could get quite clear as to what this
consciousness was like. When I asked he used to look puzzled and
worried and helpless. I made out from him that one landmark involved a
sequence, and once given a bearing from an object you could keep the
direction without a mistake. He told me he could easily, if he wanted,
go in a dirigible from the top of Mont Blanc to the top of Snowdon in
the thickest fog and without a compass, if he were given the proper
angle to start from. I confess I didn't follow that myself. Material
objects had nothing to do with the Spacial forms, for a table or a bed
in our world might be placed across a corridor of Space. The forms
played their game independent of our kind of reality. But the worst of
it was, that if you kept your mind too much in one world you were apt
to forget about the other and Hollond was always barking his shins on
stones and chairs and things.

"He told me all this quite simply and frankly. Remember his mind and
no other part of him lived in his new world. He said it gave him an
odd sense of detachment to sit in a room among people, and to know that
nothing there but himself had any relation at all to the infinite
strange world of Space that flowed around them. He would listen, he
said, to a great man talking, with one eye on the cat on the rug,
thinking to himself how much more the cat knew than the man."

"How long was it before he went mad?" I asked.

It was a foolish question, and made Leithen cross. "He never went mad
in your sense. My dear fellow, you're very much wrong if you think
there was anything pathological about him--then. The man was
brilliantly sane. His mind was as keen is a keen sword. I couldn't
understand him, but I could judge of his sanity right enough."

I asked if it made him happy or miserable.

"At first I think it made him uncomfortable. He was restless because
he knew too much and too little. The unknown pressed in on his mind as
bad air weighs on the lungs. Then it lightened and he accepted the new
world in the same sober practical way that he took other things. I
think that the free exercise of his mind in a pure medium gave him a
feeling of extraordinary power and ease. His eyes used to sparkle when
he talked. And another odd thing he told me. He was a keen
rockclimber, but, curiously enough, he had never a very good head.
Dizzy heights always worried him, though he managed to keep hold on
himself. But now all that ha