"Would one, coming out of the depths of absolute ignorance of scientific achievement, as you call it, regard it as a supernatural agency?"
"He undoubtedly would."
"What would you think of his conclusion?"
"That it was the result of superstition."
"And yet you who have just stepped out of the dawn into the full day; you who have transmitted uttered thoughts to remote distances through a coarse steel or copper wire and received other uttered thoughts in return, regard with superstitious awe, as supernatural, what you have just experienced. Wherein do you differ from the untutored barbarian?"
I sat in silence.
"The telephone wire is to the thread of sentient thought which may span the universe itself, what the horseback mail-rider is to your modern methods of communication—what the earliest dawn is to the full day."
Maros explained at full length how he became possessed of the knowledge of my identity, family connections and my misfortunes, summing up:
"When you were found in the remote and outer ocean and brought within the precincts of Intermere, you were physically unconscious, but still possessing partially dormant mental faculties; that is, you continued to think feebly and intermittently. We traced your two intermittent lines of thought to your mother in America, and to, or rather toward, your kinsman at some unknown point. Tracing again to your parent we learned that Marshall had accompanied the American expedition to China from Manila. Following this clew, we ascertained that he had been killed, and that that fact would reach his home in due course, as well as the fact that information of the loss of your ship would reach America almost simultaneously. What your mother now regards as premonitions of impending evil or misfortunes were communications with her consciousness, far more refined and perfect than the subsequent cable communications, but quite as natural, and in no sense supernatural."
"This is indeed amazing!" I exclaimed.