On that evening when the Wanderer fell to the earth before the shadow of Beatrice, Keyork Arabian sat alone in his charnel-house.  The brilliant light of two powerful lamps illuminated everything in the place, for Keyork loved light, like all those who are intensely attached to life for its own sake.  The yellow rays flooded the life-like faces of his dead companions, and streamed upwards to the heterogeneous objects that filled the shelves almost to the spring of the vault—­objects which all reminded him of the conditions of lives long ago extinct, endless heaps of barbarous weapons, of garments of leather and of fish skin, Amurian, Siberian, Gothic, Mexican, and Peruvian; African and Red Indian masks, models of boats and canoes, sacred drums, Liberian idols, Runic calendars, fiddles made of human skulls, strange and barbaric ornaments, all producing together an amazing richness of colour—­all things in which the man himself had taken but a passing interest, the result of his central study—­life in all its shapes.

He sat alone.  The African giant looked down at his dwarf-like form as though in contempt of such half-grown humanity; the Malayan lady’s bodiless head turned its smiling face towards him; scores of dead beings seemed to contemplate half in pity, half in scorn, their would-be reviver.  Keyork Arabian was used to their company and to their silence.  Far beyond the common human horror of dead humanity, if one of them had all at once nodded to him and spoken to him he would have started with delight and listened with rapture.  But they were all still dead, and they neither spoke or moved a finger.  A thought that had more hope in it than any which had passed through his brain for many years now occupied and absorbed him.  A heavy book lay open on the table by his side, and from time to time he glanced at a phrase which seemed to attract him.  It was always the same phrase, and two words alone sufficed to bring him back to contemplation of it.  Those two words were “Immortality” and “Soul.”  He began to speak aloud to himself, being by nature fond of speech.

“Yes.  The soul is immortal.  I am quite willing to grant that.  But it does not in any way follow that it is the source of life, or the seat of intelligence.  The Buddhists distinguished it even from the individuality.  And yet life holds it, and when life ends it takes its departure.  How soon?  I do not know.  It is not a condition of life, but life is one of its conditions.  Does it leave the body when life is artificially prolonged in a state of unconsciousness—­by hypnotism, for instance?  Is it more closely bound up with animal life, or with intelligence?  If with either, has it a definite abiding place in the heart, or in the brain?  Since its presence depends directly on life, so far as I know, it belongs to the body rather than to the brain.  I once made a rabbit live an hour without its head.  With a man that experiment would need careful manipulation—­I