Page:The Best continental short stories of and the yearbook of the continental short story 1924-25.pdf/70

 From this journey, Severus obtained the material for his “Contributions to the Ethnography of Southwestern Africa.” This first journey of his served as the foundation of later studies and for the work of his entire life. In Africa, though, Severus paid more attention to history than ethnography. He was strongly attracted by the shadowy past of this most obscure region of the earth. He undertook a series of travels which he embellished by important and celebrated discoveries. His wife Edith usually, but not invariably, shared his travels and his labors, accompanying him on his bold and perilous ventures into this dark country, as a loving wife cannot but desire to remain at her husband’s side throughout all the wanderings of his life.

The bright, early flower of their romance lost its first freshness after a time, as maturer days appeared. Severus’ labors had become more and more extensive and important, and now he was a man honored and considered everywhere. He was like a great hunter, or an inveterate seeker of gold, who possesses a divining rod which guides him, directs his suspicions and his guesses, and finally reveals the secrets concealed in shadows, buried in the earth, and lying lost and forgotten amid the silent dust of remotest ages. Oh, epochs of antiquity, have you left any traces which speak forth from human lips? For the antique peoples have been destroyed, annihilated, and swept from the surface of the earth. Their cities have been devastated, their tombs and graves have been effaced and leveled, their ashes have been thrown to the winds, and what remains to tell us of these our ancestors of the ancient world?

Severus was wholly consecrated to the discovery of these lost secrets, which he had the knack of a fine hunting-dog in scenting out. Were the bodies of those who, ages before, had traversed the waters seeking sites for their gardens and towns, still existent beneath the waves above them? Could traces of their language, could their faint, dim voices still be heard in the noonday silence, in the rustling of the thickets, or in the murmurs of the midnight wind? Who among the living is old enough to have memories of the old times? And still Severus never tired of