CHAPTER VII

So here was my predicament:  I knew that within myself was a Golconda of memories of other lives, yet I was unable to do more than flit like a madman through those memories.  I had my Golconda but could not mine it.

I remembered the case of Stainton Moses, the clergyman who had been possessed by the personalities of St. Hippolytus, Plotinus, Athenodorus, and of that friend of Erasmus named Grocyn.  And when I considered the experiments of Colonel de Rochas, which I had read in tyro fashion in other and busier days, I was convinced that Stainton Moses had, in previous lives, been those personalities that on occasion seemed to possess him.  In truth, they were he, they were the links of the chain of recurrence.

But more especially did I dwell upon the experiments of Colonel de Rochas.  By means of suitable hypnotic subjects he claimed that he had penetrated backwards through time to the ancestors of his subjects.  Thus, the case of Josephine which he describes.  She was eighteen years old and she lived at Voiron, in the department of the Isere.  Under hypnotism Colonel de Rochas sent her adventuring back through her adolescence, her girlhood, her childhood, breast-infancy, and the silent dark of her mother’s womb, and, still back, through the silence and the dark of the time when she, Josephine, was not yet born, to the light and life of a previous living, when she had been a churlish, suspicious, and embittered old man, by name Jean-Claude Bourdon, who had served his time in the Seventh Artillery at Besancon, and who died at the age of seventy, long bedridden. Yes, and did not Colonel de Rochas in turn hypnotize this shade of Jean-Claude Bourdon, so that he adventured farther back into time, through infancy and birth and the dark of the unborn, until he found again light and life when, as a wicked old woman, he had been Philomene Carteron?

But try as I would with my bright bit of straw in the oozement of light into solitary, I failed to achieve any such definiteness of previous personality.  I became convinced, through the failure of my experiments, that only through death could I clearly and coherently resurrect the memories of my previous selves.

But the tides of life ran strong in me.  I, Darrell Standing, was so strongly disinclined to die that I refused to let Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie kill me.  I was always so innately urged to live that sometimes I think that is why I am still here, eating and sleeping, thinking and dreaming, writing this narrative of my various me’s, and awaiting the incontestable rope that will put an ephemeral period in my long-linked existence.

And then came death in life.  I learned the trick, Ed Morrell taught it me, as you shall see.  It began through Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie.  They must have experienced a recrudescence of panic at thought of the dynamite they believed hidden.  They came to me in my dark cell, and they told me plainly that they would jacket me to death if I did not confess where the dynamite was hidden.  And they assured me that they would do it officially without any hurt to their own official skins.  My death would appear on the prison register as due to natural causes.