Note 513 — THE QUEEN OF THE SERPENTS.[507]

“Akhir al-Zamán.” As old men praise past times, so prophets prefer to represent themselves as the last. The early Christians caused much scandal amongst the orderly law-loving Romans by their wild and mistaken predictions of the end of the world being at hand. The catastrophe is a fact for each man under the form of death; but the world has endured for untold ages and there is no apparent cause why it should not endure as many more. The “latter days,” as the religious dicta of most “revelations” assure us, will be richer in sinners than in sanctity: hence “End of Time” is a facetious Arab title for a villain of superior quality. My Somali escort applied it to one thus distinguished: in 1875, I heard at Aden that he ended life by the spear as we had all predicted.