doom that thou hast earned."

He paused in his walk and stood staring blankly out of the grimy little
window with eyes which seemed to see through and beyond the
smoke-blackened walls of the wretched houses opposite, and away through
the mists of Time to where a vast city of temples and palaces lay under
a cloudless sky beside a mighty slow-flowing river, and his lips began
to move again as those of a man speaking in a dream:

"O Memphis, gem of the Ancient Land and home of a hundred kings, how is
thy grandeur humbled and thy glory departed! Thy streets and broad
places which once rang with the tramp of mighty hosts and echoed with
the songs of jubilant multitudes welcoming them home from victory are
buried under the drifting desert sands; in the ruins of thy holy temples
the statues of the gods lie prone in the dust, and the owl rears her
brood on thy crumbling altars, and hoots to the moon where once rose the
solemn chant of priests and the sweet hymns of the Sacred Virgins; the
jackal barks where once the mightiest monarchs of earth gave judgment
and received tribute; thy tombs are desecrated, and the mummies of kings
and queens and holy men have been ravished from them to adorn the
unconsecrated halls of the museums of ignorant infidels; the heel of the
heathen oppressor has stamped the fair flower of thy beauty into the
deep dust of defilement. Alas, what great evil have the sons and
daughters of Khem wrought that the High Gods should have visited them
with so sore a judgment! How long shall thy bright wings lie folded and
idle, O Necheb, Bringer of Victory?"

A deep sigh came from his heaving breast as he turned away and began his
walk again. Soon he spoke again, but now in a changed voice from which
the note of exaltation had passed away:

"But it is of little use to brood over the lost glories of the past. Our
concern is with that which is and that which may--nay, shall be. Who is
this Franklin Marmion, this wise man of the infidels? Who is he, and who
was he--since, by the changeless law of life and death, each man and
woman is a deathless soul which passes into the shadows only to return
re-garbed in the flesh to live and work through the interlocked cycles
of Eternal Destiny? Was he--ah Gods! was _he_ once Ma-Rim[=o]n, whose
footsteps in the days that are dead approached so nearly to the
threshold of the Perfect Knowledge, while mine, doubtless for the sin of
my longing for mere earthly power and greatness