Alizzed re-threads the to read tread of that thread

Page 167

There was the thread, the thread you see, and she followed it. Curdie, no that was a boy, Curdie and the thread, the good boy, he got her through. Or there was a fall of rock and it was buried, she had to scrabble with her hands and they never got them out those people trapped underneath when the earthquake collapsed the buildings. I can remember the man with his bare hands, they were bare, raw, that's it, skinned - but it must have been a pic-ture of course.

But the thread was there, sometimes - he was losing it, losing his thought.

Yes, that was the way the thread went, it came and went, elu- sive as thought - now it flashed into focus, now he had it, him sitting reading to his little girl - but he can't have had that book as a child, he hadn't had that sort of childhood.

Thinking about the thread, the idea, myth of the thread was a good way to get you applying yourself, persisting, and he had, hadn't he, he'd gone on searching with his dog in the rubble long after the others had given up.

So that thinking, which he'd thought he'd come to as a solid thing like chipping away shale and muck to get at a bit of core, a thing like a lump of coal, usable, source of energy, so that it didn't matter what you thought, it was a rope ladder to get you across somewhere, get you through the mess, something you pretended, no, not pretended - made up? - to be doing to give a reason for going on. Made up. Ah perhaps something you made, engineered, he'd like it when they called him Monsieur l'lngenieur, ingenious. Not for a reason - you don't need a reason for going on, you need a road, a way, ah yes a means. A way of going. That was tautology. You could just say 'a way'.

'Tell Alice' (you think I don't know she's dead, he heard his crafty thought within his head and in the same flash behaved as if he didn't), 'keep her fingers on the golden thread.' If it's all a fancy, if there isn't something that's true, then there isn't untrue and you were back where you were. He was getting there, getting down that path and this time he would get there, he could still breathe he could still tell them even though they couldn't move the rock off him.

If there isn't anything that's true, the opposite of true was false. But it couldn't be false because you can't have an opposite to some- thing that doesn't exist. Though what about negative numbers?

Page 7

"...There were formerly two other letters, representing numbers 90 and 900, but they became obsolete in literature, retained only as numer-cal symbols. Another letter, the digamma of value 6, also fell out of use and was replaced..."

"Thus the value in Gematria of..." "...a cross is either

The number of the beast in Revelation 13..." "...= 666..."

Jesus, has the number 888. By the conventions of gematria one unit, known as a colel, may be added to or subtracted from the value of any word without affecting its symbolic meaning. Thus'..." "778, Church of God, is equivalent by gematria to..." "..777. "

"These triple numbers, such as 111, 666, etc., all mutiples of 37, are of particular significance in gematria, and in the dimensions of temples. The plan of Noah's Ark in Genesis 6.15 measures 300 x 50 cubits which, if the royal cubit of 1.72 feet is the appropriate unit is equal to 4440 square feet. 444 is the number of..." "...flesh and blood (1 Cor. 15.50). 37 x 64 = 2368 which is the number of the Christian holy name'..." "...Jesus Christ, occurring / Page 8 / several times in New Testament gematria including fo example, the passage ( John 15.1) where Jesus announces his divinity

"I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman,'

The interpretation by gematria of this sentence is

The true vine,..."                      "...= 558
(my father the husbandman,..." "...= 1810
                                               "...= 2368       

Page 23

"In the course of the following chapters we shall examine a certain way of thought which in some ages is considered as the justification for human existence, in others as an aspect of madness, for ideas, being emanations of the gods, follow a cyclical career and their influence waxes and wanes accordingly. The attraction of this philosophy is that it professes to interpret a wide and varied range of phenomena by means of a few simple laws, which are those of natural growth and movement. Its masters are both mystics and logicians, insisting that nothing be accepted as true that can not be proved so in two ways: by reason and poetic intuition. These two criteria are brought to-gether through the medium of geometry and musical harmony, arts which are founded on rational principles yet may also be appreciated directly by the senses." The last occasion on which this way of thought achieved any great influence was at the start of the Piscean age which coincided with the rise of Christianity; the history of the last 2000 years records its suppression and gradual decline."

Page 24

Yet 2000 years ago it was believed that the secret of the elemental science, by which the forces in nature may be recognised and controlledcontrolledcontrolled,was at last returning. The decaying fabric of the old world, finally destroyed by the legions, had been replaced by a new order, formed after the military and commercial image of Rome. It was naturally understood by the scholars and initiates of Alexandria that this unbalanced situation would inevitably bring forth opposition to the imperial power, which they identified with the principle bearing the number 666. This opposition would take the form of a prophetic revival at the instigation of the earth spirit,.." "...whose number, 1080, represents the antithesis of 666. At the same time the sun was entering Pisces, and it was reckoned that the appearance of a new sun god in conjunction with the upsurge of the terrestrial spirit would introduce a fresh epoch in sacred history.

The portents associated with the end of an era had long been apparent. The uncertain state of the world had created a renewed nterest in the hermetic philosophy and the mysteries of initiation. People had taken to withdrawing from the cities and founding lonely communities in search of a new approach to life, and among the many prophets and teachers of the time were several of whom it was claimed that they were the Messiahs of the age.

The great event took place probably at Alexandria in the shape of / Page 25 / a birth long awaited by the astrologers. The reborn spirit was that of an ancient system of knowledge which, even in the time of Plato some 500 years earlier, had already been generally forgotten outside the hermetic schools of Egypt. The essence of this tradition, which consists ultimately of a mathematical demonstration of cosmic law, is so elusive, that it can only be grasped at certain times, when the influences of the age are favourable to vision and prophecy. Yet even though it may vanish for generations and appear to have be-come lost for ever, the tradition is always revived, for its spores are deeply embedded in human nature, and the truth to which it refers is constant and unique.

Although it is known as the hermetic or secret tradition, its ma-terial content has never been hidden from anyone who felt inclinedto study it. There are no esoteric schemes of geometry, no secret laws of mathematics, lost chords or musical harmonies which may not be discovered by searching. A profound scholarship in the various indi-vidual arts and sciences is open to whoever cares to achieve it without the necessity for any mystical initiation. The sum of all that has ever been discovered about the physical nature of the universe may be aquired through application and the use of reason. 

