So stepped the two from Angkor's lonely halls into the green-veiled sunlight of the tropics. Gray were the walls and spires they left behind, but grim no longer, nor menacing to two who knew their story. Someday, knew Ramey Winters, someday when war's insanity had died in mankind's bosom, they would return to read more fully the carven messages of friends they knew and loved. Someday....
But not now. Now they must leave gray Angkor and seek their future beyond the flaming jungle-lands. Long was the way, and dangerous perhaps; apes chattered in branches carpeted with moss; marsh and morass, wild beast and wilder man, these were the hazards they must pass.
Yet somehow they felt no fear. There was lightness in their hearts and in their steps as hand-in-hand they stepped forward to meet whatever fate might bring.
[1] The Burma Road is the vital supply route over which the Chinese Republic, cut off from almost all sea commerce by the Japanese invaders, still maintains contact with the outside world. Were it closed, it is doubtful whether the valiant army of General Chiang Kai-shek could long continue its fight against aggression.—Ed.
[2] Many devotees of the "science" of numerology are firmly convinced that the Great Pyramid of Cheops was too geometrically designed as to present to him who could decipher its structural allegory a comprehensive prophecy of the world's future for more than 5,000 years.—Ed.
[3] Follows another reference which would have interested Dr. Aiken:
"I accept that, in the past ... inhabitants of other worlds have—dropped here, hopped here, wafted, sailed, flown, motored—walked here, for all I know—been pulled here, been pushed; have come singly, have come in enormous numbers; have visited occasionally, have visited periodically for hunting, trading, replenishing harems, mining; have been unable to stay here, have established colonies here; have been lost here; far-advanced peoples, or things, and primitive peoples or whatever they were: white ones, black ones, yellow ones—
"I have a very convincing datum that the ancient Britons were blue ones. Of course we are told by anthropologists that they only painted themselves blue, but in our own advanced anthropology, they were veritable blue ones—
"Annals of Philosophy, 14-51: Note of a blue child born in England. That's atavism!"—from The Book of the Damned, by Charles Fort.—Ed.