to which the vast building of the College
of Sages was appropriated, that which interested me most was devoted to
the archaeology of the Vril-ya, and comprised a very ancient collection
of portraits. In these the pigments and groundwork employed were of
so durable a nature that even pictures said to be executed at dates as
remote as those in the earliest annals of the Chinese, retained much
freshness of colour. In examining this collection, two things especially
struck me:--first, that the pictures said to be between 6000 and 7000
years old were of a much higher degree of art than any produced within
the last 3000 or 4000 years; and, second, that the portraits within the
former period much more resembled our own upper world and European types
of countenance. Some of them, indeed reminded me of the Italian heads
which look out from the canvases of Titian--speaking of ambition or
craft, of care or of grief, with furrows in which the passions have
passed with iron ploughshare. These were the countenances of men who had
lived in struggle and conflict before the discovery of the latent forces
of vril had changed the character of society--men who had fought with
each other for power or fame as we in the upper world fight.

The type of face began to evince a marked change about a thousand years
after the vril revolution, becoming then, with each generation, more
serene, and in that serenity more terribly distinct from the faces of
labouring and sinful men; while in proportion as the beauty and the
grandeur of the countenance itself became more fully developed, the art
of the painter became more tame and monotonous.

But the greatest curiosity in the collection was that of three portraits
belonging to the pre-historical age, and, according to mythical
tradition, taken by the orders of a philosopher, whose origin and
attributes were as much mixed up with symbolical fable as those of an
Indian Budh or a Greek Prometheus.

From this mysterious personage, at once a sage and a hero, all the
principal sections of the Vril-ya race pretend to trace a common origin.

The portraits are of the philosopher himself, of his grandfather, and
great-grandfather. They are all at full length. The philosopher is
attired in a long tunic which seems to form a loose suit of scaly
armour, borrowed, perhaps, from some fish or reptile, but the feet and
hands are exposed: the digits in both are wonderfully long, and webbed.
He has little or no percept