However, there comes a stage in the work of every mature scientist and philosopher when the language of ordinary communication is no longer adequate to express certain aspects of his subject, of which he has become intuitively, but nonetheless certainly, aware. The disadvantage of the analytical approach is that it artificially isolates phenomena which are, like all else in nature, relative, having no individual significance other than in terms of the system to which they belong. The study of systems and of the laws which determine the relationships within and among the various classes of phenomena was therefore the chief concern of the ancient philosophers, and for this purpose they made use of a metaphysical, numerical language, ser-viceable in every department of science. This language may be dis-cerned in the foundations of all great philosophies and religions of antiquity, including Christianity. Its expression varied according to the national characteristics of its adepts, but its numerical basis was everywhere identical. By means of this language it is possible to identify areas of reality normally beyond investigation, to extend logic into the realm of intuition and to activate parts of the mind otherwise dormant. Einstein experienced the need for it when he warned his students that it was necessary to follow their intuition in order to understand his cosmology; Jung also when he wrote that only a poet could appreciate his work. Both these masters were / Page 26 / impeded in their attempts to share their revelation with others for lack of a precise metaphysical language to guide the thoughts of their pupils towards a personal realisation of the same truth.

The visionary quest for a simple formula to express the one creative process that governs the entire range of cosmic motion is now gener-ally regarded as the chimera of an earlier, more credulous age. Yet, even though it may appear to have no reasonable justification, the vision of a comprehensive world system remains an eternal poetic truth, an infallible stimulus to the imagination and thus a potential influence in human affairs. In former times, when little distinction was made between the physical and the psychological needs of a healthy society, the natural human longing for a true understanding of the cosmic order as the model for a perfectly harmonious way of life was more generally appreciated. The most cherished possession of every race was its sacred canon of cosmology, embodied in the native laws, customs, legends, symbols and architecture as well as in the ritual of everyday life. The inner secrets of this life giving tradi-tion were preserved in the principal temple which both sheltered and displayed the sacred canon; for the temple was itself a canonical work, a model of the national cosmology and thus of the social and psychic structure of the people.

The functions and attributes of the temple were so numerous, that they may only be summarised in the ancient concept of the temple as a living organism having both body and spirit. The body was that of God the macrosm, for its form and dimensions were determined by reference to the structure of the heavens; but it was also the body of a man, the same set of proportions being found applicable on each scale. The ritual varying with the seasons and cycles, provided the spirit and transformed a symbol which has no life of its own but contains a vast living potential, into an instrument of light and fertility that illuminated the entire nation..

The temple was also the seat of government, and everything that took place there was understood to have a direct influence on the life of the people. It was therefore a matter of the greatest concern that the ritual observances should follow the cosmic rhythm, for if the temple fell out of tune with the times, if the rulers became insensitive to the current forces or failed to preserve harmonious relationships among themselves, the same defects would appear throughout society, A rational explanation of this belief in the wide efficacy of acts per-formed at the sacred centre is provided by Lord Raglan, who in The Temple and the house derives the origins of the feudal mannerhouse, the palace of the local lord, from the ancient cosmic temple: 'All new / Page 27 / features start in the palaces and spread to the cottages; they start in the capitals and spread to the provinces; they start in the centres of civilisation and spread to the wilds..."

  " This may represent an extreme aristocratic view of the natural order, but it comes of a far deeper understanding of human society, which is inevitably hierarchical, than is revealed in the most ingen-ious utopias of egalitarian world improvers. It was formerly reckoned that since every system must have its sun and every society its king, it were better that the royal prerogative be sanctified, defined and limited by law, than that it be usurped by whatever gang leader might aquire the power to do so. However, the significance of the temple was not merely social and political: its chief function was as the local power station, the generator of a current which obviated the need for any further technological contrivance. The considera-tions behind the plan and position of the temple were astronomical, geometrical and numerical, and they were also geological, for the site of the temple was decided by reference to the field of terrestrial magnetism and located where the fusion between the earth current and the forces of cosmic radiation would naturally occur.

Of the Temple at Jerusalem, the mystical centre of the Jews, Dr Raphael Patai writes in his book Man and the Temple:

'Nor was the cosmic significance of the Temple exhausted with the light that emanated from it. In the middle of the Temple and con-stituting the floor of the Holy of Holies, was a huge native rock which was adorned by Jewish legends with the peculiar features of an Omphalos, a Navel of the Earth. This rock called in Hebrew Ebhen Shetiyyah, the Stone of Foundation, was the first solid thing created, and was placed by God amidst the as yet boundless fluid of the pri-meval waters. Legend has it that just as the body of an embryo is built up in its mother's womb from its navel, so God built up the earth concentrically around this Stone, the Navel of the Earth. And just as the body of the embryo recieves its nourishment from this Navel.'

The invariable practice in antiquity of locating sacred buildings immediately above underground springs and watercourses, as at the Temple of Jerusalem, constitutes one of the greatest mysteries of the past, for evidently some principal was involved of which we are now totally unaware. It is a fact, however, that the feeling which comes to many sensitive people at ancient ritual sites, that they are standing on ground which is in some way inherantly sacred, accords with the experiences of dowsers or water diviners, who detect underground /

Page 28 / springs beneath every old church and the sites of prehistoric stones. Further information on this subject has recently been provided by the dowser Guy Underwood, in his book The pattern of the past, in which he shows that the groundplans of churches and temples are in some way related to the pattern of underground water beneath them. Yet in accordance with the remarkable unity between the symbol, the thing symbolised, and the spirit behind them both, that charac-terises the omphalos or sacred centre, the actual existence of underground water was seen as a token that the spiritual water was seen as a token that the spiritual water the stimulus to prophetic inspiration, would also be present at the spot. And it was this quality that rendered the site of the Temple peculiarly suitable as the centre of the nation, the oracle and seat of government. For at that place the priests and governors would be most susceptible to the spiritual influences, and find a supernatural guidance in their conduct and decisions."

