The Country of the Blind

And now to tell of the queerest thing of all.  About two years after his cure I dined with the Davidsons, and after dinner a man named Atkins called in.  He is a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and a pleasant, talkative man.  He was on friendly terms with my brother-in-law, and was soon on friendly terms with me.  It came out that he was engaged to Davidson’s cousin, and incidentally he took out a kind of pocket photograph case to show us a new rendering of his fiancée.  “And, by-the-by,” said he, “here’s the old Fulmar.”

Davidson looked at it casually.  Then suddenly his face lit up.  “Good heavens!” said he.  “I could almost swear——­”

“What?” said Atkins.

“That I had seen that ship before.”

“Don’t see how you can have.  She hasn’t been out of the South Seas for six years, and before then——­”

“But,” began Davidson, and then, “Yes—­that’s the ship I dreamt of; I’m sure that’s the ship I dreamt of.  She was standing off an island that swarmed with penguins, and she fired a gun.”

“Good Lord!” said Atkins, who had now heard the particulars of the seizure.  “How the deuce could you dream that?”

And then, bit by bit, it came out that on the very day Davidson was seized, H.M.S. Fulmar had actually been off a little rock to the south of Antipodes Island.  A boat had landed overnight to get penguins’ eggs, had been delayed, and a thunderstorm drifting up, the boat’s crew had waited until the morning before rejoining the ship.  Atkins had been one of them, and he corroborated, word for word, the descriptions Davidson had given of the island and the boat.  There is not the slightest doubt in any of our minds that Davidson has really seen the place.  In some unaccountable way, while he moved hither and thither in London, his sight moved hither and thither in a manner that corresponded, about this distant island. How is absolutely a mystery.

That completes the remarkable story of Davidson’s eyes.  It’s perhaps the best authenticated case in existence of real vision at a distance.  Explanation there is none forthcoming, except what Professor Wade has thrown out.  But his explanation invokes the Fourth Dimension, and a dissertation on theoretical kinds of space.  To talk of there being “a kink in space” seems mere nonsense to me; it may be because I am no mathematician.  When I said that nothing would alter the fact that the place is eight thousand miles away, he answered that two points might be a yard away on a sheet of paper, and yet be brought together by bending the paper round.  The reader may grasp his argument, but I certainly do not.  His idea seems to be that Davidson, stooping between the poles of the big electro-magnet, had some extraordinary twist given to his retinal elements through the sudden change in the field of force due to the lightning.

He thinks, as a consequence of this, that it may be possible to live visually in one part of the world, while one lives bodily in another.  He has even made some experiments in support of his views; but, so far, he has simply succeeded in blinding a few dogs.  I believe that is the net result of his work, though I have not seen him for some weeks.  Latterly I have been so busy with my work in connection with the Saint Pancras installation that I have had little opportunity of calling to see him.  But the whole of his theory seems fantastic to me.  The facts concerning Davidson stand on an altogether different footing, and I can testify personally to the accuracy of every detail I have given.