They shouldered their shovels and he his, and they marched away from the devastated place and drove back across the moor. Baltazar sat next the man who drove, in the front of the empty and futile cart, and said never a word. For the first time in his eager existence, defeat overwhelmed him. The work of a laborious lifetime had been destroyed in a few hours. With infinite toil, perhaps, he might recapture the main lines of his thought-revolutionizing treatise on the Theory of Groups: his studies in the Analytical Geometry of Four Dimensional Space. Perhaps. He had relied for his data on the innumerable notes and solutions of intricate problems which had cost the labour of many years. And these had gone. The world had hitherto wondered at two such scholar tragedies—Newton’s _Principia_ destroyed by the dog Diamond, the first volume of Carlyle’s _French Revolution_ burned by Mill’s stupid housemaid. But in both cases only the finished product had perished. The data remained. The rewriting was but a painful business of recompilation. But with him, not only the more or less finished product, but the fundamental material was lost forever. He shrank with dismay, almost with terror, at the thought of going through that infinite maze of accurate calculation and reasoning once more. Still, as far as the mathematics went, the palimpsest of the brain existed. Reconstitution was humanly possible. But with the Chinese editions—for most of it the material could only be found in remote libraries in China; for much of it, the material no longer survived in the explored world. He had come hoping against hope, arguing that great masses of manuscript on thick paper were practically indestructible by fire. The outsides, the edges might be burnt, but the vast bulk of inside sheets could be preserved. But he had not counted on the disruption and devouring effect of an incendiary bomb falling at the most precious end of the long deal working-table. Probably the whole room had been instantaneously carpeted thick with loose sheets, and the great stacks of manuscript had, as it were, been burnt in detail. Then, for a while, on his hateful ride, he strove with conjecture. But what was the use of vain imaginings? That which was done was done. The harvest of his life had been annihilated. If he died to-morrow, the world would be no richer by his existence than by that of any dead goat whose body had just been cast into the cesspool. To recover the harvest would cost him many years of uninspired drudgery. It would be a horrible re-living, an impossible attempt to recapture the ardour of the pioneer, the thrills of discovery. For the first time he really felt the meaning of his age, the non-resilience of fifty. For the black present the very meaning of his life had been wiped out.