The next picture was that of a guardian, with black and white furs and stern mien. I said the name aloud, and he said something like "rees," which I took to be "guardian" in his tongue. With this series of pictures to aid us, we could make our queries clear to one another. I asked how many of these guardians he had seen or knew; and he answered, Fifteen or twenty. There being twenty-four guardians living in our glen, I knew that all of them, or nearly all, must at one time or another come here to commune with the hairy folk. I asked whether they ever lived with his people, and he said, No, that they lived beyond the woods somewhere, he thought perhaps in the sky. I managed to make him understand that they lived among my people, and he seemed surprised that they had never told his folk of us. Then he made a curious little vague shape beyond his row of pictures, which I could not fathom until he had dyed in two glowing fiery eyes; when I knew that this was meant for one of The Nameless. I asked if he had seen such an ogre, and he signed, No, that no man ever had except the guardians; and that to see them was death. Then as well as I could I showed him that we knew of these things too, calling them The Nameless. His word for them I could not dominate, though he said it several times. * * * * * I wondered how he knew what they looked like, having never seen one; but remembered the picture in the second underground inclosure. Then I thought of the shadowy outlines of that thing, and it occurred to me that this was possibly but a common symbol for the beings, as no man knew their exact form. It was such a picture as a man might make, who knew only that The Nameless were terrible, evil, beyond all thought malignant. I then asked him whether the guardians protected his people from The Nameless, and he said that they did. I told him by signs that this was their function among us. He did not seem surprised, but again signaled that they had never spoken of me and my tribe, and over this omission he shook his head till the lank hair nearly stood on end. I told him that we, too, had not known of _them_. He sat with his chin in his palm, biting his lips over this. I stared at the lightly-dyed portrayal of The Nameless. I pointed to it and to the west. He laid a hand on my shoulder, as one might to a child when it is making up a wild tale, and pointed eastward. We sat looking at each other and making these silly gestures back and forth, until in one fearful flash of knowledge it came to me what the truth was. The taste of this knowledge was at once bitter and sweet to me: sweet, because it blotted out in an instant the only great fear of all my race; bitter, because it showed me that for many generations both this man's people and my own had been hoodwinked, shamed and overlorded by the members of a single useless profession. For it had come to me that now I knew who The Nameless truly were.