CHAPTER XXV.

MURMURING RIVER.

They call this now the era of our Greater World. This year that has passed has brought us many strange things. I am not one to recount them--the wonders of the Lowlands, the world’s changed climate; the struggles, the reorganization, it seems, of everything which we held to be standard.

There is still chaos. I could not, with authority or understanding, write of it. I have told the rôles which I and my friends had forced upon us, that is all.

For those many omissions which would have made my narrative more logically clear, I ask indulgence.

Books, in future years, will be written upon many angles of the subject. The science of those two races who with enmity and smoldering strife lived in the depths of our great earth--our scientists will attempt to picture it. But that will be futile, no doubt. The Middge have gone. From that very night when their crimson rainbow annihilated their enemy, they have never been seen.

Strange race! Our scientists say that in those last days they undoubtedly located the Gians and blasted them with a hatred born of centuries of oppression. And then, with their exploring parties underground finding food and water, they vanished with their weapon into the dark realms from which they had come. They wanted nothing of our world--feared us perhaps.

We are an adventurous civilization. There is already talk of exploring the depths--finding the Middge.

There will be books of sociology written upon the strange Gian civilization. I have no more than hinted at it. Already there is much controversy. It has been said that Rhana was the personification of all womanhood if given unlimited power. I think that is unjust to womanhood. In every age and every race there have been bad men and good men--bad women and good women. There was Rhana--and there was Nereid.

A river flows beneath these windows of the house where Polly and I are living. It murmurs its endless song. Arturo and Nereid are no more than half a mile up its stream. They often come past in a boat--sometimes swimming down, with the boat floating after them. They went past like that this evening, just a short while ago. Polly was here with me then--pushing aside these pages to sit with me and watch the moonlight on the river.

And Arturo and Nereid came swimming past. They looked up and saw us. They waved. Nereid’s hair streamed out long and tawny in the silver rippling water; her face was laughing as she flung up her arm toward us and dived after Arturo.

THE END.