om their cradle, because they did
not wish to dwell longer with those--others--they came and found this
place.

"When all the face of earth was covered with waters in which lived
only tiny, hungry things that knew naught save hunger and its
satisfaction, _they_ had attained wisdom that enabled them to make paths
such as we have just travelled and to look out upon those waters! And
_laya_ upon _laya_ thereafter, time upon time, they went upon the
paths and watched the flood recede; saw great bare flats of steaming
ooze appear on which crawled and splashed larger things which had
grown from the tiny hungry ones; watched the flats rise higher and
higher and green life begin to clothe them; saw mountains uplift and
vanish.

"Ever the green life waxed and the things which crept and crawled grew
greater and took ever different forms; until at last came a time when
the steaming mists lightened and the things which had begun as little
more than tiny hungry mouths were huge and monstrous, so huge that the
tallest of my _Akka_ would not have reached the knee of the smallest
of them.

"But in none of these, in _none_, was there--realization--of
themselves, say the Three; naught but hunger driving, always driving
them to still its crying.

"So for time upon time the race of the Silent Ones took the paths no
more, placing aside the half-thought that they had of making their way
to earth face even as they had made their way from beside earth heart.
They turned wholly to the seeking of wisdom--and after other time on
time they attained that which killed even the faintest shadow of the
half-thought. For they crept far within the mysteries of life and
death, they mastered the illusion of space, they lifted the veils of
creation and of its twin destruction, and they stripped the covering
from the flaming jewel of truth--but when they had crept within those
mysteries they bid me tell _you_, Goodwin, they found ever other
mysteries veiling the way; and after they had uncovered the jewel of
truth they found it to be a gem of infinite facets and therefore not
wholly to be read before eternity's unthinkable end!

"And for this they were glad--because now throughout eternity might
they and theirs pursue knowledge over ways illimitable.

"They conquered light--light that sprang at their bidding from the
nothingness that gives birth to all things and in which lie all things
that are, have been and shall be; light that streamed through th