And now the work is finished. The great stack of papyrus will soon go into its wooden box for whatever use the future may wish of it.
And, astonishingly, I’m still alive after all of it. I am undoubtedly smaller than I was the Christmas before last. But I can’t say much more than that. Unless I look about me at all the things I now have to keep me happy in this otherwise ghastly wilderness, I might almost think it had been, from first to last, some extended dream. But it wasn’t a dream. For eight glorious months, Alaric the Magnificent lived again – and once more saved the world he had for so long adorned.
This being said, I think I can risk two whole opium pills in heated cider. We’ll see what glorious dreams of the East they can produce. If I’m still alive tomorrow morning, I suppose I should start again on what I did in Athens. I do assure you – even after seventy-five years, it’s a story worth telling.