At this point the account of wah Brother Michell, held itself in humble abeyance, whilst, as if out of nowhere, the esteemed words of wah Brothers, Lethbridge and Wilson gave common voice.

Strange Talents Editor Peter Brooksmith 1984

Author Colin Wilson. A seeker after truth

Page 16 "NO ONE WHO is interested in the paranormal can afford to ignore Tom Lethbridge, yet when he died in a nursing home in Devon in 1971, his name was hardly known to the general public. Today, many of his admirers believe that he is the single most important name in the history of psychical research his ideas on dowsing, life after death, ghosts, poltergeists, magic, second-site precog-nation, the nature of time, cover a wider field than those of any other psychical researcher. Moreover, they fit together into the most exciting and comprehensive theory of the 'occult' ever advanced.

. These ideas were expressed in a series of small books published in the last 10 years of his life. The odd thing is that Lethbridge took no interest in psychic matters until he retired to Devon in his mid fifties. He was trained as an archaeologist and a historian and spent most of his adult life in Cambridge as the Keeper of Anglo-Saxon Antiquities at the University Museum. Together with his wife Mina he moved into Hole House, an old Tudor mansion on the south coast of Devon. He ment to spend his retirement reading and digging for bits of broken pottery. In fact, the most amazing period of his eventual life was about to begin.

. The person who was most responsible for the change of direction was an old witch who lived next door. This white haired little old lady assure Lethbridge that she could put mild spells on people who annoyed her, and that she was able to leave her body at night and wander around the district - an ability known as 'astral projection' Lethbridge was naturally sceptical - until something convinced him."

At this point, after the words 'astral projection'. Zed Aliz Zed said, here you are scribe, perchance to dream, one of those delightful coincidences that never was, provided by that good wah brother of all our sisters, our man Thomas.

Page 150

"...I could stand it no longer, I shook their dust from off my feet and I bolted."

. "You raised your flag and took to your heels," Frau Stohr stated.

. "Precisely," shouted Settembrini. "I fled with my flag. Ah, what an apt phrase! I see I have come to the right place; nobody else here knows how to coin phrases like that. - May I be permitted to enquire after the state of your health, Frau Stohr?

      It was frightful to see Frau Stohr preen herself.

. "Good land!" she said. " "It is always the same, you know your-self two steps forward and three back. When you have been sit-ting here five months, along comes the old man and tucks on an-other six. It is like the torment of Tantalus : you shove and shove, and think you are getting to the top -"

. "Ah how delightful of you, to give poor old Tantalus a new job, and let him roll the stones uphill for a change! I call that true benevolence. - But what are these mysterious reports I have been hearing of you, Frau Stohr? There are tales going about - tales about doubles, astral bodies, and the like. Up to now I have lent them no credence - but this latest story puzzles me, I confess."

. "I know you are poking fun at me."

. " Not for an instant. I beg you to set my mind at rest about this dark side of your life; after that it will be time to jest. Last night between half past nine and ten, I was taking a little exercise in the garden; I looked up at the row of balconies; there was your light gleaming through the dark; you were performing your cure, led by the dictates of duty and reason. 'Ah,' thought I, ' there lies our charming invalid, obeying the rules of the house, for the sake of an early return to the arms of her waiting husband.' - And now what do I hear? That you were seen at that very hour at the Kur-haus, in the cinematografo" (Herr Settembrini gave the word the Italian pronounciation, with the accent on the fourth syllbable) and afterwards in the cafe, enjoying punch and kisses, and - afterwards in the cafe, enjoying punch and kisses, and -"

. Frau Stohr wriggled and giggled into serviette, nudged Joa-chim and the silent Dr Blumenkohl in the ribs, winked with coy confidingness, and altogether gave a perfect exhibition of fatuous complacency. She was in the habit of leaving the light burning on her balcony and stealing off to seek distraction in the quarter be-low. Her husband, meanwhile, in Cannstadt, awaited her return /

Page 151 / She was not the only patient who practised this duplicity.

. And went on Settembrini, "that you were enjoying those kisses in the company of - whom, do you think? In the company of - whom, do you think? In the company of Captain Miklosich from Bucharest. They say he wears a corset - but that is little to the point. I conjur you, madame, to tell me! Have you a double? Was it your earthly part which lay there alone on your balcony, while your spirit revelled below, with Captain Miklosich and his kisses?"

. Frau Stohr wreathed and bridled as though she were being tickled.

"One asks oneself, had it not been better the other way about," Settembrini went on; "you enjoying the kisses by yourself, and the rest-cure with Captain Miklosich - "

"Tehee!" tittered Frau Stohr."

Page 467 "Glossary

 astral body. Mans subtle body of light, prana or lifetrons, the second of three sheaths that successively encase the soul: the causal body (qv), the astral body, and the physical body. The powers of the as-tral body enliven the physical body, much as electricity illumines a bulb The astral body has nineteen elements: intelligence, ego, feel-ing mind (sense - consciousness); five instruments of knowledge (the sensory powers within the physical organs of sight, hearing, smell , taste, and touch); five instruments of action (the executive powers in the physical instruments of procreation, excretion, speech, locomotion, and the exercise of manual skill); and five in-struments of life force that perform the functions of circulation, metabolization, assimilation, crystallization, and elimination."

At this point in time and, you may think, not before time. That very far yonder scribe asked Alizzed "What is the point of all that." You will just have to wait and C C C see, scribe, said Zed Aliz.

Strange Talents Editor Peter Brooksmith 1984

Author Colin Wilson.

A seeker after truth

..."Lethbridge's neighbour, a 'witch' or 'wise woman' whose strange powers' convinced Lethbridge that the world of the paranormal was worth investigating..."

The witch explained to him one day how she managed to put off unwanted visitors. What she did was to draw a five pointed star - a pentagram - in her head, and then visualise it across the path of the unwanted visitor - for example on the front gate.

