I have observed, too, the same simultaneous flight when all were silent, among not only blackbirds, but other birds – quail, for example, widely separated by bushes – even on opposite sides of a hill.

‘It is known to seamen that a school of whales basking or sporting on the surface of the ocean, miles apart, with the convexity of the earth between, will sometimes dive at the same instant – all gone out of sight in a moment. The signal has been sounded – too grave for the ear of the sailor at the masthead and his comrades on the deck – who nevertheless feel its vibrations in the ship as the stones of a cathedral are stirred by the bass of the organ.

‘As with sounds, so with colours. At each end of the solar spectrum the chemist can detect the presence of what are known as “actinic” rays. They represent colours – integral colours in the composition of light – which we are unable to discern. The human eye is an imperfect instrument; its range is but a few octaves of the real “chromatic scale”. I am not mad; there are colours that we cannot see.

‘And, God help me! the Damned Thing is of such a colour!’

The Realm of the Unreal

1

For a part of the distance between Auburn and Newcastle the road – first on one side of a creek and then on the other – occupies the whole bottom of the ravine, being partly cut out of the steep hillside, and partly built up with boulders removed from the creek-bed by the miners. The hills are wooded, the course of the ravine is sinuous. In a dark night careful driving is required in order not to go off into the water. The night that I have in memory was dark, the creek a torrent, swollen by a recent storm. I had driven up from Newcastle and was within about a mile of Auburn in the darkest and narrowest part of the ravine, looking intently ahead of my horse for the roadway. Suddenly I saw a man almost under the animal’s nose, and reined in with a jerk that came near setting the creature upon its haunches.

‘I beg your pardon,’ I said; ‘I did not see you, sir.’

‘You could hardly be expected to see me,’ the man replied, civilly, approaching the side of the vehicle; ‘and the noise of the creek prevented my hearing you.’

I at once recognised the voice, although five years had passed since I had heard it. I was not particularly well pleased to hear it now.

‘You are Dr Dorrimore, I think,’ said I.

‘Yes; and you are my good friend Mr Manrich. I am more than glad to see you – the excess,’ he added, with a light laugh, ‘being due to the fact that I am going your way, and naturally expect an invitation to ride with you.’

‘Which I extend with all my heart.’

That was not altogether true.

Dr Dorrimore thanked me as he seated himself beside me, and I drove cautiously forward, as before. Doubtless it is fancy, but it seems to me now that the remaining distance was made in a chill fog; that I was uncomfortably cold; that the way was longer than ever before, and the town, when we reached it, cheerless, forbidding, and desolate. It must have been early in the evening, yet I do not recollect a light in any of the houses nor a living thing in the streets. Dorrimore explained at some length how he happened to be there, and where he had been during the years that had elapsed since I had seen him. I recall the fact of the narrative, but none of the facts narrated. He had been in foreign countries and had returned – this is all that my memory retains, and this I already knew. As to myself I cannot remember that I spoke a word, though doubtless I did. Of one thing I am distinctly conscious: the man’s presence at my side was strangely distasteful and disquieting – so much so that when I at last pulled up under the lights of the Putnam House I experienced a sense of having escaped some spiritual peril of a nature peculiarly forbidding. This sense of relief was somewhat modified by the discovery that Dr Dorrimore was living at the same hotel.

2

In partial explanation of my feelings regarding Dr Dorrimore I will relate briefly the circumstances under which I had met him some years before. One evening a half-dozen men of whom I was one were sitting in the library of the Bohemian Club in San Francisco. The conversation had turned to the subject of sleight-of-hand and the feats of the prestidigitateurs, one of whom was then exhibiting at a local theatre.

‘These fellows are pretenders in a double sense,’ said one of the party; ‘they can do nothing which it is worth one’s while to be made a dupe by. The humblest wayside juggler in India could mystify them to the verge of lunacy.’

‘For example, how?’ asked another, lighting a cigar.

‘For example, by all their common and familiar performances – throwing large objects into the air which never come down; causing plants to sprout, grow visibly and blossom, in bare ground chosen by spectators; putting a man into a wicker basket, piercing him through and through with a sword while he shrieks and bleeds, and then – the basket being opened nothing is there; tossing the free end of a silken ladder into the air, mounting it and disappearing.’

‘Nonsense!’ I said, rather uncivilly, I fear. ‘You surely do not believe such things?’

‘Certainly not: I have seen them too often.’

‘But I do,’ said a journalist of considerable local fame as a picturesque reporter. ‘I have so frequently related them that nothing but observation could shake my conviction. Why, gentlemen, I have my own word for it.’

Nobody laughed – all were looking at something behind me. Turning in my seat I saw a man in evening dress who had just entered the room. He was exceedingly dark, almost swarthy, with a thin face, black-bearded to the lips, an abundance of coarse black hair in some disorder, a high nose and eyes that glittered with as soulless an expression as those of a cobra. One of the group rose and introduced him as Dr Dorrimore, of Calcutta.