dispute with them; but to them all I say naught, save "Read!" And having
read that which I set down, then shall one and all have looked towards
Eternity with me--unto its very portals. And so to my telling:

To me, in this last time of my visions, of which I would tell, it was
not as if I _dreamed_; but, as it were, that I _waked_ there into the
dark, _in the future of this world_. And the sun had died; and for me
thus newly waked into that Future, to look back upon this, our Present
Age, was to look back into dreams that my soul knew to be of reality;
but which to those newly-seeing eyes of mine, appeared but as a far
vision, strangely hallowed with peacefulness and light.

Always, it seemed to me when I awaked into the Future, into the
Everlasting Night that lapped this world, that I saw near to me, and
girdling me all about, a blurred greyness. And presently this, the
greyness, would clear and fade from about me, even as a dusky cloud, and
I would look out upon a world of darkness, lit here and there with
strange sights. And with my waking into that Future, I waked not to
ignorance; but to a full knowledge of those things which lit the Night
Land; even as a man wakes from sleep each morning, and knows immediately
he wakes, the names and knowledge of the Time which has bred him, and in
which he lives. And the same while, a knowledge I had, as it were
sub-conscious, of this Present--this early life, which now I live so
utterly alone.

In my earliest knowledge of _that_ place, I was a youth, seventeen years
grown, and my memory tells me that when first I waked, or came, as it
might be said, to myself, in that Future, I stood in one of the
embrasures of the Last Redoubt--that great Pyramid of grey metal which
held the last millions of this world from the Powers of the Slayers.