“I do not wonder you fainted,” said he. “I do not believe it was what
you saw that upset you; it was what you expected to see--wasn't that
it?”
Clewe nodded in an indefinite way. “We won't talk about it now,” said
he. “I don't want any more experiments to-day. We will cover up the
instrument and go.”
When Roland Clewe reached his room, he sat down in the arm-chair to
think. He had made a grand and wonderful success, but it was not upon
that that his mind was now fixed. It was upon the casual and accidental
effect of the work of his invention, of which he had never dreamed.
Bryce had made a great mistake in thinking that it was not what Roland
Clewe had seen, but what he had expected to see, which had caused him to
drop insensible. It was what he had seen.
When the master-workman had approached the lighted space upon the
ground, Clewe stood opposite to him, a little distance from the
apparatus. As Bryce looked down, he leaned forward more and more,
until the greater part of his body was directly over the lighted space.
Looking at him, Clewe was startled, amazed, and horrified to find all
that portion of his person which projected itself into the limits of the
light had entirely disappeared, and that he was gazing upon a section of
a man's trunk, brightly illuminated, and displayed in all its internal
colors and outlines. Such a sight was enough to take away the senses of
any man, and he did not wonder that he had fainted.
“Now,” said he to himself, “all the time that I was looking into that
apparent hole, never thinking that in order to see down into it I was
obliged to project a portion of myself into the line of the Artesian
ray, that portion of me was transparent, invisible. If Bryce had come
in! and then”--as the thought came into his mind his heart stopped
beating--“if Margaret had been there!”
For an hour he sat in his chair, racking his brain.
“She must see the working of the ray,” he said. “I must tell her of my
success. She must see it as soon as possible. It is cruel to keep her
waiting. But how shall I manage it? How shall I shield her from the
slightest possibility of what happened to me? Heavens!” he exclaimed,
“if she had been there!”
After a time he determined that before any further experiments should
take place he would build a circular screen, a little room, which should
entirely surround the space on which the Artesian ray was operated. Only
one person at a time should be allowed to enter this screened apartment,
which should then be closed. It would make no difference if one should
become invisible, provided there was no one else to know it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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