ous excursions into desert places, remained a Frenchman of the South. His cook was an artist in the culinary genre of the Midi. We fed royally, perhaps a trifle too richly. And Alexandre, at least, drank champagne as the thirsty soil of those hills absorbs the autumn rains. Somehow I got the idea that he was planning to get tipsy in honor of my arrival.

With the fruit he became preposterous, risky, brilliant, prodigal of his French intelligence and cynicism. His analogies were drawn from modern Europe and from ancient mythology. He displayed intimate acquaintance with the half-world of Paris and of pre-Christian Alexandria. A word about women's fashions, and he was off on a discussion of the hair-dressing just then affected by a sociétaire of the Comédie Française, as compared with the coiffures of the Greek hetæræ. He could not have been more in earnest if considering the most profound topic. The eternal Gaul was apparent, that inseparable mixture of philosopher and feminist found nowhere outside his land.

He had reached the point where one says what one would not have said, if customary inhibitions were not dissolved by alcohol; but so far his intoxication had not disturbed his wife. She accepted it not only as though she were accustomed to it in him, but also as if it was, where she came from, the natural accompaniment of a dinner.

Alexandre was proclaiming:

"It is the absolutely new in fashion that is alluring, or else the absolutely old, which seems new to our eyes. Madame Audran's latest coiffure renews her fascination. Just so a woman of the present who dressed her hair in the Athenian triple row of curls, entwined with scarlet ribbons and powdered with gold-dust, might do nothing more ingenious to revive a dying interest in her sex-an interest abated, possibly, by an absorption in the very past from which she drew her style. Ah, the terrific fascination of the past, of certain epochs, to certain souls! To regain them otherwise than in imagination-"

With a glance at his wife he broke off quickly, turned to the man behind his chair, and commanded in a slightly thickened voice:

"Look on my desk for a bottle of milky glass, stoppered with wax."

And to me:

"My friend, to show that I am fonder of thee than of any other man, thou shalt have for a liqueur a thimbleful of Chios wine, as thick as honey, twenty-five hundred years old, dug up from a zone below the Cyd-Athenæum-from the Collytus.”

Mme. Grimaux rose to her feet, slightly pale, but with a sweet smile of apology. She explained in her unready French:

"You have so much to talk of together that you will be quite happy alone."

I protested. Alexandre, too, remonstrated with a gush of words in an unfamiliar language. She answered him softly in the same tongue.

How I strove to analyze those sounds! They were no doubt the key to everything. Not Hebrew, or Arabic, or Berber, but indefinitely reminiscent of such inflections.

She gave me her hand, said good night, and drifted from the room. Despite the eccentric, flushed man who remained with me, the atmosphere seemed relieved at once of something unnatural.

Was it just then that it occurred to me that Mme. Grimaux's hair had been dressed in a triple row of curls, and entwined with smoky-red ribbons?

But Alexandre was saying, while nervously smoothing out his big black beard: "Come into the study, then. We shall be more comfortable there. Auguste, bring that bottle back, and cigars and brandy-enough brandy for the evening." We repaired to his workroom.

I gave him time for one more glass, then took the bull by the horns.

Alexandre, in what language did you speak to Madame Grimaux just now?"

For a moment he looked at me doubtfully from under his heavy brows, pinched his beak-like nose, and fiddled with his watch-charm, an electrum coin of the Mermnads, stamped with the lion's head. At last he said with a grunt: "Eh, bien, in Punic." "Punic!"

He laughed derisively, though his fingers trembled as he lighted an immense cigar.

"Ha, you are surprised? You find it a trifle out of the way, hein, that one should speak fluently the language of the ancient Carthaginians? Why so? Because it is.

so little known in books? Ah, in books, to be sure! Books written by my erudite

the inscriptions previous to 600 B.C. Ridiculous creatures, who work a year, from pompous, unidiomatic phrases carved in stone, and find another archaic dull vowel, and crown themselves as savants! Look you: I could sit down to-night at this desk and compose out of my head a manual for beginners, in Punic conversation, that would enable you after a few hours' study to talk intelligently, in the vernacular of the second century before Christ, with Hamilcar Barca. That is what I, Grimaux, know of Punic, and what those zanies who call themselves my contemporaries do not know."

"But it is marvelous. And Madame Grimaux also speaks it as well as that?" "Bah! Madame speaks many languages."

