“So we are—­those of us who have cultivated philosophy, history and logic; but this poor fellow is still under the domination of feelings inherited from a million ignorant and superstitious ancestors—­for Lalugnan was once as barbarous a country as your own.  The most grotesque and frightful conceptions of death, and life after death, were current; and now many of even those whose understandings are emancipated wear upon their feelings the heavy chain of heredity.”

“But,” said I, “granting for the sake of the argument which I am about to build upon the concession” (I could not bring myself to use the idiotic and meaningless phrase, “for the sake of argument”) “that death, especially the death of a Lalugwump, is desirable, yet the act of dying, the transition state between living and being dead, may be accompanied by the most painful physical, and most terrifying mental phenomena.  The moment of dissolution may seem to the exalted sensibilities of the moribund a century of horrors.”

The great man smiled again, with a more intolerable benignity than before.  “There is no such thing as dying,” he said; “the ‘transition state’ is a creation of your fancy and an evidence of imperfect reason.  One is at any time either alive or dead.  The one condition cannot shade off into the other.  There is no gradation like that between waking and sleeping.  By the way, do you recognize a certain resemblance between death and a dreamless sleep?”

“Yes—­death as you conceive it to be.”

“Well, does any one fear sleep?  Do we not seek it, court it, wish that it may be sound—­that is to say, dreamless?  We desire occasional annihilation—­wish to be dead for eight and ten hours at a time.  True, we expect to awake, but that expectation, while it may account for our alacrity in embracing sleep, cannot alter the character of the state that we cheerfully go into.  Suppose we did not wake in the morning, never did wake!  Would our mental and spiritual condition be in any respect different through all eternity from what it was during the first few hours?  After how many hours does oblivion begin to be an evil?  The man who loves to sleep yet hates to die might justly be granted everlasting life with everlasting insomnia.”

Gnarmag-Zote paused and appeared to be lost in the profundity of his thoughts, but I could easily enough see that he was only taking breath.  The old man whose grief had given this turn to the conversation had fallen asleep and was roaring in the nose like a beast.  The rush of a river near by, as it poured up a hill from the ocean, and the shrill singing of several kinds of brilliant quadrupeds were the only other sounds audible.  I waited deferentially for the great antiquarian, scientist and courtier to resume, amusing myself meantime by turning over the leaves of an official report by the Minister of War on a new and improved process of making thunder from snail slime.  Presently the oracle spoke.