not answer.

After a lugubrious pause, he whispered:--

"There's more to follow. You haven't heard the worst."

"What--more! I thought your damnable old Bonze died in the odour of
sanctity over there in his Yellow Kingdom."

"True. He died. But before he died he recorded a vision he had. It is
inscribed on the other side of the fan."

Effinghame's features lengthened.

"Still the same fan."

"The same. Here is what it prophesies." Reversing the clumsy fan, Arn
again read:--

Before I pass over into Nirvana I must relate what I saw in the
country of the Christians. It was not a dream. It was too real. And
yet it is to be, for it has not yet happened. The Campagna was now
become a shallow lake from the sea almost to the Sabine Mountains.
What had been Rome was a black waste spot, full of stones and
weeds. And no two stones stood together. Ah! our war with the white
races had been successful. We had not used their fighting machines,
as did that nation of little brown men, the Japanese. The Chinese
were too sage. They allowed the Christians to exterminate the
Japanese; but when they attacked us and attempted to rob us of our
land, we merely resorted to our old-time weapon--the Odour-Death.
With it we smothered their armies, sunk their navies, swept through
their countries like the simoon. The awful secret of the
Odour-Death is one that has been ours from the beginning of time.
Known only to the College of Bonzes, it was never used except in
extreme peril. Its smell is more revolting in its consequences than
the Black Plague. It ravaged the earth.

I sat in a flat-bottomed boat, enjoying the soft melancholy Italian
evening. Not a human did I see; nor had I encountered one on my
slow voyage from the Middle Seas. In meditation I pondered the
ultimate wisdom of Confucius and smiled at the folly of the white
barbarians who had tried to show us a new god, a new religion. At
last they, too, had succumbed like the nations before their era.
The temple of Jupiter on the Capitol had fallen, so had the holy
temple of Jerusalem. And now St. Peter's. Their central religion
had been destroyed, and yet prophecies of the second coming of
their divinity had not been accomplished. When the last Pope of
Rome dies, so it was said, then time would be accomplished. The
last Pope _had_ died. Th