uled over by a _beautiful white woman_ who is seldom seen by them, but
who is reported to have power over all things living and dead. Two
days after I had ascertained this the man died of fever contracted
in crossing the swamps, and I was forced by want of provisions and by
symptoms of an illness which afterwards prostrated me to take to my dhow
again.

"Of the adventures that befell me after this I need not now speak. I was
wrecked upon the coast of Madagascar, and rescued some months afterwards
by an English ship that brought me to Aden, whence I started for
England, intending to prosecute my search as soon as I had made
sufficient preparations. On my way I stopped in Greece, and there, for
'Omnia vincit amor,' I met your beloved mother, and married her, and
there you were born and she died. Then it was that my last illness
seized me, and I returned hither to die. But still I hoped against hope,
and set myself to work to learn Arabic, with the intention, should I
ever get better, of returning to the coast of Africa, and solving
the mystery of which the tradition has lived so many centuries in our
family. But I have not got better, and, so far as I am concerned, the
story is at an end.

"For you, however, my son, it is not at an end, and to you I hand on
these the results of my labour, together with the hereditary proofs of
its origin. It is my intention to provide that they shall not be put
into your hands until you have reached an age when you will be able to
judge for yourself whether or no you will choose to investigate what, if
it is true, must be the greatest mystery in the world, or to put it by
as an idle fable, originating in the first place in a woman's disordered
brain.

"I do not believe that it is a fable; I believe that if it can only
be re-discovered there is a spot where the vital forces of the world
visibly exist. Life exists; why therefore should not the means of
preserving it indefinitely exist also? But I have no wish to prejudice
your mind about the matter. Read and judge for yourself. If you are
inclined to undertake the search, I have so provided that you will not
lack for means. If, on the other hand, you are satisfied that the whole
thing is a chimera, then, I adjure you, destroy the potsherd and the
writings, and let a cause of troubling be removed from our race for
ever. Perhaps that will be wisest. The unknown is generally taken to be
terrible, not as the proverb would infer, from the inh