Shortly afterwards, Tom was lying in bed, idly drawing pentagrams in his head, and imagining them around their beds. In the middle of the night, Mina woke up with a creepy feeling that there was somebody else in the room. At the foot of the bed, she could see a faint glow of light, which slowly faded as she watched it. The next day, the witch came to see them. When she told them that she had 'visited' their bedroom on the pre-vious night, and found the beds surrounded by triangles of fire, Tom's sceptism began to evaporate. Mina politely requested the old witch to stay out of their bedroom at night.

Three years later, the old lady died in peculiar circumstances. She was quarrelling with a neighbouring farmer, and told Leth-bridge that she intended to put a spell on the man's cattle. By this time Lethbridge knew enough about the 'occult' to take her serious-ly, and he warned her about the dangers of black magic - how it could rebound on to the witch. But the old lady ignored his advice. One morning, she was found dead in her bed in circumstances that made the police suspect murder. And the cattle of two nearby farms suddenly got foot and mouth disease. However, the farmer she wanted to 'ill wish' remained unaffected. Lethbridge was convinced that the spell had gone wrong and 'bounced back'

 Page 17 The invisible world

But the old lady's death resulted - indirectly - in one of his most important insights. Passing the witch's cottage, he experienced a 'nasty feeling', a suffocating sense of dep-ression. With a scientist's curiousity, he walked around the cottage, and noticed an interest-ing thing. He could step into the depression and then out of it again, just as if it was some kind of an invisible wall.

The depression reminded Lethbridge of something that had happened when he was a teenager. He and his mother had gone for a walk in the Great Wood near Wokingham. It was a lovely morning; yet quite suddenly both of them experienced 'a horrible feeling of gloom and depression, which crept upon us like a blanket of fog over the surface of the sea'. They hurried away, agreeing that it was something terrible and inexplicable. Afew days later, the corpse of a suicide was found a few yards from the spot where they had been standing, hidden by some bushes.

About a year after the death of the witch, another strange experience gave Tom the clue he was looking for. On a damp January afternoon, he and Mina drove down to Ladram Bay to collect seaweed for her gar-den. As Lethbridge stepped on to the beach, he once again experienced the feeling of gloom and fear, like a blanket of fog descend-ing upon him. Mina wandered off along the beach while Tom filled the sacks with sea-weed. Suddenly she came hurrying back, saying: 'Let's go. I can't stand this place a minute longer. There's something frightful here.'

The next day, they mentioned what had happened to Mina's brother he said he also had experienced the same kind of thing in a field near Avebury, in Wiltshire. The word 'field' made something connect in Tom's brain- he remembered that field telephones often short-circuit in warm, muggy weather. 'What was the weather like?' he asked. 'Warm and damp, said the brother.

An idea was taking shape. Water. . . .could that be the key? It had been warm and damp on Ladram beach. The following weekend, they set out for Ladram Bay a second time. Again, as they stepped on to the beach, both walked into the same bank of depression - or 'ghoul' as Lethbridge called it. Mina led Tom to the far end of the beach, to the place she had been sitting when she had been overwhelmed by the strange feel-ing. Here it was so strong that it made them feel giddy - Lethbridge described it as the feeling you get when you had a high tem-perature and are full of drugs. On either side of them were two small streams.

Mina wandered off to look at the scenery from the top of the cliff. Suddenly, she walked into the depression again. Moreover, she had an odd feeling, as if someone - or something - was urging her to jump over. She went and fetched Tom, who agreed that the spot was just as sinister as the place down on the seashore below.

Now he needed only one more piece of the jigsaw puzzle, and he found it - but only years later. Nine years after the first known experiences of depression were felt on those cliffs a man did commit suicide there. Lethbridge wondered whether the 'ghoul' was a feeling so intense that it had become timeless and imprinted itself on the area, casting its baleful shadow on those who stood there.

Whether from the past or from the future the feelings of despair were 'recorded' on the surroundings - but how?

The key, Lethbridge believed, was water. As an archaeologist, he had always been mildly interested in dowsing and water - divining. The dowser walks along with a forked hazel twig held in his hands, and when he stands above running water, the muscles in his hands and arms convulse and the twig bends either up or down. How does it work? Professor Y Rocard of the Sorbonne dis-covered that underground water produces changes in the earth's magnetic field and that is what the dowser's muscles respond to. The water does this because it has a field of its own, which interacts with the earth's field.

Significantly, magnetic fields are the means by which sound is recorded on tape covered with iron oxide. Suppose the magnetic field of running water can also record strong emotions - which after all, are basi-cally electrical activities in the human brain and body? such fields could well be strongest in damp and muggy weather.

 Page 24 Gateway To Other Worlds

"In 1962, FIVE YEARS AFTER his move to Devon, Tom Lethbridge's ideas on ghosts, 'ghouls', pendulums and dowsing rods began to crystallise into a coherent theory, which he outlined in a book called Ghost and divining rod. This appeared in 1963 and it aroused more interest than anything he had published so far. It deserved to be so popular, for its central theory was orginal, exiting and well argued.

He suggested that nature generates fields of static electricity in certain places, par-ticularly near running water. These 'fields' are capable of picking up and recording the thoughts and feelings of human beings and other living creatures. But human beings are also surrounded by a mild electrical field, as the researches of Harold Burr of Yale Uni-versity in the United States revealed in the 1930s. So if someone goes into a room where a murder has taken place and experiences a distictly unpleasasant feeling, all that is happening is that the emotions associated with the crime (such as fear, pain and horror) are being transferred to the visitor's electrical field, in accordance with the laws of elect-ricity. If we are feeling full of energy, excite-ment, misery or anger, the emotional trans-ference may flow the other way, and our feelings will be recorded on the field.

'But if human emotions can be imprinted in some way on the 'field' of running water, and picked up by a dowser, then this world we are living in is a far more strange and complex place than most people give credit for. To begin with, we must be surrounded by hidden information - in the form of these 'tape recordings' - that might become ac-cessible to al of us if we could master the art of using the dowser's pendulum.

