The bishop scanned with a shudder this frowning cliff of basalt, and turned to address his companion.

“Do people really throw themselves over here?”

“Very few.  Not more than three or four in a season, I’m told.  The local suicides, as a rule, are not as spectacular as they might be considering the landscape.  They shoot themselves or take poison, which shows a certain consideration for other people.  It is not a pleasant job, you know, to row to this remote spot and scramble about the cliff at the risk of a broken neck, collecting shattered fragments of humanity into a potato sack.”

“Not at all pleasant!”

“As compared with England,” Keith pursued, “life here is intense, palpitating, dramatic—­a kind of blood-curdling farce full of irresponsible crimes and improbable consequences.  The soil is saturated with blood.  People are always killing themselves or each other for motives which, to an Englishman, are altogether outside the range of comprehensibility.  Shall I tell you about one of our most interesting cases?  I happen to be on the island at the time.  There was a young fellow here—­an agreeable young fellow—­an artist; he was rich; he took a villa, and painted.  We all liked him.  Then, by degrees, he became secretive and moody.  Said he was studying mechanics.  He told me himself that much as he liked landscape painting he thought an artist—­a real artist, he said—­ought to be versed in ancillary sciences; in fortification, wood-carving, architecture, and so on.  Leonardo da Vinci, you know.  Well, one day they could not get into his bedroom.  They broke open his door and discovered that he had constructed a perfectly-formed guillotine; the knife had fallen; his head lay on one side and his body on the other.  You may well be surprised.  I went carefully into that case.  He was in the best of health, with a creditable artistic record behind him.  He had no troubles, financial or domestic.”

“Then what on earth—?”

“The scenery of Nepenthe.  It got on his nerves; it unstrung him.  Does that surprise you too?  Don’t you feel its effect upon yourself?  The bland winds, the sea shining in velvety depths as though filled with some electric fluid, the riot of vegetation, these extravagant cliffs that change colour with every hour of the day?  Look at that peak yonder—­is it not almost transparent, like some crystal of amethyst?  This coast-line alone—­the sheer effrontery of its mineral charm—­might affect some natures to such an extent as to dislocate their stability.  Northern minds seem to become fluid here, impressionable, unstable, unbalanced—­what you please.  THere is something in the brightness of this spot which decomposes their old particles and arranges them into fresh and unexpected patterns.  That is what people mean when they say that they ‘diswcover’ themselves here.  You discover a mechanism, you know, when you take it to pieces.  You catch my meaning?”