I’ll get a taxi at once, and we

can see about the other luggage afterwards.”

It seemed to him he hardly knew quite what he was saying; the change

in his friend had come upon him so suddenly and now grew upon him more

and more distressingly. Yet he could not make out exactly in what it

consisted. A terrible suspicion began to take shape in his mind,

troubling him dreadfully.

“I am neither very tired, nor in need of food, thank you,” the

professor said quietly. “And this is all I have. There is no luggage to

follow. I have brought home nothing—nothing but what you see.”

His words conveyed finality. They got into a taxi, tipped the

porter, who had been staring in amazement at the venerable figure of

the scientist, and were conveyed slowly and noisily to the house in the

north of London where the laboratory was, the scene of their labours of

years.

And the whole way Professor Ebor uttered no word, nor did Dr.

Laidlaw find the courage to ask a single question.

It was only late that night, before he took his departure, as the

two men were standing before the fire in the study—that study where

they had discussed so many problems of vital and absorbing

interest—that Dr. Laidlaw at last found strength to come to the point

with direct questions. The professor had been giving him a superficial

and desultory account of his travels, of his journeys by camel, of his

encampments among the mountains and in the desert, and of his

explorations among the buried temples, and, deeper, into the waste of

the pre-historic sands, when suddenly the doctor came to the desired

point with a kind of nervous rush, almost like a frightened boy.

“And you found—” he began stammering, looking hard at the other’s

dreadfully altered face, from which every line of hope and cheerfulness

seemed to have been obliterated as a sponge wipes markings from a

slate—“you found—”

“I found,” replied the other, in a solemn voice, and it was the

voice of the mystic rather than the man of science—“I found what I

went to seek. The vision never once failed me. It led me straight to

the place like a star in the heavens. I found—the Tablets of the

Gods.”

Dr. Laidlaw caught his breath, and steadied himself on the back of a

chair. The words fell like particles of ice upon his heart. For the

first time the professor had uttered the well-known phrase without the

glow of light and wonder in his face that always accompanied it.

“You have—brought them?” he faltered.

“I have brought them home,” said the other, in a voice with a ring

like iron; “and I have—deciphered them.”

Profound despair, the bloom of outer darkness, the dead sound of a

hopeless soul freezing in the utter cold of space seemed to fill in the

pauses between the brief sentences. A silence followed, during which

Dr. Laidlaw saw nothing but the white face before him alternately fade

and return. And it was like the face of a dead man.

“They are, alas, indestructible,” he heard the voice continue, with

its even, metallic ring.

“Indestructible,” Laidlaw repeated mechanically, hardly knowing what

he was saying.

Again a silence of several minutes passed, during which, with a

creeping cold about his heart, he stood and stared into the eyes of the

man he had known and loved so long—aye, and worshipped, too; the man

who had first opened his own eyes when they were blind, and had led him

to the gates of knowledge, and no little distance along the difficult

path beyond; the man who, in another direction, had passed on the

strength of his faith into the hearts of thousands by his books.

“I may see them?” he asked at last, in a low voice he hardly

recognized as his own. “You will let me know—their message?”

Professor Ebor kept his eyes fixedly upon his assistant’s face as he

answered, with a smile that was more like the grin of death than a

living human smile.

“When I am gone,” he whispered; “when I have passed away. Then you

shall find them and read the translation I have made. And then, too, in

your turn, you must try, with the latest resources of science at your

disposal to aid you, to compass their utter destruction.” He paused a

moment, and his face grew pale as the face of a corpse. “Until that

time,” he added presently, without looking up, “I must ask you not to

refer to the subject again—and to keep my confidence meanwhile— ab—so—lute—ly.”

3

A year passed slowly by, and at the end of it Dr. Laidlaw had found

it necessary to sever his working connexion with his friend and

one-time leader. Professor Ebor was no longer the same man. The light

had gone out of his life; the laboratory was closed; he no longer put

pen to paper or applied his mind to a single problem. In the short

space of a few months he had passed from a hale and hearty man of late

middle life to the condition of old age—a man collapsed and on the

edge of dissolution. Death, it was plain, lay waiting for him in the

shadows of any day—and he knew it.

To describe faithfully the nature of this profound alteration in his

character and temperament is not easy, but Dr. Laidlaw summed it up to

himself in three words: Loss of Hope. The splendid mental powers

remained indeed undimmed, but the incentive to use them—to use them

for the help of others—had gone. The character still held to its fine

and unselfish habits of years, but the far goal to which they had been

the leading strings had faded away.