its ciphers as I have been able to make
out. The language, I believe, for I am no scholar, is Latin of a
mediaeval type; but there are words which, if I rightly decipher them,
are not Latin, and hardly seem to belong to any known language; most
of them, I fancy, quasi-scientific terms, invented to describe various
technical devices unknown to the world when the manuscript was
written. I only make it a condition that you shall not publish the
story during my life; that if you show the manuscript or mention the
tale in confidence to any one, you will strictly keep my secret; and
that if after my death, of which you shall be advised, you do publish
it, you will afford no clue by which the donor could be confidently
identified."

"I promise," said I. "But I should like to ask you one question. What
do you conceive to have been the cause of the extraordinary shock you
felt and of the havoc you witnessed? What, in short, the nature of the
occurrence and the origin of the manuscript you entrust to my care?"

"Why need you ask me?" he returned. "You are as capable as myself of
drawing a deduction from what I have told you, and I have told you
everything, I believe, that could assist you. The manuscript will tell
the rest."

"But," said I, "an actual eye-witness often receives from a number of
little facts which he cannot remember, which are perhaps too minute to
have been actually and individually noted by him, an impression which
is more likely to be correct than any that could be formed by a
stranger on the fullest cross-questioning, on the closest examination
of what remains in the witness's memory. I should like to hear, before
opening the manuscript, what you believe to have been its origin.

"I can only say," he answered, "that what must be inferred from the
manuscript is what I had inferred before I opened it. That same
explanation was the only one that ever occurred to me, even in the
first night. It then seemed to me utterly incredible, but it is still
the only conceivable explanation that my mind can suggest."

"Did you," asked I, "connect the shock and the relics, which I presume
you know were not on the island before the shock, with the meteor and
the strange obscuration of the sun?"

"I certainly did," he said. "Having done so, there could be but one
conclusion as to the quarter from which the shock was received."

The examination and transcription of the manuscript, with all the help
afforded me by my frie