n perfectly stiff,
hung a yellow ivory crucifix.

"Who on earth can it be?" said I.

"Can't you guess?" asked Good.

I shook my head.

"Why, the old Dom, Jose da Silvestra, of course--who else?"

"Impossible," I gasped; "he died three hundred years ago."

"And what is there to prevent him from lasting for three thousand years
in this atmosphere, I should like to know?" asked Good. "If only the
temperature is sufficiently low, flesh and blood will keep fresh as New
Zealand mutton for ever, and Heaven knows it is cold enough here. The
sun never gets in here; no animal comes here to tear or destroy. No
doubt his slave, of whom he speaks on the writing, took off his clothes
and left him. He could not have buried him alone. Look!" he went on,
stooping down to pick up a queerly-shaped bone scraped at the end into
a sharp point, "here is the 'cleft bone' that Silvestra used to draw
the map with."

We gazed for a moment astonished, forgetting our own miseries in this
extraordinary and, as it seemed to us, semi-miraculous sight.

"Ay," said Sir Henry, "and this is where he got his ink from," and he
pointed to a small wound on the Dom's left arm. "Did ever man see such
a thing before?"

There was no longer any doubt about the matter, which for my own part I
confess perfectly appalled me. There he sat, the dead man, whose
directions, written some ten generations ago, had led us to this spot.
Here in my own hand was the rude pen with which he had written them,
and about his neck hung the crucifix that his dying lips had kissed.
Gazing at him, my imagination could reconstruct the last scene of the
drama, the traveller dying of cold and starvation, yet striving to
convey to the world the great secret which he had discovered:--the
awful loneliness of his death, of which the evidence sat before us. It
even seemed to me that I could trace in his strongly-marked features a
likeness to those of my poor friend Silvestre his descendant, who had
died twenty years before in my arms, but perhaps that was fancy. At any
rate, there he sat, a sad memento of the fate that so often overtakes
those who would penetrate into the unknown; and there doubtless he will
still sit, crowned with the dread majesty of death, for centuries yet
unborn, to startle the eyes of wanderers like ourselves, if ever any
such should come again to invade his loneliness. The thing overpowered
us, already almost perished as we were with cold and hunger.

"Let u