It looks - says Lethbridge - as if human beings possess 'psyche fields' as well as bodies. The body is simply a peice of ap-paratus for collecting impressions, which are then stored in the psyche-field. But in that case, there would seem to be part of us that seeks the information. Presumably this is what religious people call the spirit. And since the information it can aquire through the pendulum may come from the remote past, or from some place on the other side of the world, then this spirit must be outside the limits of space and time.

It was this last idea that excited Lethbridge so much. His experiments with the pendulum seemed to indicate that there are other worlds beyond this one, perhaps worlds in other dimensions. Presumably we cannot see them - although they co-exist with our world - because our bodies are rather crude machines for picking up low-level vibrations. But the psyche field - or perhaps the spirit - seems to have access to those other invisible worlds.

Page 23 Secrets of the 'other you'

Tom lethbridge's own explanation of this strange 'power of the pendulum' Is that there is a part of the human mind - the uncons-cious, perhaps - that knows the answers to all questions. Unfortunately it cannot convey these answers to the 'everyday you', the busy, conscious self that spends its time coping with practical problems. But this 'other you' can convey its message via the dowsing rod or pendulum by the simple expedient of controlling the muscles.

Lethbridge had started as a cheerfully sceptical investigator trying to understand nature's hidden codes for conveying information . His researches led him into strange, bewildering realms where all his normal ideas seemed to be turned upside down. He compared himself to a man walking on ice, when it suddenly collapses and he finds himself floundering in freezing water. Of this sudden immersion in new ideas he said: 'From living a normal in a three- dimensional world, I seem to have suddenly fallen through into one where there are more dimensions. The three dimensional life goes on as usual; but one has to adjust one's thinking to the other.' "

Page 25 "...Lethbridge had always been interested in dreams, ever since he read J. W. Dunne's An experiment with time in the 1930's" "...Lethbridge speculated that during sleep, a part of us passes through this world to a still higher world still. Coming back from sleep we pass through it once again to enter our own much slower world of vibrations."

Page 27 "...The more he studied these puzzles, the more convinced Lethbridge became that the key to all of them is the concept of vibrations. Our bodies seem to be machines tuned to pick up certain vibrations. Our eyes will only register energy whose wavelength is between that of red and violet light. Shorter or longer wavelengths are invisible to us. Modern Physics tells us that at the sub- atomic level matter is in a state of constant vibration.

Diagram and photographs omitted

"...the spectrum of electromagnetic (EM) vibrations. EM waves consist of electric and magnetic fields vibrating with a definite frequency, each corresponding to a particular wavelength in order of increasing frequency and decreasing wavelength, the EM spectrum consists of : very long wave radio, used for communication with submarines; long, medium and short wave radio (used for AM broadcasting); FMradio, television and radar; infra-red (heat) radiation, which is recorded in the Earth photographs taken by survey satellites; visible light; ultraviolet light, which, while invisible, stimulates fluorescence in some materials; X- rays; and high energy gamma rays, which occur in fall out and in cosmic rays. The progressive discovery of these waves has inspired speculations concerning unknown 'vibrations' making up our own and higher worlds"

Worlds beyond worlds

According to Lethbridge's pendulum, the 'world' beyond our world - the world that can be detected by a pendulum of more than 40 inches - consists of vibrations that are four times as fast as ours. It is all around us yet we are able to see it, because it is beyond the range of our senses. All the objects in our world extend into this other world. Our personalities also extend into it, but we are not aware of this, because our 'everyday self' has no communication with that 'other self'. But the other self can answer questions by means of the pendulum."

"...Lethbridge's insistence on rediscovering the ancient art of dowsing also underlined his emphasis on understanding the differences between primitive and modern Man. The ancient peoples- going back to our caveman ancestors - believed that the Universe is magical and that Earth is a living creature. They were probably natural dowsers - as the aborigines of australia still are - and res-ponded naturally to the forces of the earth. Their standing stones were, according to Lethbridge, intended to mark places where the earth force was most powerful and perhaps to harness it in some way now forgotten.

  Modern Man has suppressed - or lost that instinctive, intuitive contact with the forces of the Universe. He is two busy keeping together his precious civilisation Yet he still potentially possesses that ancient power of dowsing, and could really develop it if he really wanted to. Lethbridge set out to develop his own powers, and to explore them scientifically, and soon came to the conclu-sion that the dowsing rod and the pendulum are incredibly accurate. By making use of some unknown part of the mind - the un-conscious or 'superconscious' - they can provide information that is inaccessible to our ordinary senses, and can tell us about realms of reality beyond the 'everyday' world of physical matter.

Lethbridge was not a spiritualist. He never paid much attention to the question of life after death or the existence of a 'spirit world'. But by pursuing his researches into these subjects with a tough - minded logic, he concluded that there are other realms of reality beyond our world, and that there are forms of energy we do not even begin to understand. Magic, spiritualism and occult-ism are merely our crude attempts to under-stand this vast realm of hidden energies, just as alchemy was Man's earliest attempt to understand the mysteries of atomic physics.

As to the meaning of all this, Lethbridge preserves the caution of an academic. Yet in his last years he became increasingly con-vinced that there is a meaning in human existence. and that it is tied up with the concept of our personal evolution. For some reason we are being driven to evolve.

With a bow, instead of a wob those twa brothers, and one sister being caught fast, rainbowed out and in order not to lose that golden thread of threads. Alizzed here re-introduced that beloved Mann, Castorp.

         THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
 Thomas Mann 1924
 Humaniora

Page 251 " HANS CASTORP and Joachim Ziernssen, arrayed in white trouse and blue blazers, were sitting in the garden after 
dinner. It was another of those much-lauded October days: bright without be-ing heavy, hot and yet with a tang in the air. The sky 
above the vally was a deep southern blue and the pastures beneath, widt the cattle tracks running across and across them, still a
lively green. From the rugged slopes came the sound of cowbells; the peacefu, simple, melodious tintinnabulation came floating 
unbroken through the quiet, thin, empty air, enhancing the mood of solemnity that broods over the valley heights.

