To me he seemed as miserable a figure as one could imagine, brooding and plotting in his illuminated cave, at the end of an extended but misspent life.
Also I wondered what he, or rather his ego, had been doing during all those two hundred and fifty thousand years of sleep.

Possibly if Yva's theory, as I understood it, were correct, he had reincarnated as Attila, or Tamerlane, or Napoleon, or even as Chaka the terrible Zulu king.
At any rate there he was still in the world, filled with the dread of death, but consumed now as ever by his insatiable and most useless finite ambitions.
Yva, also! Her case was his, but yet how different.

In all this long night of Time she had but ripened into one of the sweetest and most gentle women that ever the world bore.

She, too, was great in her way, it appeared in her every word and gesture, but where was the ferocity of her father?
Where his desire to reach to splendour by treading on a blood-stained road paved with broken human hearts?
It did not exist.
Her nature was different although her body came of a long line of these power-loving kings.

Why this profound difference of the spirit?
Like everything else it was a mystery.