waking to sleep. You'll see in time what my father taught
me, you'll see!"

Here the yellowish individual smiled again, but in a strange way.

On a tame covered with a piece of Persian tapestry rested a leaden
cylinder containing the objects that were to be kept in the tomb-like
receptacle and a glass case with thick sides, which would hold that
mummy of an epoch and preserve for the future the records of a past.

Tasio, the Sage, who was walking about there thoughtfully, murmured:
"Perchance some day when this edifice, which is today begun, has grown
old and after many vicissitudes has fallen into ruins, either from
the visitations of Nature or the destructive hand of man, and above
the ruins grow the ivy and the moss,--then when Time has destroyed the
moss and ivy, and scattered the ashes of the ruins themselves to the
winds, wiping from the pages of History the recollection of it and
of those who destroyed it, long since lost from the memory of man:
perchance when the races have been buried in their mantle of earth or
have disappeared, only by accident the pick of some miner striking a
spark from this rock will dig up mysteries and enigmas from the depths
of the soil. Perchance the learned men of the nation that dwells in
these regions will labor, as do the present Egyptologists, with the
remains of a great civilization which occupied itself with eternity,
little dreaming that upon it was descending so long a night. Perchance
some learned professor will say to his students of five or six years of
age, in a language spoken by all mankind, 'Gentlemen, after studying
and examining carefully the objects found in the depths of our soil,
after deciphering some symbols and translating a few words, we can
without the shadow of a doubt conclude that these objects belonged to
the barbaric age of man, to that obscure era which we are accustomed
to speak of as fabulous. In short, gentlemen, in order that you may
form an approximate idea of the backwardness of our ancestors, it will
be sufficient that I point out to you the fact that those who lived
here not only recognized kings, but also for the purpose of settling
questions of local government they had to go to the other side of the
earth, just as if we should say that a body in order to move itself
would need to consult a head existing in another part of the globe,
perhaps in regions now sunk under the waves. This incredible defect,
however improbable it may seem to us now