There was a flash of white teeth opposite. ‘No, it can be done,’ murmured Ram Dar, ‘Past, Present, Future! It is all an illusion. We have known these things a long time. You wish to look into the Future?...’ And he rose to his feet. Still suspecting some pleasantry, the other forced a laugh, and stammered out: ‘Above all things.... Pity no way of doing it.... Final Conquest of Nature.’ By this time, the Hindoo had pulled forward the little side-table, on which stood the great metal bowl. To Glindersby’s astonishment, the latter was filled with a liquid blacker than ink, and had, fastened to the edge, several little pans, into which Ram Dar quickly poured a quantity of grey powder. ‘How far forward will you look, and at what place?’ asked Ram Dar as he proceeded to set fire to the little heaps of powder. Glindersby stared at the dense fumes that were encircling the great bowl. Half mechanically, almost unwillingly, he gasped out: ‘Oh, Coventry ... go-ahead place, I b’lieve ... eight hundred years hence.’ There was some muttering in a strange tongue, and then a dark hand waved across the rolling, sickly-smelling fumes. ‘Come!’ cried the voice of the Hindoo, who must have trafficked with the devil, whom he resembled at that moment. Hardly knowing what he was doing, Glindersby found himself in the midst of the fumes, bending over the bowl and staring at the ebony surface of the liquid within. ‘Near Coventry.... Your year, two thousand seven hundred and thirty....’ The voice seemed to come from miles away. Next moment, the fumes, the bowl, everything had vanished, and he seemed to be looking, as from a great height, at a large meadow where a number of sheep with their lambs were browsing. It seemed a bright morning in early summer. There was no shadow of smoke; the air was perfectly clear. In one corner of the meadow a boy was seated under a large elm. He was bare-legged, sandalled and simply clad in a bright blue robe, and, all the time, he appeared to be playing upon a little pipe. Near by was a small shrine garlanded with red roses, and the grass around was strewn with crimson petals scattered by the breeze. Cloud-shadows drifted across the grass; the sheep moved steadily forward, with their lambs capering about them; a few more crimson petals were shaken from the shrine; the boy still fingered his little pipe in the shade of the elm.... ‘It is not what you expected to find,’ cried a voice in his ear; and Glindersby looked up and saw the smiling face of Ram Dar Chubb above the bowl over which they had both been bending. I say that Glindersby is a changed man, and that I, for one, approve the change in him. But I think that this story of his is full of lies; and that as for Ram Dar Chubb, he is an obvious invention, and cheap at that. ON VULGAR ERRORS