knowledge of the
heavens as these were two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, and are
today."

Here I should state that those two metal maps and the ring which I gave
to Yva and found again after the catastrophe, were absolutely the only
things connected with her or with Oro that we brought away with us.
The former I would never part with, feeling their value as evidence.
Therefore, when we descended to the city Nyo and the depths beneath,
I took them with me wrapped in cloth in my pocket. Thus they were
preserved. Everything else went when the Rock of Offerings and the cave
mouth sank beneath the waters of the lake.

This may have happened either in the earth tremor, which no doubt
was caused by the advance of the terrific world-balance, or when the
electric power, though diffused and turned by Yva's insulated body,
struck the great gyroscope's travelling foot with sufficient strength,
not to shift it indeed on to the right-hand path as Oro had designed,
but still to cause it to stagger and even perhaps to halt for the
fraction of a second. Even this pause may have been enough to cause
convulsions of the earth above; indeed, I gathered from Marama and other
Orofenans that such convulsions had occurred on and around the island
at what must have corresponded with that moment of the loosing of the
force.

This loss of our belongings in the house of the Rock of Offerings was
the more grievous because among them were some Kodak photographs which
I had taken, including portraits of Oro and one of Yva that was really
excellent, to say nothing of pictures of the mouth of the cave and of
the ruins and crater lake above. How bitterly I regret that I did not
keep these photographs in my pocket with the map-plates.

"Even if the star-maps are correct, still it proves nothing," said
Bickley, "since possibly Oro's astronomical skill might have enabled
him to draw that of the sky at any period, though I allow this is
impossible."

"I doubt his taking so much trouble merely to deceive three wanderers
who lacked the knowledge even to check them," I said. "But all this
misses the point, Bickley. However long they had slept, that man and
woman did arise from seeming death. They did dwell in those marvelous
caves with their evidences of departed civilisations, and they did show
us that fearful, world-wandering gyroscope. These things we saw."

"I admit that we saw them, Arbuthnot, and I admit that they are one and
all beyond h