She told me her mother was born west of Timbuctu, belonged to a Berber tribe, and had been taken prisoner and sold to slave dealers of the west African coast.
Several weeks after the boy's death I received from Professor Fales a liberal translation of the boy's talk and writings, which at the suggestion of the professor and his friend I have kept a secret, as neither of us believed in transmigration, or desired to figure as in any sense encouraging such an outrageously absurd belief.
The translator and professor are both dead and I suppose their copies have been destroyed. I give mine to the public as a spooky flight of fancy unworthy of belief, aware that this declaration will cause a few half-crazy people to believe the tale is true.
THE TRANSLATION.
The city of Theni is the capital of Kami. The western and southern coast of Kami and the interior country to the central range is a pleasant land, where palm trees of many kinds grow and there is much tropical verdure because on these coasts there is a constant current of warm water, which comes through an untraveled sea lying west and south of us, and in which float endless paths of sargassum.
To the north and east beyond the central range, as also the land northeast of us across the sea, are barren wastes of ice and snow. It has not always been so. Our records show that centuries ago the whole land was as the south and west coast country, but each year the fields of ice swallow more and more of our sweet and fertile land, until now we have but little space for our teeming population and each year less and less to eat.
On the top of a mountain south of our city dwell a few strange people with a strange faith and who keep to themselves. For years they have been building a great ship well up the mountain side. They are directed and encouraged in this useless labor by a prophet who tells of the early destruction of our land by ice and water.
I visited the place recently; the great ship is nearly completed and they are beginning to sheet the hull with copper to protect it from ice floes.
For three nights past my sleep has been disturbed by strange, wild dreams. I see the warm ocean currents which wash our shores, shifted westward by some strange freak of nature, and a land far north of us, now ice and snow, turned into greenland; while our whole land is enshrouded in death dealing cold and ice and snow and preceding this, the waters creep up and engulf our city. The mountain on which the great ship rests sinks down to meet the rising waters and the ship sails off to the southeast, leaving us helpless victims to be engulfed by the rising waters or frozen by the creeping, numbing cold, or smothered under mountains of ice and snow. How long before this shall be I do not know.
I have told my dream to Nefert, the best beloved of my wives, and we have agreed to prepare against the portent of such catastrophes.