"Not English, however, or German?" "No, old numbskull, not English, not German. Greek-the Greek of Corax, who wrote the 'Art of Words.' Latinthe Latin of Cato! Egyptian-the Egyptian of the days of Ptolemy Philopator! Punic! But I have mentioned Punic? Libyan! Aha! That hits you? A lost language? Not at all. My wife speaks it; I speak it; we converse in it when the servants are about. I have made a Libyan grammar and a vocabulary, which I keep to myself, because otherwise my dear colleagues would call me an insane impostor. What good would it do them to know Libyan, anyway? Pearls before swine! For me, however, it is good-for sentimental occasions, for intimate blague. Its terms of endearment are exquisite, its slang is delicious. You Americans think you have a slang; but the slang of Crosus's people, who, in effect, were the Yankees of that age, is of a pungency—."

He gulped down another liqueur-glass of cognac, and snorted scornfully:

"My wife is an intelligent woman. She comes of a very restricted class, the small feminine intellectual aristocracy of her race."

Surely the secret was about to be disclosed. With a little urging

I suggested, in an offhand manner: "You have not told me yet of the circumstances that produced all this felicity."

He lowered his eyelids, moved his feet uneasily, gazed askance into the corners, thick with shadows, and shining dimly

zations.

His agitation was returning. My first impression-of a development in him of some distressing abnormality-recurred to me.

But confronted by the cue for full confession, he obviously recoiled. Yet I knew that sooner or later he would tell me everything; for I was the only human being, except his wife, sufficiently sympathetic to him, and in the end he, as a Frenchman, would have to say something to some one about his heart. Also, he was rapidly becoming drunk.

"Nevertheless," he ejaculated violently, "I ought to tell you nothing."

"Why, then, Alexandre, let us talk of other things.'

He pulled hard at his cigar, made a movement toward his glass, withdrew his hand empty. He repeated in a voice that quivered:

"I ought to tell you nothing, nothing, nothing,"-he emptied his glass,-"but I must. Name of God! And better you than another. You at least will not have me examined for my sanity." He leaned forward over the table till his black Assyrian beard brushed the heaps of glitterIn an anxious tone, ing coins and gems. staring at me beseechingly, he asked, “Tell me truly, have I ever seemed to you at all unusual, eccentric?"

Without waiting for a reply, he sprang up, strode to a cabinet, returned with a handful of objects, which he laid on the desk before me. I stared at some flakes and crusts of rust, a few fragments of blackened silver, a scrap of fur-covered hide as hard as a board, and three small plates of gold riveted together. He looked sidewise toward the ceiling, with the air of a man whose conscience almost senses an external remonstrance; and I got the impression that Mme. Grimaux, doubtless in the room above, was somehow concerned even in the story of these objects. Then, lowering his voice, he said:

"Regard well these specimens, for they came at the beginning." I gave it up.

"You see nothing significant?"

“I am not an archæologist, Alexandre." He drank more brandy, sat down beside me, and put one large finger on the broadest mass of rust.

"This javelin-head is of a shape pecu

liar to the Libyan levies of the Carthaginian oligarchy."

He touched the riveted gold plates. "This is a piece of body-mail such as was worn by the Punic Guard of Patricians."

He pointed to the scrap of hide and to the silver.

"A piece from a shield of lion-skin. Bracelets of Græco-Hispanian workmanship. Well? Well? Well? Where would you think I found these things?"

"The north coast of Africa? Sicily? Spain? Italy?"

He shook his head. Seizing me by the arm, in a whisper he said:

"The Alps!" He leaned back, his eyes afire. He pronounced the word "Hannibal!" and jumping to his feet, in a bellow that rang through the room cried: "I know-I, Alexandre Grimaux, and none other-know by which road Hannibal descended into Italy!"

Suddenly he shook his hand in my face. "But understand I shall not tell you that road-neither you nor any one else; for they would go there flying. They might find out somehow, from ignorant gossip, the other affair-the affair beside which all this is nothing."

He seated himself again, and with unsteady fingers relighted his cigar. Once more he leaned forward, his brow working, the veins at his temples standing out in knots. And he began:

"It was two years ago this month. Worn out by too much work, I was up there for the sake of the climbing, the high air, the solitude. Just where? That is my secret. To the west, of course. Even you will know that without my telling, since Hannibal had come from the Pyrenees. But not the Mont Genèvre pass! Not the Col d'Argentière! Mont Cenis! Another place.

