The Moon Pool

Page

lted. I lay on my two chairs and listened. The song was one with the wholesome sunshine an

d lark is sha

he breast of hi

voice

his feathers a

sun and his

, Doc, you a

e stood outside laughing. The Suwarna, her engines silent, was making fine headway u

water rushing on each side of us; flashed for an instant and were gone. Behind us gulls hovered and dipped. The shadow of mystery had retreated far over the rim of this wid

patient?" a

on a pair of pajamas and, giant torso naked under the sun, he strode out upon us. We all of us looked at him a

o me: "You said las

odd

re?" he as

there to Metalanim Harbour-to th

hite gleam as of ice s

here?" h

we must first se

af Huldricksson

the little Portuguese, following his t

onape tomorrow mor

orseman. He looked awa

reat sympathy and a great pity, to neither of which they quite know how to give e

ricksson expressed a desire

take the wheel and the two fall into earnest talk. I beckoned to O'Keefe and we stretched ourselves out on the bow ha

?" I

u think-and then I'll proceed to point out your sc

t night to which I must interpose serious objection. You more than hinted that I hid-superstitions. Let me inform you, Larry O'Keefe, that I am solely a seeker, observer, analy

back and shoute

ee"-another twinkle showed in his eyes-"and then with all this sunshine and this wide-open world"-he

tural in the sense spiritualists and table turners have given that word. I do think it is supernormal; ener

ted-for not yet had I been able to put into form

ow that many of these islands are honeycombed with caverns and vast subterranean spaces, literally underground lands running in some cases far out beneath the ocean floor.

orms of energy-especially that we call light. They may have developed a civilization and a science far more advanced than ours. What I call th

nger, a scientific dove from their Ark?" I

the Chamats?" I asked

uote from the legend. Not only in Papua but throughout Malaysia you find this story. And, so the tradition runs, these people-the Chamats-will one day break through the hills and rule the world; 'make over the world' is the literal translation

our down upon the pool their prismatic columns, are humanly made mechanisms. So long as they are humanly made, and so long as it is this flood of moonlight from which the Dwe

eefe. "Do you mean to say you think that

ractically all the slower vibrations we call red and infra-red, while the extremely rapid vibrations we call the violet and ultra-violet are accelerated and altered. Many scientists hold that there is a

the moon becomes something entirely different from mere modified sunlight-just as the addition or subtraction of one ot

There would be nothing scientifically improbable in such a process. Kubalski, the great Russian physicist, produced crystalline forms exhibiting every faculty that we call vital by subjecting certain combinations of chemicals to the

hat a bunch of moonshine can handle a big woman such as you say Throckmartin's Thora was, nor a two-fisted man such as you say Throckmartin was, nor Huldricksson's wife-and I'll bet she was one of those strapping big northern women too

much irritated indeed. "What's your theory?

hing to it. 'I was lost, strayed, or stolen, Larry avick,' it'll say, 'an' I was so homesick for the old sod I wa

ing new to us and that drives you crazy-lots of kinds of gas do that. It hit the Throckmartin party on that island and they probably were all more or less delirious all the time; thought they saw things; talked it over and-collective hallucination-just

s the child and jumps over. Maybe the moon rays make it luminous! I've seen gas on the front under the moon that looked like a thousand whirling dervi

me I was

re right or I am right, I must go to th

ave word at Ponape, to tell them where I am should they come along. If they report me dead for a while there's nobody to ca

ht have Larry O'Keefe with me, was

called attention to this remarkable belief in an article printed not long ago in the Atlantic Monthly. Still more signifi