ut off both arms at the shoulder-sockets. Cut off both
legs at the hip-sockets. And I, the unconquerable and indestructible I,
survive. Am I any the less for these mutilations, for these subtractions
of the flesh? Certainly not. Clip my hair. Shave from me with sharp
razors my lips, my nose, my ears--ay, and tear out the eyes of me by the
roots; and there, mewed in that featureless skull that is attached to a
hacked and mangled torso, there in that cell of the chemic flesh, will
still be I, unmutilated, undiminished.

Oh, the heart still beats. Very well. Cut out the heart, or, better,
fling the flesh-remnant into a machine of a thousand blades and make
mincemeat of it--and I, _I_, don't you understand, all the spirit and the
mystery and the vital fire and life of me, am off and away. I have not
perished. Only the body has perished, and the body is not I.

I believe Colonel de Rochas was correct when he asserted that under the
compulsion of his will he sent the girl Josephine, while she was in
hypnotic trance, back through the eighteen years she had lived, back
through the silence and the dark ere she had been born, back to the light
of a previous living when she was a bedridden old man, the
ex-artilleryman, Jean-Claude Bourdon. And I believe that Colonel de
Rochas did truly hypnotize this resurrected shade of the old man and, by
compulsion of will, send him back through the seventy years of his life,
back into the dark and through the dark into the light of day when he had
been the wicked old woman, Philomene Carteron.

Already, have I not shown you, my reader, that in previous times,
inhabiting various cloddy aggregates of matter, I have been Count
Guillaume de Sainte-Maure, a mangy and nameless hermit of Egypt, and the
boy Jesse, whose father was captain of forty wagons in the great westward
emigration. And, also, am I not now, as I write these lines, Darrell
Sanding, under sentence of death in Folsom Prison and one time professor
of agronomy in the College of Agriculture of the University of
California?

Matter is the great illusion. That is, matter manifests itself in form,
and form is apparitional. Where, now, are the crumbling rock-cliffs of
old Egypt where once I laired me like a wild beast while I dreamed of the
City of God? Where, now, is the body of Guillaume de Sainte-Maure that
was thrust through on the moonlit grass so long ago by the flame-headed
Guy de Villehardouin? Where, now, are th