The cousins were sitting on a bench at the end of the garden, in front of a semi-circle of young firs. The small open space lay at the north-west of the hedged-in platform, which rose some fifty yards above the valley, and formed the foundations of the Berghof building. They were silent. Hans Castorp was smoking. He was also wrangling inwardly with Joachim, \\lho had not wanted to join the society on the verandah after luncheon, and had drawn his cousin against his will into the stillness and seclusion of the garden, until such time as they should go up to their balconies. That was behaving like a tyrant - when it came to that, they were not Siamese twins, it was possible for them to separate, if their inclinations took them in opposite directions. Hans Castorp was not up here to be company for Joachim, he was a patient hiinself.

Page 252

Thus he grumbled on, and could endure to grumble, for had he not Maria? He sat, his hands in his blazer pockets, his feet in brown shoes stretched out before him, and held the long, greyish cigar between his lips, precisely in the centre of his mouth, and droop- ing a little. It was in the first stages of consumption, he had not yet knocked off the ash from its blunt tip; its aroma was pec-uliarly grateful after the heavy meal just enjoyed. It might be true that in other respects getting used to life up here had mainly consisted in getting used to not getting used to it. But for the chemistry of his digestion, the nerves of his mucous membrane, which had been parched and tender, inclined to bleeding, it seemed that the process of adjustment had completed itself. For imperceptibly, in the course of these nine or ten weeks, his organic satisfaction in that excellent brand of vegetable stimulant or narcotic had been entirely restored. He rejoIced in a faculty regained, his mental satisfaction heightened the physical. During his time in bed he had saved on the supply of two hundred cigars which he had brought with him, and some of these were still left; but at the same time with his winter clothing from below, there had arrived another five hundred of the Bremen make, which he had ordered through Schalleen to make quite sure of not running out. They came in beautiful little varnished boxes, ornamented in gilt with a globe, several medals, and an exhibition building with a flag floating above it.

As they sat, behold, there came Hofrat Behrens through the garden. He had taken his midday meal in the dining-hall to-day, folding his gigantic hands before his place at Frau Salomon's table. After that he had probably been on the terrace, making the suitable personal remark to each and everybody, very likely displaying his trick with the bootlaces for such of the guests as had not seen it. Now he came lounging through the garden, wear- ing a check tail-coat, instead of his smock, and his stiff hat on the back of his head. He too had a cigar in his mouth, a very black one, from which he was puffing great white clouds of smoke. His head and face, with the over-heated purple cheeks, the snub nose, watery blue eyes, and little clipped moustache, looked small in proportjon to the lank, rather warped and stooping figure, and the enormous hands and feet. He was nervous; visibly started when he saw the cousins, and seemed embarrassd over the neces-sity of passing them. But he greeted them in his usual picturesque and expansive fashion, with "Behold, behold, Timotheus! " go- ing on to invoke the usual blessings on their metabolisms, while / Page 253 / he prevented their rising from their seats, as they would have done in his honour.

"Sit down, sit down. No formalities with a simple man like me. Out of place too, you being my patients, both of you. Not necessary. No objection to the status quo," and he remained stand- ing before them, holding the cigar between the index and middle fingers of his great right hand.

" How's your cabbage-leaf, Castorp? Let me see, I'm a connois-seur. That's a good ash - what sort of brown beauty have you there? "

"Maria Mancini, Postre de Banquett, Bremen, Herr Hofrat. Costs little or nothing, nineteen pfennigs in plain colours - but a bouquet you don't often come across at the price. Sumatra-Havana wrapper, as you see. I am very wedded to them. It is a medium mixture, very fragrant, but cool on the tongue. Suits it to leave the ash long, I don't knock it off more than a couple of times. She has her whims, of course, has Maria; but the inspection must be very thorough, for she doesn't vary much, and draws perfectly even May I offer you one? "

" Thanks, we can exchange." And they drew out their cases.

"There's a thorough-bred for you," the Hofrat said, as he displayed his brand. " Temperament, you know, juicy, got some guts to it. St. Felix, Brazil- I've always stuck to this sort. Regu-lar 'begone, dull care,' burns like brandy, has something ful- minating toward the. end. But you need to exercise a little cau- tion - can't light one from the other, you know - more th:tn a fellow can stand. However, better one good mouthful than any amount of nibbles."

They twirled their respective offerings between their fingers, felt connoisseur-like thc slender shapes that possessed, or so one might think, some organic quality of life, with their ribs fonned by the diagonal parallel edges of the raised, here and tbere porous wrapper, the exposed veins that seemed to pulsate, the small in- equalities of the skin, the play of light on planes and edges.

Hans Castorp expressed it: "A cigar like that is alive- it breathes. Fact. Once, at home, I had the idea of keeping Maria in an air-tight tin box, to protect her from damp. Would you believe it, she died! Inside of a week she perished - nothing but leathery corpses left."

They exchangcd experiences upon the best way to keep cigars - particularly imported ones. The Hofrat loved them,. he would have smoked nothing but heavy Havanas, but they did not suit / Page 254 / him. He told Hans Castorp about two little Henry Clays he had once taken to his heart, in an evening company, which had come within an ace of putting him under the sod.

.. I smoked them with my coffee, " he said, and thought no more of it. But after a while it struck me to wonder how I felt - and I discovered it was like nothing on earth. I don't know how I got home - and once there, well, this time, my son, I said to myself, you're a goner. Feet and legs like ice, you know, reeking with cold sweat, white as a table-cloth, heart going all ways for Sunday - sometimes just a thread of a pulse, sometimes pounding like a trip- hammer. Cerebration phenomenal. I made sure I was going to toddle off - that is the very expression that occurred to me, be-cause at the time I was feeling as jolly as a sand-boy. Not that I wasn't in a funk as well, because I was - I was just one large blue funk all over. Still, funk and felicity aren't mutually exclusive, everybody knows that. Take a chap who's going to have a girl for the first. time in his life; he is in a funk too, and so is she, and yet both of them are simply dissolving with felicity. I. was nearly dis-solving too - my bosom swelled with pride, and there I was, on the point of toddling off; but the Mylendonk got hold of me and - suaded me it was a poor idea. She gave me a camphor injection, applied ice-compresses and friction - and here I am, saved for hu- manity ."

