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.