After a lugubrious pause, he whispered:—­

“There’s more to follow.  You haven’t heard the worst.”

“What—­more!  I thought your damnable old Bonze died in the odour of sanctity over there in his Yellow Kingdom.”

“True.  He died.  But before he died he recorded a vision he had.  It is inscribed on the other side of the fan.”

Effinghame’s features lengthened.

“Still the same fan.”

“The same.  Here is what it prophesies.”  Reversing the clumsy fan, Arn again read:—­

Before I pass over into Nirvana I must relate what I saw in the country of the Christians.  It was not a dream.  It was too real.  And yet it is to be, for it has not yet happened.  The Campagna was now become a shallow lake from the sea almost to the Sabine Mountains.  What had been Rome was a black waste spot, full of stones and weeds.  And no two stones stood together.  Ah! our war with the white races had been successful.  We had not used their fighting machines, as did that nation of little brown men, the Japanese.  The Chinese were too sage.  They allowed the Christians to exterminate the Japanese; but when they attacked us and attempted to rob us of our land, we merely resorted to our old-time weapon—­the Odour-Death.  With it we smothered their armies, sunk their navies, swept through their countries like the simoon.  The awful secret of the Odour-Death is one that has been ours from the beginning of time.  Known only to the College of Bonzes, it was never used except in extreme peril.  Its smell is more revolting in its consequences than the Black Plague.  It ravaged the earth.

I sat in a flat-bottomed boat, enjoying the soft melancholy Italian evening.  Not a human did I see; nor had I encountered one on my slow voyage from the Middle Seas.  In meditation I pondered the ultimate wisdom of Confucius and smiled at the folly of the white barbarians who had tried to show us a new god, a new religion.  At last they, too, had succumbed like the nations before their era.  The temple of Jupiter on the Capitol had fallen, so had the holy temple of Jerusalem.  And now St. Peter’s.  Their central religion had been destroyed, and yet prophecies of the second coming of their divinity had not been accomplished.  When the last Pope of Rome dies, so it was said, then time would be accomplished.  The last Pope had died.  Their basilica with its mighty dome was a desert where scorpions and snakes abounded.  The fifth Buddha would appear, not the second Christos.  Suddenly I saw before me in a puny boat a beautiful beardless youth.  He was attired in some symbolical garments and upon his head a triple tiara.  I could not believe my aged eyes.  He sat upright.  His attitude was hieratic.  His eyes were lifted heavenwards.  He clasped his hands and prayed:—­

“O Lord, remove thy servant.  The time is at hand foretold by thy slaughtered saints.  I am the last Pope and the humblest of