oulder in a rather military
fashion. The fur cap sat a little to one side on his strange head, his
eyes twinkled, his long white beard waved in the cold wind, and his
whole appearance was that of a jaunty gnome-king, well satisfied with
the inspection of his treasure chamber.

And he had cause for satisfaction, as he knew well enough when he
thought of the decided progress made in the great experiment. The cost
at which that progress had been obtained was nothing. Had Israel Kafka
perished altogether under the treatment he had received, Keyork Arabian
would have bestowed no more attention upon the catastrophe than would
have been barely necessary in order to conceal it and to protect himself
and Unorna from the consequences of the crime. In the duel with death,
the life of one man was of small consequence, and Keyork would have
sacrificed thousands to his purposes with equal indifference to their
intrinsic value and with a proportionately greater interest in the
result to be attained. There was a terrible logic in his mental process.
Life was a treasure literally inestimable in value. Death was the
destroyer of this treasure, devised by the Supreme Power as a sure means
of limiting man's activity and intelligence. To conquer Death on his own
ground was to win the great victory over that Power, and to drive back
to an indefinite distance the boundaries of human supremacy.

It was assuredly not for the sake of benefiting mankind at large that
he pursued his researches at all sacrifices and at all costs. The
prime object of all his consideration was himself, as he unhesitatingly
admitted on all occasions, conceiving perhaps that it was easier to
defend such a position than to disclaim it. There could be no doubt
that in the man's enormous self-estimation, the Supreme Power occupied a
place secondary to Keyork Arabian's personality, and hostile to it. And
he had taken up arms, as Lucifer, assuming his individual right to live
in spite of God, Man and Nature, convinced that the secret could be
discovered and determined to find it and to use it, no matter at what
price. In him there was neither ambition, nor pride, nor vanity in the
ordinary meaning of these words. For passion ceases with the cessation
of comparison between man and his fellows, and Keyork Arabian
acknowledged no ground for such a comparison in his own case. He had
matched himself in a struggle with the Supreme Power, and, directly,
with that Power's only act