, 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