 The Hofrat's large, goggling blue eyes watered as he told this story. Hans Castorp, seated in his capacity of patient, looked up at
 him with an expression that betrayed mental activity.
" You paint sometimes, don't you, Herr Hofrat? " he asked suddenly.
  The Hofrat pretended to stagger backwards " W hat the deuce! What do you take me for, youngster? "
  " I beg your pardon. I happened to hear somebody say so, and it just crossed my mind."

"Well, then, 1 won't trouble to lie about it. We're all poor crea- tures. I admit such a thing has happened. Anch' io sono pittore, as the Spaniard used to say.'

" Landscape? " Hans Castorp asked him succinctly, with the air of a connoisseur, circumstances betraying him to this tone.

 " As much as you like," the Hofrat answered, swaggering out of sheer self-consciousness. " Landscape, still life, animals - chap
like me shrinks from nothing."
 
 " No portraits? "

"I've even thrown in a portrait or so. Want to give me an order?" / Page 255 / Ha ha! No, but it would be very kind of you to show us your pictures some time - we should enjoy it." Joachim looked blankly at his cousin, but then hastened to add his assurances that it would be very kind indeed of the Hofrat.

Behrens was enchanted at the flattery. He grew red with pleas- ure, his tears seemed this time actually on the point of falling.

"With the greatest pleasure," he cried. On the spot if you like. Come on, come along with me, I'll brew us a Turkish coffee in my den."

He pulled both young men from the bench and walked be-tween them arm in arm, down the gravel path which led, as they knew, to his private quarters in the north-west wing of the build- mg.

" I've dabbled a little in that sort of thing myself," Hans Castorp explained.

"You don't say! Gone in for it properly - oils? "

" Oh, no, I never went further than a water-colour or so. A ship, a sea-piece, childish efforts. But I'm fond of painting, and so I took the liberty - "

Joachim in particular felt relieved and enlightened by this ex- planation of his cousin's startling curiosity; it was in fact more on his account than on the Hofrat's that Hans Castorp had offered it. They reached the entrance, a much simpler one than the impres-sive portal on the drive, with its flanking lanterns. A pair of curv-ing steps led up to the oaken house door, which the Hofrat opened with a latch-key from his heavy bunch. His hand trembled, he was plainly in a nervous state. They entered an antechamber with clothes-racks, where Behrens hung his bowler on a hook, and thence passed into a short corridor, which was separated by a glass door from that of the main building. On both sides of this corridor lay the rooms of the small private dwelling. Behrens called a servant and gave an order; then to a running accompaniment of whimsical remarks ushered them through a door on the right.

They saw a couple of rooms furnished in banal middle-class taste, facing the valley and opening one into another through a doorway hung with portieres. One was an "old-German" din-ing-room, the other a living- and working-room, with woollen carpets, bookshelves and sofa, and a writing-table above which hung a pair of crossed swords and a student's cap. Beyond was a Turkish smoking-cabinet. Everywhere were paintings, the work of the Hofrat. The guests went up to them at once on entering, courteously ready to praise. There were several portraits of his de-parted wife, in oil; also, standing on the writing-table, photo- / Page 256 / graphs of her. She was a thin, enigmatic blonde, portrayed in flow-ing garments, with her hands, their finger-tips just lightly enlaced, against her left shoulder, and her eyes either directed toward heaven or else cast upon the ground, shaded by long, thick, ob-liquely outstanding eyelashes. Never once was the departed one shown looking directly ahead of her toward the observer. The other pictures were chiefly mountain landscapes, mountains in snow and mountains in summer green, mist-wreathed mountains, mountains whose dry, sharp outline was cut out against a deep-blue sky - these apparently under the influence of Segantini. Then there were cowherds' huts, and dewlapped cattle standing or lying in sun-drenched high pastures. There was a plucked fowl, with its long writhen neck hanging down from a table among a setting of vegetables. There were flower-pieces, types of mountain peasantry, and so on - all painted with a certain brisk dilettantism, the colours boldly dashed on to the canvas, and often looking as though they had been squeezed on out of the tube. They must have taken a long time to dry - but were sometimes effective by way of helping out the other shortcomings.

They passed as they would along the walls of an exhibition, ac-companied by the master of the house, who now and then gave a name to some subject or other, but was chiefly silent, with the proud embarrassment of the artist, tasting the enjoyment of look- ing on his own works with the eyes of strangers. The portrait of Clavdia Chauchat hung on the window wall of the living-room - Hans Castorp spied it out with a quick glance as he entered, though the likeness was but a distant one. Purposely he avoided the spot, detaining his companions in the dining-room, where he affected to admire a fresh green glimpse into the valley of the Serbi, with ice- blue glaciers in the background. Next he passed of his own accord into the Turkish cabinet, and looked at an it had to show, with praises on his lips thence back to the living-room, beginning with the entrance wall, and calling upon Joachim to second his en- comiums. But at last he turned, with a measured start, and said: "But surely that is a familiar face? "

  "You recognize her? "the Hofrat wanted to know.
  " It is not possible I am mistaken. The lady at the' good' Rus-sian table, with the French name - "
   Right! Chauchat. Glad you think it's like her."

