My Dearest Evilyn,

I know now the truth.

To think I could shift my rudder and steer my course away from anything other than my fate is vanity, my dear; vanity of vanities.

I shall be dead. So is it with us all. How many millions have lain as I lie, here gazing to the apathetic heavens, and thought these thoughts and been forgotten? — thousands upon thousands of years ago they thought them, those dying men of the dim past; and thousands on thousands of years hence will their descendants think them and be in their turn forgotten. “As the breath of the oxen in winter, as the quick star that runs along the sky, as a little shadow that loses itself at sunset,” as I once heard a Tupi warrior called Itohua put it, such is the order of our life, the order that passeth away.

So, when the heart is stricken, and the head is humbled in the dust, civilization fails us utterly. Back, back, we creep, and lay us like little children on the great breast of Nature, she that perchance may soothe us and make us forget, or at least rid remembrance of its sting. Who has not in his great grief felt a longing to look upon the outward features of the universal Mother; to lie on the mountains and watch the clouds drive across the sky and hear the rollers break in thunder on the shore, to let his poor struggling life mingle for a while in her life; to feel the slow beat of her eternal heart, and to forget his woes, and let his identity be swallowed in the vast imperceptibly moving energy of her of whom we are, from whom we came, and with whom we shall again be mingled, who gave us birth, and will in a day to come give us our burial also.

So shall I find myself at last in your fickle bosom, my empyrean Titania, my Queen, my Mother.

Endearingly yours, Allen Quartermain