CHAPTER XII

Israel Kafka found himself seated in the corner of a comfortable carriage with Keyork Arabian at his side.  He opened his eyes quite naturally, and after looking out of the window stretched himself as far as the limits of the space would allow.  He felt very weak and very tired.  The bright colour had left his olive cheeks, his lips were pale and his eyes heavy.

“Travelling is very tiring,” he said, glancing at Keyork’s face.

The old man rubbed his hands briskly and laughed.

“I am as fresh as ever,” he answered.  “It is true that I have the happy faculty of sleeping when I get a chance and that no preoccupation disturbs my appetite.”

Keyork Arabian was in a very cheerful frame of mind.  He was conscious of having made a great stride towards the successful realisation of his dream.  Israel Kafka’s ignorance, too, amused him, and gave him a fresh and encouraging proof of Unorna’s amazing powers.

By a mere exercise of superior will this man, in the very prime of youth and strength, had been deprived of a month of his life.  Thirty days were gone, as in the flash of a second, and with them was gone also something less easily replaced, or at least more certainly missed.  In Kafka’s mind the passage of time was accounted for in a way which would have seemed supernatural twenty years ago, but which at the present day is understood in practice if not in theory.  For thirty days he had been stationary in one place, almost motionless, an instrument in Keyork’s skilful hands, a mere reservoir of vitality upon which the sage had ruthlessly drawn to the fullest extent of its capacities.  He had been fed and tended in his unconsciousness, he had, unknown to himself, opened his eyes at regular intervals, and had absorbed through his ears a series of vivid impressions destined to disarm his suspicions, when he was at last allowed to wake and move about the world again.  With unfailing forethought Keyork had planned the details of a whole series of artificial reminiscences, and at the moment when Kafka came to himself in the carriage the machinery of memory began to work as Keyork had intended that it should.

Israel Kafka leaned back against the cushions and reviewed his life during the past month.  He remembered very well the afternoon when, after a stormy interview with Unorna, he had been persuaded by Keyork to accompany the latter upon a rapid southward journey.  He remembered how he had hastily packed together a few necessaries for the expedition, while Keyork stood at his elbow advising him what to take and what to leave, with the sound good sense of an experienced traveller, and he could almost repeat the words of the message he had scrawled on a sheet of paper at the last minute to explain his sudden absence from his lodging—­for the people of the house had all been away when he was packing his belongings.  Then the hurry of the departure recalled itself to