He used to talk to me about what he called 'telepathy.' I remember the
word, because he wrote it down and made me learn it. It was one of
those strange ideas he was always getting hold of. I always believed
that, when he chose, he was a regular old-fashioned magician--like you
read of in the Bible. Some of the things he did--and a great many more
that he wanted to do--were against nature. When I hinted that that was
what I felt, he'd look at me in that queer way of his, and say that
magic was knowledge, and knowledge was magic; and that you'd only got
to know everything to do everything. It was the same with this
'telepathy.' According to him you can make yourself understood by a
person who's thousands of miles away--if you've only got the knack of
it. He declared that when he was away from me, sometimes, if he was
just in the right frame of mind, he could tell what I was doing and
saying, and even thinking. There was something in what he said. When
he'd been away for weeks together, when he came back he'd tell me what
I'd been doing at a certain time on a certain day--even my very
words!--but principally at night when I was alone. When I was praying
for him he always knew. Dozens of times has he shown me the
words--written down on a sheet of paper, date and hour and all!--which
I had used in my prayers, when I was asking God to tell me where he
was, and send him home to me. It did make me feel so ashamed; because
he had such a way about him when he was showing you a thing like that.
But while he could understand me I couldn't him, though over and over
again I've known that there was something he wanted to say to me, and
that he was trying to say it. And, as he told me to, I've put down on
paper the time the feeling came over me. And when he returned he'd
show me his piece of paper; sure enough, when he was trying to speak
to me was the very time I felt he was.
'Persevere,' he'd say. 'You and I'll get into telepathic communication
yet before we've done; and when we do we'll show this ancient and
highly civilised nation a thing or two. There's more to be got out of
Egyptian tombs than mummies.'
What he meant I couldn't say. He was always talking in a way that was
beyond me altogether. But I knew that he had some scheme in his head.
Now the feeling I have been talking about was on me again; that he was
trying to say something he wanted me to understand. It was that
feeling made me so sure he wasn't dead; though what he wanted to say I
couldn't imagine. I knew that it was only my silliness which prevented
me from finding out, and that made me so mad. I might be doing the
very thing he didn't want me to; and I wouldn't do anything he didn't
want me to do for all the world. I would have given something to have
just been sensible enough to understand, but if you're not sensible
always you can't be now and then. Though I have heard tell of how even
idiots have an occasional gleam of good, sound, sterling sense.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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