When the World Shook: Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and ArbuthnotHaggard, H. Rider (Henry Rider)
Science
When the World Shook: Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot
Haggard, H. Rider (Henry Rider)
Adventure stories; Science fiction
More, they, or some of them, had learned the use of the Fourth
Dimension, that is their most instructed individuals, could move
_through_ opposing things, as well as over them, up into them and
across them. This power these possessed in a two-fold form. I mean,
that they could either disintegrate their bodies at one spot and cause
them to integrate again at another, or they could project what the old
Egyptians called the Ka or Double, and modern Theosophists name the
Astral Shape, to any distance. Moreover, this Double, or Astral Shape,
while itself invisible, still, so to speak, had the use of its senses.
It could see, it could hear, and it could remember, and, on returning
to the body, it could avail itself of the experience thus acquired.
Thus, at least, said Yva, while Bickley contemplated her with a cold
and unbelieving eye. She even went further and alleged that in certain
instances, individuals of her extinct race had been able to pass
through the ether and to visit other worlds in the depths of space.
“Have you ever done that?” asked Bickley.
“Once or twice I dreamed that I did,” she replied quietly.
“We can all dream,” he answered.
As it was my lot to make acquaintance with this strange and uncanny
power at a later date, I will say no more of it now.
Telepathy, she declared, was also a developed gift among the Sons of
Wisdom; indeed, they seem to have used it as we use wireless messages.
Only, in their case, the sending and receiving stations were skilled
and susceptible human beings who went on duty for so many hours at a
time. Thus intelligence was transmitted with accuracy and despatch.
Those who had this faculty were, she said, also very apt at reading the
minds of others and therefore not easy to deceive.
“Is that how you know that I had been trying to analyse your
Life-water?” asked Bickley.
“Yes,” she answered, with her unvarying smile. “At the moment I spoke
thereof you were wondering whether my father would be angry if he knew
that you had taken the water in a little flask.” She studied him for a
moment, then added: “Now you are wondering, first, whether I did not
see you take the water from the fountain and guess the purpose, and,
secondly, whether perhaps Bastin did not tell me what you were doing
with it when we met in the sepulchre.”
“Look here,” said the exasperated Bickley, “I admit that telepathy and
thought-reading are possible to a certain limited extent. But supposing
that you possess those powers, as I think in English, and you do not
know English, how can you interpret what is passing in my mind?”
“Perhaps you have been teaching me English all this while without
knowing it, Bickley. In any case, it matters little, seeing that what I
read is the thought, not the language with which it is clothed. The
thought comes from your mind to mine—that is, if I wish it, which is
not often—and I interpret it in my own or other tongues.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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