Herman Melville

“ With a dull flambeau, we now descended some narrow stone steps, to view Oh-Oh's collection of ancient and curious manuscripts, preserved in a vault.
"This way, this way, my masters," cried Oh-Oh, aloft, swinging his dim torch. "Keep your hands before you; it's a dark road to travel."
"So it seems," said Babbalanja, wide-groping, as he descended lower and lower. "My lord this is like going down to posterity."
Upon gaining the vault, forth flew a score or two of bats, extinguishing the flambeau, and leaving us in darkness, like Belzoni deserted by his Arabs in the heart of a pyramid. ”

“ Whence then is this? If the fogs of some few years can make soul linked to matter naught; how can the unhoused spirit hope to live when mildewed with the damps of death."
Piously he folded the shreds of manuscript together, kissed them, and laid them down.
Then approaching Oh-Oh, he besought him for one leaf, one shred of those most precious pages, in memory of Bardianna, and for the love of him.
But learning who he was, one of that old Ponderer's commentators, Oh-Oh tottered toward the manuscripts; with trembling fingers told them over, one by one, and said-"Thank Oro! ”

“ They seemed to have formed parts of a work, whose title only remained—"Thoughts, by a Thinker."
Silently Babbalanja pressed them to his heart. Then at arm's length held them, and said, "And is all this wisdom lost? Can not the divine cunning in thee, Bardianna, transmute to brightness these sullied pages? Here, perhaps, thou didst dive into the deeps of things, treating of the normal forms of matter and of mind; how the particles of solids were first molded in the interstices of fluids; how the thoughts of men are each a soul, as the lung-cells are each a lung ”