While the event hung doubtful Tommy, who was growing bored with these long proceedings, picked up a bough still covered with flowers which, after their pretty fashion, the Orofenans had placed on the top of one of the baskets of food. This small bough he brought and laid at the feet of Oro, no doubt in the hope that he would throw it for him to fetch, a game in which the dog delighted. For some reason Oro saw an omen in this simple canine performance, or he may have thought that the dog was making an offering to him, for he put his thin hand to his brow and thought a while, then motioned to Bastin to pick up the bough and give it to him.
Next he spoke to his daughter as though assenting to something, for I saw her sigh in relief. No wonder, for he was conveying his decision to spare our lives and admit us to their fellowship.
After this again they talked, but in quite a different tone and manner. Then the Glittering Lady said to me in her slow and archaic Orofenan:
“We go to rest. You must not follow. We come back perhaps tonight, perhaps next night. We are quite safe. You are quite safe under the beard of Oro. Spirit of Oro watch you. You understand?”
I said I understood, whereon she answered:
“Goodbye, O Humfe-ry.”
“Goodbye, O Yva,” I replied, bowing.
Thereon they turned and refusing all assistance from us, vanished into the darkness of the cave leaning upon each other and walking slowly.
XII
Two Hundred and Fifty Thousand Years!
“You seem to have made the best of your time, old fellow,” said Bickley in rather a sour voice.
“I never knew people begin to call each other by their Christian names so soon,” added Bastin, looking at me with a suspicious eye.
“I know no other,” I said.
“Perhaps not, but at any rate you have another, though you don’t seem to have told it to her. Anyway, I am glad they are gone, for I was getting tired of being ordered by everybody to carry about wood and water for them. Also I am terribly hungry as I can’t eat before it is light. They have taken most of the best fruit to which I was looking forward, but thank goodness they do not seem to care for pork.”
“So am I,” said Bickley, who really looked exhausted. “Get the food, there’s a good fellow. We’ll talk afterwards.”
When we had eaten, somewhat silently, I asked Bickley what he made of the business; also whither he thought the sleepers had gone.
“I think I can answer the last question,” interrupted Bastin. “I expect it is to a place well known to students of the Bible which even Bickley mentions sometimes when he is angry. At any rate, they seem to be very fond of heat, for they wouldn’t part from it even in their coffins, and you will admit that they are not quite natural, although that Glittering Lady is so attractive as regards her exterior.”
Bickley waved these remarks aside and addressed himself to me.
“I don’t know what to think of it,” he said; “but as the experience is not natural and everything in the Universe, so far as we know it, has a natural explanation, I am inclined to the belief that we are suffering from hallucinations, which in their way are also quite natural. It does not seem possible that two people can really have been asleep for an unknown length of time enclosed in vessels of glass or crystal, kept warm by radium or some such substance, and then emerge from them comparatively strong and well. It is contrary to natural law.”
“How about microbes?” I asked. “They are said to last practically forever, and they are living things. So in their case your natural law breaks down.”
“That is true,” he answered. “Some microbes in a sealed tube and under certain conditions do appear to possess indefinite powers of life. Also radium has an indefinite life, but that is a mineral. Only these people are not microbes nor are they minerals. Also, experience tells us that they could not have lived for more than a few months at the outside in such circumstances as we seemed to find them.”
“Then what do you suggest?”
“I suggest that we did not really find them at all; that we have all been dreaming. You know that there are certain gases which produce illusions, laughing gas is one of them, and that these gases are sometimes met with in caves. Now there were very peculiar odours in that place under the statue, which may have worked upon our imaginations in some such way. Otherwise we are up against a miracle, and, as you know, I do not believe in miracles.”
“I do,” said Bastin calmly. “You’ll find all about it in the Bible if you will only take the trouble to read. Why do you talk such rubbish about gases?”
“Because only gas, or something of the sort, could have made us imagine them.”
“Nonsense, Bickley! Those people were here right enough. Didn’t they eat our fruit and drink the water I brought them without ever saying thank you? Only, they are not human. They are evil spirits, and for my part I don’t want to see any more of them, though I have no doubt Arbuthnot does, as that Glittering Lady threw her arms round his neck when she woke up, and already he is calling her by her Christian name, if the word Christian can be
