I write these final words as fast as pen will travel over paper, for I know the end is near. I began to write, working night and day whenever my brain was clear enough to think and remember. It was not so always. I think it was on the night I finished my chapter describing our descent into the valley of great birds that the first attack came upon me. I have no time here to describe the visitation, nor is there need, for it was a recurrence, three-fold intensified, of that paralysing oppression of spirit I had known during my imprisonment in Hellas. I knew what it meant. I was paying the penalty of my broken oath, to a people more terrible by far than any secret organisation of natives in the outer world. Almost have I expected to see materialise, in this room where I write, the tall, stern, accusing finger of some wise one from the Hall of Wandering Souls, but that horror at least has been spared me. As before, the onsets have steadily increased in fury, but as before they have been intermittent; and it is during the dwindling intervals of peace that I have rushed on with this narrative, to which I now write _finis_ as the crowning work of my life.... May God have mercy upon my soul. EPILOGUE So ends, in a hand markedly hurried and scrawled in comparison with the earlier portions of the manuscript, the narrative which was brought into my room on that bitter Peking morning so long ago: a narrative which, leaving out of consideration the ingenious but confessedly fictitious compositions of the professional romancers, struck me and strikes me still as the most remarkable record of human experience ever set down in black and white. I have already written, in my preface to the manuscript, that the reader must judge for himself of its truth or falsity; but I may perhaps fittingly add a few lines as to my own view and the circumstances under which this narrative now comes to be published. Firstly, regarding Ronald Mirlees, the writer of the manuscript. I had had personal experience of him in the past, and found him to be a man of the staunchest trustworthiness. No one who had known him would, I am convinced, ever credit that he could be guilty of deliberate falsehood; indeed, his greatest handicap in advancing his repute among scholarly Europeans of the East had been a too dogmatic manner of stating what he believed to be the truth. Critics who were reluctant to accept the fruits of his researches on sight he treated invariably with a cavalier outspokenness approaching to contempt--an attitude which may have been at times in some degree provoked, but was certainly not calculated to make him popular with other orientalists. As for engineering an elaborate hoax and planting it on a former friend and comrade in adventure, I should eternally believe him incapable of this, if only for the reason that to the best of my knowledge he was totally devoid of a sense of humour. So much for the character of Ronald Mirlees.