Some convict given a month in solitary was an event.  And yet we could learn nothing from such transient and ofttimes stupid Dantes who would remain in our inferno too short a time to learn knuckle-talk ere they went forth again into the bright wide world of the living.

Still, again, all was not so trivial in our abode of shadows.  As example, I taught Oppenheimer to play chess.  Consider how tremendous such an achievement is—­to teach a man, thirteen cells away, by means of knuckle-raps; to teach him to visualize a chessboard, to visualize all the pieces, pawns and positions, to know the various manners of moving; and to teach him it all so thoroughly that he and I, by pure visualization, were in the end able to play entire games of chess in our minds.  In the end, did I say?  Another tribute to the magnificence of Oppenheimer’s mind:  in the end he became my master at the game—­he who had never seen a chessman in his life.

What image of a bishop, for instance, could possibly form in his mind when I rapped our code-sign for bishop?  In vain and often I asked him this very question.  In vain he tried to describe in words that mental image of something he had never seen but which nevertheless he was able to handle in such masterly fashion as to bring confusion upon me countless times in the course of play.

I can only contemplate such exhibitions of will and spirit and conclude, as I so often conclude, that precisely there resides reality.  The spirit only is real.  The flesh is phantasmagoria and apparitional.  I ask you how—­I repeat, I ask you how matter or flesh in any form can play chess on an imaginary board with imaginary pieces, across a vacuum of thirteen cell spanned only with knuckle-taps?

CHAPTER XV

I was once Adam Strang, an Englishman.  The period of my living, as near as I can guess it, was somewhere between 1550 and 1650, and I lived to a ripe old age, as you shall see.  It has been a great regret to me, ever since Ed Morrell taught me the way of the little death, that I had not been a more thorough student of history.  I should have been able to identity and place much that is obscure to me.  As it is, I am compelled to grope and guess my way to times and places of my earlier existences.

A peculiar thing about my Adam Strang existence is that I recollect so little of the first thirty years of it.  Many times, in the jacket, has Adam Strang recrudesced, but always he springs into being full-statured, heavy-thewed, a full thirty years of age.

I, Adam Strang, invariably assume my consciousness on a group of low, sandy islands somewhere under the equator in what must be the western Pacific Ocean.  I am always at home there, and seem to have been there some time.  There are thousands of people on these islands, although I am the only white man.  The natives are a magnificent breed, big-muscled, broad-shouldered, tall.  A six-foot man is a commonplace.  The king, Raa Kook, is at least six inches above six feet, and though he would weigh fully three hundred pounds, is so equitably proportioned that one could not call him fat.  Many of his chiefs are as large, while the women are not much smaller than the men.