'The band, Grecians and their Asian wives, came at last to the great mountains which encircle our city. They suffered grievous hardship and peril, and their numbers were reduced by their sufferings, but there was ever with them the leader whose mighty soul could sustain armies, and in the end some fifty men and women reached this valley. Dreams had told the King that there lay a fertile land beyond the great snows, and this, it seemed to them all, was the land which the King had dreamed. Here he built his city, and I tell you, strangers, that there stand in the city to this day stones which the great King had touched with his own hands. These names'--Kalliboas pointed to the marble pedestal of the obelisk--'are the names of those devoted men and women who followed him across the wilds. Here they settled and prospered, and we who dwell in the valley to-day are their descendants. 'The King lived to see the young state multiplied far beyond the numbers which had accompanied him, and when at a great age he died, he left these words with his people.' Kalliboas again pointed to the obelisk, and read, word for word, this astounding passage: '"Not until the world is ripe to hear shall the secret of this land be made known to the world. In my life I have striven to unite the races of Europe and Asia, but I have failed, for the world was not ready. Barbarism and jealousy were too heavy upon it: the world has not understood my thoughts. But there shall arise in the years to come a generation more enlightened. Till then, I charge ye my people to hold aloof from the world. I go now to the nether shades, but I shall come again. Let you and your children's children remember."' The old man shot a keen glance from one to the other of us. 'This is strange hearing to you, doubtless?' he said. 'It is monstrous!' I cried. 'It is impossible! We have been taught--our people have believed down through the ages that the man we call Alexander the Great died in Babylon, and that his body was borne in an alabaster coffin to his own city of Alexandria, which stands beside the Nile. There, our historians say, it was laid with great pomp and ceremony in the mausoleum called Sema.' 'That a coffin was carried from Babylon into Egypt on a car of gold and that it was deposited in our King's own city,' said Kalliboas, 'we ourselves know. That it was the body of Alexander was universally believed by his generals, and by his Baktrian wife Roxana, who at the time of his supposed death lost no time in murdering her rival the Persian Stateira, that her own son might succeed to the empire. Our King thought well to leave the murderess to a vengeance which was not long in overtaking her crime. He himself was already gone far eastward when that funeral procession set forth from Babylon towards the west. The body contained in the coffin was the body of a youth whose name, Krantor, has perhaps never been heard by you.'