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“A wonderful region, all this world of islands,” he said, waving his hand to the scenery rushing past us, “but doesn’t it strike you there’s something lacking?”

“It’s–hard,” I answered, after a moment’s reflection. “It has a superficial, glittering prettiness, without–” I hesitated to find the word I wanted.

John Silence nodded his head with approval.

“Exactly,” he said. “The picturesqueness of stage scenery that is not real, not alive. It’s like a landscape by a clever painter, yet without true imagination. Soulless–that’s the word you wanted.”

“Something like that,” I answered, watching the gusts of wind on the sails. “Not dead so much, as without soul. That’s it.”

“Of course,” he went on, in a voice calculated, it seemed to me, not to reach our companion in the bows, “to live long in a place like this–long and alone–might bring about a strange result in some men.”

I suddenly realised he was talking with a purpose and pricked up my ears.

“There’s no life here. These islands are mere dead rocks pushed up from below the sea–not living land; and there’s nothing really alive on them. Even the sea, this tideless, brackish sea, neither salt water nor fresh, is dead. It’s all a pretty image of life without the real heart and soul of life. To a man with too strong desires who came here and lived close to nature, strange things might happen.”

“Let her out a bit,” I shouted to Sangree, who was coming aft. “The wind’s gusty and we’ve got hardly any ballast.”

He went back to the bows, and Dr. Silence continued–

“Here, I mean, a long sojourn would lead to deterioration, to degeneration. The place is utterly unsoftened by human influences, by any humanising associations of history, good or bad. This landscape has never awakened into life; it’s still dreaming in its primitive sleep.”

“In time,” I put in, “you mean a man living here might become brutal?”

“The passions would run wild, selfishness become supreme, the instincts coarsen and turn savage probably.”

“But–“

“In other places just as wild, parts of Italy for instance, where there are other moderating influences, it could not happen. The character might grow wild, savage too in a sense, but with a human wildness one could understand and deal with. But here, in a hard place like this, it might be otherwise.” He spoke slowly, weighing his words carefully.

I looked at him with many questions in my eyes, and a precautionary cry to Sangree to stay in the fore part of the boat, out of earshot.

“First of all there would come callousness to pain, and indifference to the rights of others. Then the soul would turn savage, not from passionate human causes, or with enthusiasm, but by deadening down into a kind of cold, primitive, emotionless savagery–by turning, like the landscape, soulless.”

“And a man with strong desires, you say, might change?”

“Without being aware of it, yes; he might turn savage, his instincts and desires turn animal. And if”–he lowered his voice and turned for a moment towards the bows, and then continued in his most weighty manner–“owing to delicate health or other predisposing causes, his Double–you know what I mean, of course–his etheric Body of Desire, or astral body, as some term it–that part in which the emotions, passions and desires reside–if this, I say, were for some constitutional reason loosely joined to his physical organism, there might well take place an occasional projection–“

Sangree came aft with a sudden rush, his face aflame, but whether with wind or sun, or with what he had heard, I cannot say. In my surprise I let the tiller slip and the cutter gave a great plunge as she came sharply into the wind and flung us all together in a heap on the bottom. Sangree said nothing, but while he scrambled up and made the jib sheet fast my companion found a moment to add to his unfinished sentence the words, too low for any ear but mine–