How does the narrator arrive at his insight about who the gods of the death places were?

When John arrived at the city, he initially believed it to be a place of the gods. He could not read the placards and was amazed at the ruins standing before him. That night he had a dream..... a dream in which the city magically came back to life. It was in this dream that John first realized that the people of the city were not gods..... that the city was merely a city, inhabited by men like himself. Upon further inspection, John found the mumified body of a man sitting in a window, looking out over the city. At this point John knew that his dream was truthful. What he saw was not a god or demon, it was a man..... a man whose world had been destroyed. This realization cleared his mind, and his fear disappear.

"When I woke in the morning, I was hungry, but I did not think first of my hunger for my heart was perplexed and confused. I knew the reason for the Dead Places but I did not see why it had happened."

"Then I saw the dead god. He was sitting in his chair, by the window, in a room I had not entered before and, for the first moment, I thought that he was alive. Then I saw the skin on the back of his hand—it was like dry leather. The room was shut, hot and dry—no doubt that had kept him as he was. At first I was afraid to approach him—then the fear left me."

"That is all of my story, for then I knew he was a man—I knew then that they had been men, neither gods nor demons. It is a great knowledge, hard to tell and believe. They were men—they went a dark road, but they were men."