Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce Author:Ambrose Bierce Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: AN INTERVIEW WITH GNARMAG- ZOTE MOGON-ZWAIR and Lalugnan, having the misfortune to lie on opposite sides of a line, naturally hate each other; so each country... more » sends its dangerous political criminals into the other, where they usually enjoy high honors and are sometimes elevated to important office under the crown. I was therefore received in Lalugnan with hospitality and given every encouragement in prosecuting my researches into the history and intellectual life of the people. They are so extraordinary a people, inhabiting so marvelous a country, that everything which the traveler sees, hears or experiences makes a lively and lasting impression upon his mind, and the labor of a lifetime would be required to relate the observation of a single year. I shall notice here only one or two points of national character— those which differ most conspicuously from ours, and in which, consequently, they are least worthy. With a fatuity hardly more credible than creditable, the Lalugwumps, as they call themselves, deny the immortality of the soul. In all my stay in their country I found only one person who believed in a life " beyond the grave," as we should say, though as the Lalugwumps are cannibals they would say " beyond the stomach." In testimony to the consolatory value of the doctrine of another life, I may say that this one true believer had in this life a comparatively unsatisfactory lot, for in early youth he had been struck by a flying stone from a volcano and had lost a considerable part of his brain. I cannot better set forth the nature and extent of the Lalugwumpian error regarding, this matter than by relating a conversation that occurred between me and one of the high officers of the King's household—a man whose proficiency in all the vices of antiquity, together wit...« less