Not

"There, where the mountain-tops begin to fall away toward Italy, is a certain glacier, a valley glacier of extraordinary length and ramifications, that descends from a limited snow-field at a very gentle incline to the moraine-a river of ice that flows to-day a distance of a few millimeters, to-morrow a few millimeters, and so on through eternity. In it, here and there, is a deep crevasse, where one could easily slip, and die quickly, and be frozen, and thereafter be borne on for centuries,

Sometime when I am tired of life, if I feel like amusing the anthropologists of the future, I shall go up there to the top, to the bergschrund, and have my body. boxed and lowered into the crevasse, and travel down gently through the ages. And perhaps, if luck were with science, I would show forth at last through the melting ice. of the lower slopes as a fresh relic from another epoch, perfectly preserved by cold, as sound as if I had died the day before. To be sure, in my case they might not get a good idea of the typical twentieth-century man. Perhaps you would do better. Will you give me the disposal of your body?"

He grinned in my face with a sort of strained jocularity. Then he demanded. indignantly:

"Are you incredulous so soon? Have you forgotten the mammoths in the frozen soil of the tundra of northern Siberia? When men chopped them out, they were intact. Their bodies were safe from dissolution in that cold storage. One cut steaks from them, cooked and ate their flesh. Tiens! A feast brought down for moderns from the Pleistocene Period! But the mammoths, before the ice imprisoned them, were dead." He glared at his big hands, shaking on the edge of the desk as if with palsy, and in a voice of awe, with a profound shudder he repeated, "The mammoths-they were dead."

It was then that it entered my mind:

"My first impression was the right one. It is Alexandre who is in need of a little treatment, not Madame Grimaux."

He poured out and gulped down more brandy, then continued:

"I had followed the glacier down from its beginnings almost to its end. I had started up there, in the region of its perennial renewal, the snow-fields, fall upon fall growing deeper and deeper, always more compact, changing from drift to névé, from névé to ice, to the crystalline rock that finally moves forward of its own weight, to join the glacier proper. I had traveled down over its surface, camping beside them, measuring its stealthy progress, comparing the advance of its center and edges, deducing the nature of its channel from its crevasses, descending into the crevasses at the end of ropes, to observe the stratification caused by the snow-falls of long ago, the changes in granular texture, the depth of dust-holes. For I, who have always found glacier-study a relaxation, was fascinated by this glacier. Why? Anagké-it was necessary."

Even now my mind was forced to wander again. What was it about her that was at the same time majestic and pathetic? Loneliness! that was it! Surely there surrounded her an atmosphere of ineffable loneliness which, though exquisitely dissembled, was more moving than any loneliness that I had ever known.

Alexandre tapped me on the arm.

"Not far above the moraine, where an abrupt change in gradient produces many crevasses, I dug out-this."

He bent over, opened a drawer, and laid before me, amid the intaglios and papyrus-scrolls and liqueur-glasses, a skull, crushed, polished as if by graving-tools, but with scraps of dried tissue clinging in its cavities.

I said something emphatic. Alexandre chuckled, it seemed to me, quite ghoulishly. "Observe it, observe it, mon cher! A skull? No doubt; but more than that." Seizing the thing between his massive hands, he rumbled:

"From what is left of the maxilla, clearly prognathous; narrow; the frontal short; the parietal region uncommonly thick. Well? A prehistoric type, you think? Not at all. The thickness of the dome is not characteristic of prehistoric mountaineers. It is the skull of a negro.

"You may imagine I asked myself, 'What the devil is a negro doing in this galley!' I got him from the wall of a fresh crevasse, not a healed one. Besides, the infinitesimal movement of the icegranules had polished the bone as you see it. Evidently he had been in there a long, long time. Nearly thirty miles he had come, without a doubt, at the average rate of two and a half inches a day.

"And it was just about 777,800 days ago that Hannibal crossed the Alps with an army of Spaniards and Africans.

"Grand Dieu! as for that moment, you can see my face from here! I ran over the ice. I popped down crevasses before the ropes were fast about me. My guides thought me mad.

"When I became calmer, I marked out a reasonable area, which I explored as best I could. I could. After much toil, danger, and disappointment, I found these other objects."

He waved toward the rust flakes and the pieces of gold and silver.

"Then I knew I had the truth." Struggling to his feet, he walked with a lurching gait about the room. Behind the lamplight, his bulky shadow filled the wall, his beaked profile intruded on the ceiling. He turned his back to me. Staring across the mummy of Soter's favorite out into the night, he seemed trying to control some extreme emotion.

