A Strange Discovery

by Charles Romyn Dake

"I quite believe that he did it," I said, "and when we consider that he claims to have measured the distance only mentally, and that he might therefore honestly have mistaken it to the extent of a few feet, I am willing to say that my confidence in his intended veracity is unshaken—even if he is an old sailor."

"Yes," said Bainbridge, "and we must not overlook the fact that a man's mental state at the time of performing a physical feat is a very important determining factor in the result of the performance. A powerful but lackadaisical fellow might, with only a few dollars at stake, make a very poor showing; yet to preserve his life he might make a really wonderful leap. What effect, then, did mental condition exert on a man like Peters under the circumstances attending this unparalleled leap? Think of the enormous muscular power developed by the message received through the nerves from a mind thus affected! His own life, and that of another, if not of two others, depended upon the success of his effort. Under such circumstances muscular power would either be paralyzed, or else intensified beyond our common conception of such force. Peters positively asserts, that when a boy of sixteen he frequently leaped from the flat upper deck of a boat—that is, from a height of twenty feet—into the surrounding water, habitually covering a distance of from forty to forty-five feet; whilst other boys, under the same conditions, rarely covered twenty-five feet, and never thirty."

A moment later Bainbridge arose to depart; but he lingered for a moment, standing, and with his left hand resting on the centre table, began to speak in a general way of the great antarctic crater and its surrounding wonders. It was my habit to make full notes of the actual facts stated by him in the more formal parts of these evening recitals, and sometimes even of his comments; and I regret that I did not do so at the particular moment to which I am now alluding. It was not until the following morning that I made a few memoranda of the closing incident of the evening. With the help of these notes and a fairly good memory, I hope to be able at this late day to describe for the reader an episode that I should dislike entirely to omit from this narrative.

He spoke for several minutes of the wonderful power of nature to accomplish certain ends—the force that accomplishes which, he termed a purpose in nature; and he made some remarks along the line of a contention, that the development of all matter into higher forms was what he called an unconscious intention, explaining that there was no paradox in the expression "unconscious intention"; for, he said, even men, individual men, are constantly performing a thousand acts that have an unconscious purpose or intention—as, for instance, the automatic action of winding a watch without the slightest exercise of will, and without remembering the action. This unconscious motive-force, he said, is inherent in vegetables as well as in animals, and that in fact it exists, though relatively of very slow and feeble action, in all matter, the power being an attribute of all molecules, and even of elemental atoms. He, however, claimed no originality for any of the views which he expressed.

"To my consciousness," he said, "the conviction of individual immortality is so clear that, if I were not perfectly aware of the cause of their doubt or disbelief, I should wonder at intelligent persons questioning the fact. Like everything else taught by Christ, that we are immortal is a fact; and it is not in a billion years that we shall live again under new conditions, but, as He intimated, 'to-morrow.' And I surmise that we shall not do so in any absurdly physical way, nor yet in a manner so deeply abstruse that it would require a logician and a professional physicist, were it explained, to comprehend it. As with all that God has given us, we shall find the conditions of the next life very simple. Educated men—nearly all highly educated men, and particularly educated theologians—when they touch this subject remind me of the cuttle-fish. There is nothing around them that is not perfectly transparent until, by their own act, everything is obscured to themselves and to their neighbors. But whilst the cuttle-fish swims out of the zone of opacity created by himself, the theologian remains in his, fighting the obscurity with logic—for that purpose the poorest of all devices. You cannot guide an emotional boat with an intellectual rudder. Something to me much more convincing than reason, tells me that our bodies will not be long in their graves before we shall again begin to live; and my feeling is, that, though consciousness will at the death of this body be obscured for a time, it will not be lost for a long time. I feel that almost at once after death the mystery of conscious individuality will again assert itself. Refined by this life, as the molecular construction of inorganic matter is refined by passing through organic life, so the consciousness lately within the molecules of your discarded body, will not be as the consciousness within like molecules of mineral or of vegetable matter; for it will be your consciousness —your consciousness, created by God and developed by His edict —developed after slumbering for ages within the mineral; awakening to quicker action in the vegetable world; touching the domain of conscious memory in lower animals; aroused to keener moral and intellectual existence in your late body, and at last made ready for a new mystery—what, we know not—in another world, possibly in the direction of what we might call a 'fourth dimension' of consciousness. Oh, no; there should not be anything to prevent us from knowing now that we shall continue to exist, and to go ever upward, upward, upward. Nature permits us, in each sphere of being, to catch a glimpse of the succeeding one, if only we will not ourselves obstruct the view."

