es and blood offerings lavished on his dead in the hope
of seeing that one spasm which would show that death might yet be
conquered; many the engines, the machines, the artificial hearts, the
applications of electricity that he had invented; many the powerful
reactives he had distilled wherewith to excite the long dead nerves,
or those which but two days had ceased to feel. The hidden essence
was still undiscovered, the meaning of vitality eluded his profoundest
study, his keenest pursuit. The body died, and yet the nerves could
still be made to act as though alive for the space of a few hours--in
rare cases for a day. With his eyes he had seen a dead man spring half
across a room from the effects of a few drops of musk--on the first day;
with his eyes he had seen the dead twist themselves, and move and grin
under the electric current--provided it had not been too late. But that
"too late" had baffled him, and from his first belief that life might
be restored when once gone, he had descended to what seemed the simpler
proposition of the two, to the problem of maintaining life indefinitely
so long as its magic essence lingered in the flesh and blood. And now he
believed that he was very near the truth; how terribly near he had yet
to learn.

On that evening when the Wanderer fell to the earth before the shadow of
Beatrice, Keyork Arabian sat alone in his charnel-house. The brilliant
light of two powerful lamps illuminated everything in the place, for
Keyork loved light, like all those who are intensely attached to life
for its own sake. The yellow rays flooded the life-like faces of his
dead companions, and streamed upwards to the heterogeneous objects that
filled the shelves almost to the spring of the vault--objects which all
reminded him of the conditions of lives long ago extinct, endless heaps
of barbarous weapons, of garments of leather and of fish skin, Amurian,
Siberian, Gothic, Mexican, and Peruvian; African and Red Indian
masks, models of boats and canoes, sacred drums, Liberian idols, Runic
calendars, fiddles made of human skulls, strange and barbaric ornaments,
all producing together an amazing richness of colour--all things in
which the man himself had taken but a passing interest, the result of
his central study--life in all its shapes.

He sat alone. The African giant looked down at his dwarf-like form
as though in contempt of such half-grown humanity; the Malayan lady's
bodiless head turned its smiling f