ms that you are great," I said, "and have lived long and learned
much. Yet the end of it is that your lot is neither worse nor better
than that of us creatures of an hour."

"It is so, Humphrey. Presently you will die, and within a few centuries
I shall die also and be as you are. You believe that you will live again
eternally. It may be so because you do believe, since Fate allows Faith
to shape the future, if only for a little while. But in me Wisdom has
destroyed Faith and therefore I must die. Even if I sleep again for
tens of thousands of years, what will it help me, seeing that sleep is
unconsciousness and that I shall only wake again to die, since sleep
does not restore to us our youth?"

He ceased, and walked up and down the rock with a troubled mien. Then he
stood in front of me and said in a triumphant voice:

"At least, while I live I will rule, and then let come what may come. I
know that you do not believe, and the first victory of this new day of
mine shall be to make you believe. I have great powers and you shall
see them at work, and afterwards, if things go right, rule with me for a
little while, perhaps, as the first of my subjects. Hearken now; in one
small matter my calculations, made so long ago, have gone wrong. They
showed me that at this time a day of earthquakes, such as those that
again and again have rocked and split the world, would recur. But now
it seems that there is an error, a tiny error of eleven hundred years,
which must go by before those earthquakes come."

"Are you sure," I suggested humbly, "that there is not also an error in
those star-maps you hold?"

"I am sure, Humphrey. Some day, who knows? You may return to your world
of modern men who, I gather, have knowledge of the great science of
astronomy. Take now these maps with which I have done, and submit them
to the most learned of those men, and let them tell you whether I was
right or wrong in what I wrote upon this metal two hundred and fifty
thousand years ago. Whatever else is false, at least the stars in their
motions can never die."

Then he handed me the maps and was gone. I have them today, and if ever
this book is published, they will appear with it, that those who are
qualified may judge of them and of the truth or otherwise of Oro's
words.

From that night forward for quite a long time I saw Oro no more. Nor
indeed did any of us, since for some reason of his own he forbade us to
visit the under ground city of N