, and took their women to wife, and the race of the Amahagger that is now