A moment later he dropped into an animated, almost rhapsodical, running comment on some of the scenic beauties surrounding Hili-li.

"Imagine," he said, "what the scenic effects must have been, everywhere within the illumination of that great lake of fire, covering an area of nearly two hundred square miles—that great lake of white, boiling, earthy matter, brilliantly lighting the long antarctic night. Think of those mountains, with the Olympian offshoot six miles in height; and of the peak called Mount Olympus, looming up ten thousand feet above even that great mountain-range. Try to picture the valleys, the chasms, the overhanging cliffs, the many smaller active craters, like mammoth watch-fires lighted on the mountain-tops in all directions; and the masses of glistening salt, thrown by upheavals of the earth high upon the mountain-side. Cannot you almost behold the scene? May we not, with the brush of fancy, paint for our mental vision many a strange, weird picture? Here we see, high on the mountain-front, a mass of crystal salt—many millions of tons—thrown, by a mere fillip of terrestrial power, thirty thousand feet above the ocean level, to rest and sparkle like a gem on the bosom of that old mountain-god, Olympus. Then, still higher, on the very summit—for even here, in the glare of this great crater, where evaporation rains upward from the sea, all vapor is quickly condensed and frozen on the higher peaks—we see, like the tresses of the aged, the pearly snow and ice overhanging the Olympian brow. Aye, may we not even—"

Well, dear reader, I expect to be censured. As Bainbridge drew toward what I suppose would, under any circumstances, have been his close, I was sitting with my face toward Arthur, and the actions of that unpolished gem told me that the catastrophe was at hand. Those who say that "the expected never happens" misinform us; for the expected very frequently does happen. The wretched boy did not—would not—look at me, and I could not, of course, interrupt the flow of eloquence that poured from the lips of Bainbridge. What could I have done? Even at this late day, I cannot see what I could have done, though I did know the nature of what was coming. It was the words "snow and ice" that added the last straw which broke the camel's back, and let fall the load of annoyance; and as Bainbridge uttered the words, "Aye, may we not even——," Arthur, that miserable factotum, whom I had so rashly trusted, shot from his chair into the air; and, with arms waving, and eyes glistening with excitement, he fairly yelled:

"Great geewhilikin! Think of that ice, and that salt, and that climate! Now if a fellow only had a drove of Giganticus cows, with old Olympus for 'em to run over free, where would the other ice-cream fellows be? Free ice, free salt, free cream, free fodder, and no end of 'em all, too! Why, in that hot hole a man 'ud be a ice-cream king in no time. Well, now! doesn't that make your windows bulge? You're a shoutin', Doc. Please don't speak again in the same language till I rest my mind, if you love me!"

I could not stop him. Frowning had no effect, and toward the end of his outburst I even protested in words. But it was no use. He spoke quickly, and he spoke very loudly, and not a word was lost on Bainbridge. Bainbridge had a fine sense of humor; but like many other humorists, he did not relish jocosities of which he was the subject. Any levity in any manner connected with Hili-li, I knew would be to him unendurable. He had from the beginning taken the Peters disclosures, and even the old sailor himself, very seriously. Little happenings during our stay at the old sailor's home, which had brought a smile to my own face, had never for a moment altered the countenance of Bainbridge from the stern seriousness becoming that of one who is gathering facts of the most solemn import. I am positive that he would have taken with a poor grace the slightest levity from even myself on the subject of Hili-li. But from the bell-boy of a hotel! Olympus to become a pasture field for mastodon cows! Its ice and its saline wonders to be employed in the making of ice-cream!