But the intrusion of accident into his own sphere had palsied his renewed enthusiasms. For a time, whilst he was restoring Tamarna to her old self, and barring out the chance of accident again, he was not conscious of the check given to the vigour of his functions. But, when all was well and the families of the Piramo were busy again at the expansion of meteorology, he knew that the old nausea had returned with redoubled force. The impetus of the new age was beginning to fail; its pace had perceptibly slackened; its best triumphs had been won; and it needed the ignorance of eyes newly opened upon the green earth and the azure vault of sky to peer into the darkness with thrilling hope; it needed the elasticity of youthful muscles and tissues to withstand the weariness and despair that come with the truer perspective of a gigantic future become a pigmy past. What had he to do with human prospects, when a thousand times he had seen them loom large on the horizon, and then fade into commonplace when realised? Here had he outlasted a dozen generations of ordinary men, and shared the triumphs of a people whose progress compared with that of the rest of the earth was as lightning to the pace of a snail; and yet, when he looked at all that they had done in these thousand years, it was as nothing in the shadow of what had yet to be done, a poor hand’s breadth beside the voyage of light from a distant star. Where lay the advantage in extending a life that had seen such humiliation before the everlasting future? He might spin the thread of his life out for another thousand years without great effort. But what would that do for his race, or himself who had seen his past, with all the achievements that had each seemed as it came within the range of possibility a marvel surpassing the human, fade into a microscopic speck underneath the sumless stars? The voices of his friends, as they poured consolation and eulogy, persuasion and prayer, into his ears, sounded now like the undistinguishable hum of insects as sleep comes upon a man in the open. What would they not have meant to him in the ambitious time of youth? How strongly they rang out to him at the beginning of the last stage of enthusiasm, when they drove out of him the love of going for ever to sleep! But, now, that the longing had come to him again, they sounded idly as the exultant wail of gnats on the evening air. The life of earth was withdrawn and distant for him.