From the garden a soft breeze, sweet with the perfume of dewy roses, drifted in to us. in to us. And with it entered the chirruping of crickets, the song of nightingales, and another sound also, faint, plaintive, like the music of a harp plucked slowly, producing, as it were, unprecedented sequences. No Italian could be making that strange music. It was Mme. Grimaux?

Abruptly, in a thick voice, Alexandre

said:

"You can believe what you have heard so far?"

“I believe you.”

"Very well. Now I shall tell you the part that you will never believe."

And stumbling over the helmets and the baskets of mosaics, he returned to his chair to take more brandy.

"I felt in my bones that I was going to find more. In such a preservative, they ought to have left a trace or two, an army

on the march-a host clambering over mountain-peaks, twenty thousand foot, six thousand horse, mule-trains and swarms of sick, war-elephants and the polyglot herds of camp-followers, the women of the mercenaries, and the concubines of the captains, and the slaves from tribes stamped flat on the way. Imagine all the broken trappings discarded, the weapons smashed in skirmishes and dropped, the paraphernalia too heavy to be carried farther, all the little luxuries, all the loot, that this last great effort made into burdens too cumbrous. And the dead left behind in the drifts.

"Certainly I expected to find other things in the midst of that glacier. Many curious things, abandoned up there amid the snow-fields over two thousand years before, and now approaching the low moraine, and the light of the sun once more. "We camped beside the glacier, close to my selected spot. We built a hut. Every day, in a swing of ropes, with lantern and ice-hatchet, I peered and pecked in the crevasses. That was a time, my friend! The gloom of those glistening depths! The encircling walls, murky and opaque! The deadly cold! My numb arms, and frozen face, and feverish heart! My head clear, my stomach full of cognac! "We sank narrow shafts, prolonged the dust-wells, even drove one horizontal gallery a little way into the ice. Now and then a fresh crevasse opened near by with a crash: the walls heaved and settled; once I barely escaped alive. After that the guides refused to continue. I had paid them like a king, and now they called me crazy. As you may imagine, we quarreled over that. They left me there, all but one, an honest, stupid fellow who had become attached to me. Thereafter it was he who let out the ropes. I went on prying and picking down there alone."

From out of doors the harp-music entered again-a new air-no less strange, ineffably wistful. And the wistfulness of that enigmatic air was somehow related in my mind to the unfathomable wistfulness of the player's eyes.

Alexandre leaned closer.

"One night as I lay in the hut the glacier gave forth a deep, smacking boom. Another crevasse! I went out under the stars, and found it, and peering down into that black, narrow abyss, I told myself,

'If this one discloses nothing, I shall go away.' Next day I descended into it." His voice failed him. His mouth moved spasmodically. He achieved the words:

"And deep, very deep, close to the surface of its wall, looming through the ice, I saw-" He pressed his eyelids together with a shiver-"I saw a long object like a battered coffer-like a misshapen coffin."

He made a quick gesture, lighted a fresh cigar, and for a while smoked furiously. Out of doors the faint harp-notes died away. He went on in a tone of un

natural calm:

"In two days I had reached this thing, and loosened it from the ice sufficiently to lash it round with ropes. It was a great iron chest, vastly caked with rust, bent and warped by the slow grinding of the glacier, but so far as general cohesion went, intact. Toward evening on the second day we had it out, after breaking the ropes three times, and once nearly being dragged to the bottom of the crevasse. Then, in the dusk, with logs for rollers, we pushed it to the hut.

"How many hours to smash it open? I remember that night as a dream—a dream of almost insupportable exultation, of terrific expectancy, of apprehension that made my scalp tingle and my whole body ill. There comes back to me the ceaseless clanging of steel on iron, the dim lamplight falling on the corrugations of rust, the steam of our freezing breath, the patter of sweat on metal. At last, we ripped off the top, and inside, beneath a shroud of camel-hair fabric, appeared the outline of a human body."

A hush fell between us. He remained motionless, staring at me with that new, uncanny composure, his eyes steady, though filmy and injected with blood, his features firm, yet dripping perspiration.

"See! Among the folds of camel-hair I found a piece of vellum, one side scrawled with maps, the other with writing-Greek, of the dialect of the Pontine coast, second century B.C."

And he recited slowly, in his deep voice that was stirred by vibrations:

"On the day of the tumult made by the Celtiberians and the Balearic slingers, in a storm of wind and sleet, she was killed. The rear-guard, maddened by the cold, pushing up through the pass, came clamoring to the general, who was di