For I am naturally inventive, as you know.
Now, I still think that for this box of matches to have escaped the
wear of time for immemorial years was a most strange, as for me it was
a most fortunate, thing. Yet, oddly enough, I found a far unlikelier
substance, and that was camphor. I found it in a sealed jar, that by
chance, I suppose, had been really hermetically sealed. I fancied at
first that it was paraffin wax, and smashed the glass accordingly. But
the odour of camphor was unmistakable. In the universal decay this
volatile substance had chanced to survive, perhaps through many
thousands of centuries. It reminded me of a sepia painting I had once
seen done from the ink of a fossil Belemnite that must have perished
and become fossilised millions of years ago. I was about to throw it
away, but I remembered that it was inflammable and burnt with a good
bright flame was, in fact, an excellent candle and I put it in my
pocket. I found no explosives, however, nor any means of breaking down
the bronze doors. As yet my iron crowbar was the most helpful thing I
had chanced upon. Nevertheless I left that gallery greatly elated.
I cannot tell you all the story of that long afternoon. It would
require a great effort of memory to recall my explorations in at all
the proper order. I remember a long gallery of rusting stands of arms,
and how I hesitated between my crowbar and a hatchet or a sword. I
could not carry both, however, and my bar of iron promised best against
the bronze gates. There were numbers of guns, pistols, and rifles. The
most were masses of rust, but many were of some new metal, and still
fairly sound. But any cartridges or powder there may once have been had
rotted into dust. One corner I saw was charred and shattered; perhaps,
I thought, by an explosion among the specimens. In another place was a
vast array of idols Polynesian, Mexican, Grecian, Ph nician, every
country on earth, I should think. And here, yielding to an irresistible
impulse, I wrote my name upon the nose of a steatite monster from South
America that particularly took my fancy.
As the evening drew on, my interest waned. I went through gallery
after gallery, dusty, silent, often ruinous, the exhibits sometimes
mere heaps of rust and lignite, sometimes fresher. In one place I
suddenly found myself near the model of a tin mine, and then by the
merest accident I discovered, in an air-tight case, two dynamite
cartridges! I shouted Eureka! and smashed the case with joy. Then
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