The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 518 pages of information about The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories.

The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 518 pages of information about The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories.

V.

And now to tell of the queerest thing of all.  About two years after his cure I dined with the Davidsons, and after dinner a man named Atkins called in.  He is a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and a pleasant, talkative man.  He was on friendly terms with my brother-in-law, and was soon on friendly terms with me.  It came out that he was engaged to Davidson’s cousin, and incidentally he took out a kind of pocket photograph case to show us a new rendering of his fiancee.  “And, by-the-by,” said he, “here’s the old Fulmar.”

Davidson looked at it casually.  Then suddenly his face lit up.  “Good heavens!” said he.  “I could almost swear——­”

“What?” said Atkins.

“That I had seen that ship before.”

“Don’t see how you can have.  She hasn’t been out of the South Seas for six years, and before then——­”

“But,” began Davidson, and then, “Yes—­that’s the ship I dreamt of; I’m sure that’s the ship I dreamt of.  She was standing off an island that swarmed with penguins, and she fired a gun.”

“Good Lord!” said Atkins, who had now heard the particulars of the seizure.  “How the deuce could you dream that?”

And then, bit by bit, it came out that on the very day Davidson was seized, H.M.S. Fulmar had actually been off a little rock to the south of Antipodes Island.  A boat had landed overnight to get penguins’ eggs, had been delayed, and a thunderstorm drifting up, the boat’s crew had waited until the morning before rejoining the ship.  Atkins had been one of them, and he corroborated, word for word, the descriptions Davidson had given of the island and the boat.  There is not the slightest doubt in any of our minds that Davidson has really seen the place.  In some unaccountable way, while he moved hither and thither in London, his sight moved hither and thither in a manner that corresponded, about this distant island. How is absolutely a mystery.

That completes the remarkable story of Davidson’s eyes.  It’s perhaps the best authenticated case in existence of real vision at a distance.  Explanation there is none forthcoming, except what Professor Wade has thrown out.  But his explanation invokes the Fourth Dimension, and a dissertation on theoretical kinds of space.  To talk of there being “a kink in space” seems mere nonsense to me; it may be because I am no mathematician.  When I said that nothing would alter the fact that the place is eight thousand miles away, he answered that two points might be a yard away on a sheet of paper, and yet be brought together by bending the paper round.  The reader may grasp his argument, but I certainly do not.  His idea seems to be that Davidson, stooping between the poles of the big electro-magnet, had some extraordinary twist given to his retinal elements through the sudden change in the field of force due to the lightning.

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The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.