And now he believed that he was very near the truth; how terribly near he had yet to learn.
On that evening when the Wanderer fell to the earth before the shadow of Beatrice, Keyork Arabian sat alone in his charnel-house.

The brilliant light of two powerful lamps illuminated everything in the place, for Keyork loved light, like all those who are intensely attached to life for its own sake.

The yellow rays flooded the life-like faces of his dead companions, and streamed upwards to the heterogeneous objects that filled the shelves almost to the spring of the vault--objects which all reminded him of the conditions of lives long ago extinct, endless heaps of barbarous weapons, of garments of leather and of fish skin, Amurian, Siberian, Gothic, Mexican, and Peruvian; African and Red Indian masks, models of boats and canoes, sacred drums, Liberian idols, Runic calendars, fiddles made of human skulls, strange and barbaric ornaments, all producing together an amazing richness of colour--all things in which the man himself had taken but a passing interest, the result of his central study--life in all its shapes.
He sat alone.

The African giant looked down at his dwarf-like form as though in contempt of such half-grown humanity; the Malayan lady's bodiless head turned its smiling face towards him; scores of dead beings seemed to contemplate half in pity, half in scorn, their would-be reviver.

Keyork Arabian was used to their company and to their silence.
Far beyond the common human horror of dead humanity, if one of them had all at once nodded to him and spoken to him he would have started with delight and listened with rapture.