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“But what makes you think that it will penetrate fog?” I queried. “And if it is invisible itself, how will it illumine an object?”

“As to your first question,” he answered, with a smile, “it is well known to surgeons that ultraviolet light will penetrate the human body to the depth of an inch, while the visible rays are reflected at the surface. And it has been known to photographers for fifty years that this light–easily isolated by dispersion through prisms–will act on a sensitized plate in an utterly dark room.”

“Granted,” I said. “But how about the second question? How can you see by this light?”

“There you have me,” he answered. “It will need a quicker development than any now known to photography–a traveling film, for instance, that will show the picture of an iceberg or a ship before it is too late to avoid it–a traveling film sensitized by a quicker acting chemical than any now used.”

“Why not puzzle it out?” I asked. “It would be a wonderful invention.”

“I am too old,” he answered dreamily. “My life work is about done. But other and younger men will take it up. We have made great strides in optics. The moving picture is a fact. Colored photographs are possible. The ultraviolet microscope shows us objects hitherto invisible because smaller than the wave length of visible light. We shall ultimately use this light to see through opaque objects. We shall see colors never imagined by the human mind, but which have existed since the beginning of light.

“We shall see new hues in the sunset, in the rainbow, in the flowers and foliage of forest and field. We may possibly see creatures in the air above never seen before.

“We shall certainly see creatures from the depths of the sea, where visible light cannot reach–creatures whose substance is of such a nature that it will not respond to the light it has never been exposed to–a substance which is absolutely transparent because it will not absorb, and appear black; will not reflect, and show a color of some kind; and will not refract, and distort objects seen through it.”

“What!” I exclaimed. “Do you think there are invisible creatures?”

He looked gravely at me for a moment, then said: “You know that there are sounds that are inaudible to the human ear because of their too rapid vibration, others that are audible to some, but not to all. There are men who cannot hear the chirp of a cricket, the tweet of a bird, or the creaking of a wagon wheel.

“You know that there are electric currents much stronger in voltage than is necessary to kill us, but of wave frequency so rapid that the human tissue will not respond, and we can receive such currents without a shock. And I know”–he spoke with vehemence–“that there are creatures in the deep sea of color invisible to the human eye, for I have not only felt such a creature, but seen its photograph taken by the ultraviolet light.”

“Tell me,” I asked breathlessly. “Creatures solid, but invisible?”

“Creatures solid, and invisible because absolutely transparent. It is long since I have told the yarn. People would not believe me, and it was so horrible an experience that I have tried to forget it. However, if you care for it, and are willing to lose your sleep to-night, I’ll give it to you.”

He reached for a pipe, filled it, and began to smoke; and as he smoked and talked, some of the glamor and polish of the successful artist and clubman left him. He was an old sailor, spinning a yarn.

“It was about thirty years ago,” he began, “or, to be explicit, twenty-nine years this coming August, at the time of the great Java earthquake. You’ve heard of it–how it killed seventy thousand people, thirty thousand of whom were drowned by the tidal wave.

“It was a curious phenomenon; Krakatoa Island, a huge conical mountain rising from the bottom of Sunda Strait, went out of existence, while in Java a mountain chain was leveled, and up from the bowels of the earth came an iceberg–as you might call it–that floated a hundred miles on a stream of molten lava before melting.