therefore, how old must that
city have been! And now, follow thou me, and I will show thee after what
fashion this great people fell when the time was come for it to fall,"
and she led the way down to the centre of the cave, stopping at a spot
where a round rock had been let into a kind of large manhole in the
flooring, accurately filling it just as the iron plates fill the spaces
in the London pavements down which the coals are thrown. "Thou seest,"
she said. "Tell me, what is it?"

"Nay, I know not," I answered; whereon she crossed to the left-hand side
of the cave (looking towards the entrance) and signed to the mutes to
hold up the lamps. On the wall was something painted with a red pigment
in similar characters to those hewn beneath the sculpture of Tisno, King
of Kor. This inscription she proceeded to translate to me, the pigment
still being fresh enough to show the form of the letters. It ran thus:

"I, Junis, a priest of the Great Temple of Kor, write this upon the
rock of the burying-place in the year four thousand eight hundred and
three from the founding of Kor. Kor is fallen! No more shall the
mighty feast in her halls, no more shall she rule the world, and her
navies go out to commerce with the world. Kor is fallen! and her mighty
works and all the cities of Kor, and all the harbours that she built
and the canals that she made, are for the wolf and the owl and the wild
swan, and the barbarian who comes after. Twenty and five moons ago did
a cloud settle upon Kor, and the hundred cities of Kor, and out of the
cloud came a pestilence that slew her people, old and young, one
with another, and spared not. One with another they turned black and
died--the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the man and the
woman, the prince and the slave. The pestilence slew and slew, and
ceased not by day or by night, and those who escaped from the pestilence
were slain of the famine. No longer could the bodies of the children of
Kor be preserved according to the ancient rites, because of the number
of the dead, therefore were they hurled into the great pit beneath
the cave, through the hole in the floor of the cave. Then, at last, a
remnant of this the great people, the light of the whole world, went
down to the coast and took ship and sailed northwards; and now am I, the
Priest Junis, who write this, the last man left alive of this great city
of men, but whether there be any yet left in the other cities I know
not. This