EPIGRAPH
By Charles Wayne, M.D.
The reader who has persisted so far in the present volume will doubtless recall the fact that the first portion is heralded by a short foreword from one Edward Cayley, who therein expresses his full belief in the narrative he publishes. In this preface also he makes allusion to the traveller Sir W—— Y——, the original finder and owner of the manuscript. For the sake of convenience and explanation therefore I shall state here that the Editor of Part I. is the late Mr Edward Cayley, F.S.A., an official employed in the British Museum, whose book was issued in the early months of 1913. How this obscure work came into my possession I shall explain in due course, but I should like to add here that the book in question evoked no public interest whatsoever, and that such scanty notices of it as appeared were invariably unfavourable or contemptuous. Such a fate seems natural enough to me, for I have long observed how in all publications concerning the occult, nine out of ten readers are to be found scoffers and unbelievers, whilst the tenth is over-credulous.
But a few weeks after the appearance of the volume, its editor himself was far beyond the range of hostile jest or criticism, for one March evening he was found dead of heart disease in the railway carriage wherein he was returning to his home at Harrow. Of "the exquisitely prepared roll of vellum covered with close crabbed writing," as also of its containing cylinder of some exotic white metal, I have been assured by Mr Cayley's executor that of neither can a trace be found—"suddenly, as rare things will, they vanished," though I am inclined to think that these gentlemen in common with a good many others of Mr Cayley's friends have never credited their existence save in the brain of their late owner. Indeed, I am told not a few persons openly denounced the ill-fated volume as an indiscreet jeu d'esprit of which Cayley himself was both author and editor. As to Sir W—— Y—— I see no reason to withhold the full name of Sir Wardour Yockney, head of an ancient Kentish house which received its baronetcy so long ago as the reign of Charles the Martyr. Sir Wardour was a fine shot, an ardent mountaineer and no mean scholar—alas! that I must use the aorist here in so speaking of him, for Sir Wardour, who started for Flanders with a motor car soon after the outbreak of the War, was described as "missing" so long ago as last October, nor have any further tidings reached his household concerning his fate.
These two principal witnesses therefore being no longer available, there remains none to whom I can apply for information, none with whom it would prove worth my while to communicate. It lies therefore with myself alone to deal as I may think fit with the manuscript, which is practically a continuation or sequel of the extraordinary story already accepted and published as solid truth by Mr Cayley. This second manuscript was found by me under circumstances I shall presently relate in the bedroom of a sea-side inn in South Wales. With the narrative was also a letter addressed to me wherein the writer thanked me in warm and sincere language for the small amount of assistance and sympathy it had been my privilege to vouchsafe to him during our past twelve weeks of companionship on Earth, but the contents of the letter shed no further light on the subject-matter of the manuscript. In addition to these there was a copy of Mr Cayley's book, which is already become so scarce as to be almost unattainable. The contents of this little volume I have therefore placed at the beginning of the present publication, so that the reader can follow in due sequence all the amazing adventures of the writer from the date of his first departure from the Earth to the stars until the very moment when he voluntarily chose a second time to quit this planet in order to resume a state of sovereignty whose tragical interruption he has already described with his own pen.
I have always reckoned myself with perfect contentment as a private person of no importance; de me igitur nefas omninò loqui. Nevertheless, I have been propelled willy-nilly into obtruding some portion of my personal affairs before the public and in what I conceive to be the public's true interest. For I myself have been requisitioned, so to speak, for the solution of some gigantic problem which is of deep import to our race, and my realisation of this unsought attention on my part must serve as my excuse for the short biographical details that follow.
I was born in the year 1853, one of a respectable family of dalesmen in Cumberland, and after a boyhood wherein the passionate love of solitary wandering over the wild north country fells seems the only trait I think worth recording, I was sent to study medicine at Edinburgh. Here I had a successful if not a distinguished career, and after taking the required degrees I departed to the East to practise my profession and to amass the conventional fortune. In the former object I trust I have performed my duty satisfactorily; and as to the second, I have at any rate acquired a sufficient pension for the needs of my evening of life. I have also found alleviation and no small degree of pleasure in my chosen science, especially in the study of certain tropical diseases, though my natural inclination for privacy has hitherto prevented my publishing some interesting notes and observations covering many years' research in this particular section of medicine. In my domestic life however I have been less fortunate, for having married an estimable woman with every prospect of a joint happy existence before us, we were both deeply wounded in the deaths at rapid intervals of our four children, a series of blows that I myself, thanks to my profession and other interests in life, was able to bear with tolerable courage. Not so my poor partner; from the date of her last boy's loss at Singapore she could support this prolonged visitation of malign fortune no longer, and after a short but terrible attack of violent dementia she relapsed into a permanent condition of apathetic melancholy, from which she either could not or would not be diverted. I hope and trust I did all that was possible by patience and calmness to soften her hard lot; but, needless to say, it was a cheerless home wherein I moved, until after many years my suffering wife was at last called to rejoin her lost children.
From the date of her death I devoted myself with increased ardour to my duties, whilst I occupied my many spare hours in studying with care and intelligence such literature as deals with the cult of the supernatural, which has always possessed a singular fascination for my mind, and has, I feel sure, helped me to sustain with equanimity hitherto so many slings and arrows of outrageous fortune on this Earth. The years rolled by, so that in due course I became eligible for my retiring pension, yet even then I was in no haste to turn my back on the East, where I had passed practically the whole of my life since adolescence, for during thirty-seven years of service I had only twice returned home on short leave. And now, when in professional decency and according to the custom of my caste I was expected to resign, I felt small inclination to revisit my native land, where the only contemporary relative I owned was a married sister living at Aberdeen. Of my various nephews and nieces I knew nothing, and I felt a not unnatural dread of being exploited or patronised by a coterie of self-satisfied young persons of the present generation. At times I thought of migrating to some sparsely peopled British colony, such as Western Australia or Tasmania, where the advent of an elderly widower might possibly be welcome, if only as tending to swell the meagre tale of the approaching census. I was still hesitating and pondering, when in July 1914 the tedious question was solved for me rather arbitrarily in the following manner.
A friend of mine about to revisit England had already engaged and paid for his passage from Rangoon, and was eagerly looking forward to his intended holiday, when almost at the last moment the poor fellow met with a shocking accident, whereby he was so unfortunate as to break both his legs. Visiting the patient at his house in the capacity of friend and not as physician, I found Mr —— in a pitiable state of lamentation over the money spent on his passage home, which he regarded as practically lost; indeed, this particular matter seemed to oppress the invalid even more heavily than his other far more serious disaster. I reflected a while on the situation, and then deeming it a special opportunity for me to break from my thraldom of indecision and simultaneously to perform a real kindness to a brother in distress, I offered to relieve my sick friend of his ticket and to have his cabin transferred to myself. As a result of this suggestion I had at least the satisfaction of the injured man's warm gratitude, though I confess the homing instinct within me had grown so faint that I could summon up little or no enthusiasm at this new prospect of a speedy return to the land of my birth. One external ray of consolation however I was able to draw from this new arrangement, which was that the Orissa of the Pheon Line, the boat selected by my friend, was timed to sail on the seventeenth day of the seventh month of the year. I have long held a secret veneration for the figure seven, and in this case the circumstance of the benign figures was combined with certain stellar conjunctions in the heavens on which I need not dwell here.