s, the scene of their labours of
years.

And the whole way Professor Ebor uttered no word, nor did Dr. Laidlaw
find the courage to ask a single question.

It was only late that night, before he took his departure, as the two
men were standing before the fire in the study--that study where they
had discussed so many problems of vital and absorbing interest--that
Dr. Laidlaw at last found strength to come to the point with direct
questions. The professor had been giving him a superficial and desultory
account of his travels, of his journeys by camel, of his encampments
among the mountains and in the desert, and of his explorations among the
buried temples, and, deeper, into the waste of the pre-historic sands,
when suddenly the doctor came to the desired point with a kind of
nervous rush, almost like a frightened boy.

"And you found--" he began stammering, looking hard at the other's
dreadfully altered face, from which every line of hope and cheerfulness
seemed to have been obliterated as a sponge wipes markings from a
slate--"you found--"

"I found," replied the other, in a solemn voice, and it was the voice of
the mystic rather than the man of science--"I found what I went to seek.
The vision never once failed me. It led me straight to the place like a
star in the heavens. I found--the Tablets of the Gods."

Dr. Laidlaw caught his breath, and steadied himself on the back of a
chair. The words fell like particles of ice upon his heart. For the
first time the professor had uttered the well-known phrase without the
glow of light and wonder in his face that always accompanied it.

"You have--brought them?" he faltered.

"I have brought them home," said the other, in a voice with a ring like
iron; "and I have--deciphered them."

Profound despair, the bloom of outer darkness, the dead sound of a
hopeless soul freezing in the utter cold of space seemed to fill in the
pauses between the brief sentences. A silence followed, during which Dr.
Laidlaw saw nothing but the white face before him alternately fade and
return. And it was like the face of a dead man.

"They are, alas, indestructible," he heard the voice continue, with its
even, metallic ring.

"Indestructible," Laidlaw repeated mechanically, hardly knowing what he
was saying.

Again a silence of several minutes passed, during which, with a creeping
cold about his heart, he stood and stared into the eyes of the man he
had known and loved so long--aye, and wo