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. The desire for knowledge--knowledge for
its own sake--had died, and the passionate hope which hitherto had
animated with tireless energy the heart and brain of this splendidly
equipped intellect had suffered total eclipse. The central fires had
gone out. Nothing was worth doing, thinking, working for. There _was_
nothing to work for any longer! The professor's first step was to recall as many of his books as
possible; his second to close his laboratory and stop all research. He
gave no explanation, he invited no questions. His whole personality
crumbled away, so to speak, till his daily life became a mere mechanical
process of clothing the body, feeding the body, keeping it in good
health so as to avoid physical discomfort, and, above all, doing nothing
that could interfere with sleep. The professor did everything he could
to lengthen the hours of sleep, and therefore of forgetfulness. It was all clear enough to Dr. Laidlaw. A weaker man, he knew, would
have sought to lose himself in one form or another of sensual
indulgence--sleeping-draughts, drink, the first pleasures that came to
hand. Self-destruction would have been the method of a little bolder
type; and deliberate evil-doing, poisoning with his awful knowledge all
he could, the means of still another kind of man. Mark Ebor was none of
these. He held himself under fine control, facing silently and without
complaint the terrible facts he honestly believed himself to have been
unfortunate enough to discover. Even to his intimate friend and
assistant, Dr. Laidlaw, he vouchsafed no word of true explanation or
lament. He went straight forward to the end, knowing well that the end
was not very far away. And death came very quietly one day to him, as he was sitting in the
arm-chair of the study, directly facing the doors of the laboratory--the
doors that no longer opened. Dr. Laidlaw, by happy chance, was with him
at the time, and just able to reach his side in response to the sudden
painful efforts for breath; just in time, too, to catch the murmured
words that fell from the pallid lips like a message from the other side
of the grave. "Read them, if you must; and, if you can--destroy. But"--his
voice sank so low that Dr. Laidlaw only just caught the dying
syllables--"but--never, never--give them to the world." And like a grey bundle of dust loosely gathered up in an old garment the
professor sank back into his chair and expired. But this was only the death of the body. His spirit had died two years
before. 4


The estate of the dead man was small and uncomplicated, and Dr. Laidlaw,
as sole executor and residuary legatee, had no difficulty in settling
it up. A month after the funeral he was sitting alone in his upstairs
library, the last sad duties completed, and his mind full of poignant
memories and regrets for the loss of a friend he had revered and loved,
and to whom his debt was so incalculably great. The last two years,
indeed, had been for him terrible. To watch the swift decay of the
greatest combination of heart and brain he had ever known, and to
realize he was powerless to help, was a source of profound grief to him
that would remain to the end of his days. At the same time an insatiable curiosity possessed him.