dured by men--twenty years
of search and hardship ending in soul-shaking wonder and amazement.

My death is very near to me, and of this I am glad, for I desire to
pursue the quest in other realms, as it has been promised to me that I
shall do. I desire to learn the beginning and the end of the spiritual
drama of which it has been my strange lot to read some pages upon earth.

I, Ludwig Horace Holly, have been very ill; they carried me, more dead
than alive, down those mountains whose lowest slopes I can see from my
window, for I write this on the northern frontiers of India. Indeed any
other man had long since perished, but Destiny kept my breath in me,
perhaps that a record might remain. I, must bide here a month or two
till I am strong enough to travel homewards, for I have a fancy to die
in the place where I was born. So while I have strength I will put the
story down, or at least those parts of it that are most essential, for
much can, or at any rate must, be omitted. I shrink from attempting too
long a book, though my notes and memory would furnish me with sufficient
material for volumes.

I will begin with the Vision.

After Leo Vincey and I came back from Africa in 1885, desiring solitude,
which indeed we needed sorely to recover from the fearful shock we had
experienced, and to give us time and opportunity to think, we went to an
old house upon the shores of Cumberland that has belonged to my family
for many generations. This house, unless somebody has taken it believing
me to be dead, is still my property and thither I travel to die.

Those whose eyes read the words I write, if any should ever read them,
may ask--What shock?

Well, I am Horace Holly, and my companion, my beloved friend, my son in
the spirit whom I reared from infancy was--nay, is--Leo Vincey.

We are those men who, following an ancient clue, travelled to the Caves
of Kor in Central Africa, and there discovered her whom we sought,
the immortal _She-who-must-be-obeyed_. In Leo she found her love, that
re-born Kallikrates, the Grecian priest of Isis whom some two thousand
years before she had slain in her jealous rage, thus executing on him
the judgment of the angry goddess. In her also I found the divinity whom
I was doomed to worship from afar, not with the flesh, for that is all
lost and gone from me, but, what is sorer still, because its burden
is undying, with the will and soul which animate a man throughout the
countless eons of his