Speaking," Hans Castorp lied. He did so less from insincerity than in the consciousness that, on the face of things, he ought not to have been able to recognize her. Joachim could never have done so - good Joachim, who saw the whole affair now in its true light, / Page 257 / after the false one Hans Castorp had first cast upon it; wool had been pulled over his eyes; and with a murmured recog-nition applied himself to help look at the painting. His cousin had paid him out for not going into society after luncheon. It was a bust-length, in half profile, rather under life size in a wide, bevelled frame, black, with an inner beading of guilt. Neck and bosom were bare or veiled with a soft drapery laid about the shoulders. Frau Chauchat appeared ten years older than her age, as often happens in amateur portraiture where the artist is bent on making a character study. There was too much red all over the face, the nose was badly out of drawing, the colour of the hair badly hit off, too straw-colour; the mouth was distorted, the pecu-liar charm of the features ungrasped or at least not, spoiled by the exaggeration of their single elements. The whole was a rather botched performance, and only distantly related to its original. But Hans Castorp was not particular about the degree of like-ness, the relation of this canvas to Frau Chauchat's person was close enough for him. It purported to represent her, in these very rooms she had sat for it, that was all he needed; much moved he reiterated:

" The very image of her! "

"Oh, no," the Hofrat demurred. "It was a pretty clumsy piece of work, I don't flatter myself I hit her off very well we had, I suppose, twenty sittings. What can you do with a rum sort of face like that? You might think she would be easy to capture, with those hyperborean cheek-bones, and eyes like cracks in a loaf of bread. Yes, there's something about her- if you get the detail right, you botch the ensemble. Riddle of the sphinx. Do you know her? It would probably be better to paint her from memory instead of having her sit. Did you say you knew her? "

" No; that is, only superficially, the way one knows people up here."

"Well, I know her under her skin - subcutaneously, blood pressure, tissue tension, lymphatic circulation, al that sort of thing. I've good reason to. It's the superficies make the difficulty. Have you ever noticed her walk? She slinks. It's character - istic, show's in her face - take the eyes, for example, not to mention the complexion, though that is tricky too. I don't mean their colour, I am speaking of the cut, and the way they s it in the faceYou'd say the eye slit was cut obliquely, but it only looks so. What deceives you is the epicanthus, a racial variation, consisting in a sort of ridge of integument that runs from the bridge of the nose to the eyelid, and comes down over the inside corner of the eye. If you take your finger and stretch the skin at the base of the nose, the / Page 258 / eye looks as straight as any of ours. Quite a taking little dodge - but as a matter of fact, the epicanthus can be traced back to an atavistic vestige - it's a. developmental arrest."

" So that's it. " Hans Castorp said. "I never knew that - but I've wondered for a long time what it is about eyes like that."

" Vanity," said the Hofrat, and vexation of spirit. If you simply draw them in slanting, you are lost. You must bring about the obliquity the same way nature does, you must add illusion to illusion - and for that you have to know about the epicanthus. What a man knows always comes in handy. Now look at the skin - the epidennis. Do you find I've managed to make it lifelike, or not? "

" Enormously," said Hans Castorp, "Simply enormously. I've never seen skin painted anything like so well. You can fairly see the pores..' And he ran the edge of his hand lightlyy over the bare neck and shoulders, the skin of which, especially by contrast with the exaggerated red of the face, was very white, as though seldom exposed. Whether this effect was premeditated or not, it was rather suggestive.

And still Hans Castorp's praise was deserved. The pale shim-mer of this tender, though not emaciated, bosom, losing itself in the bluish shadows of the drapery, was very like life. It was obvi-ously painted with feeling; a sort of sweemess emanated .from it, yet the artist had been successful in giving it a scientific realism and precision as well. The roughness of the canvas texture, show-ing through the paint, had been dexterously employed to suggest the natural unevennesses of the skin - this especially in the neigh- bourhood of the delicate collar-bones. A tiny mole, at the point where the breasts began to divide, had been done with care, and on their rounding surfaces one thought to trace the delicate blue veins. It was as though a scarcely perceptible shiver of sensibility beneath the eye of the beholder were passing over this nude flesh, as though one might see the perspiration, the invisible vapour which the life beneath threw off; as though, were one to press one's lips upon this surface, one might perceive, not the smell of paint and fixative, but the odour of the human body. Such, at least, were Hans Castorp's impressions, which we here reproduce - and he, of course, was in a peculiarly susceptible state. But it is none the less true that Frau Chauchat's portrait was by far the most telling piece of painting in the room.

Hofrat Behrens rocked back and forth on his heels and the balls of his feet, his hands in this trouser pockets, as he gazed at his work in company with the cousins. / Page 259 / " Delighted," he said. "Delighted to find favour in the eyes of a colleague. If a man knows a bit about what goes on under the epidermis, that does no harm either. In other words, if he can paint a little below the surface, and stands in another relation to nature than just the lyrical, so to say. An artist who is a doctor, physi-ologist, and anatomist on the side. and has his own little way of thinking about the under sides of things - it all comes in handy too, it gives you the pas, say what you like. That birthday suit there is painted with science. it is organically correct, you can ex-amine it under the microscope. You can see not only the horny and mucous strata of the epidermis, but I've suggested the texture of the corium underneath, with the oil- and sweat-glands, the blood-vessels and tubercles - and then under that still the layer of fat, the upholstering, you know, full of oil ducts, the underpinning of the lovely female form. What is in your mind as you work runs into your hand and has its influence - it isn't really there, and yet somehow or other it is, and that is what gives the lifelike effect."

All this was fuel to Hans Castorp's fire. His brow was flushed, his eyes fairly sparkled, he had so much to say he knew not where to begin. In the first place, he had it in mind to remove the picture of Frau Chauchat from the window wall, where it hung somewhat in shadow, and place it to better advantage; next, he was eager to take up the Hofrat's remarks about the constitution of the skin, which had keenly interested him; and finally, he wanted to make some remarks of his own, of a general and philosophical nature. which interested him no less mightily.

Laying his hands upon the painting to unhook it, he eagerly be-gan: "Yes, yes indeed, that is all very important. What I'd like to say is - I mean, you said, Herr Hofrat, if I understood rightly, you said: 'In another relation.' You said it was good when there was some other relation besides the lyric - I think that was the word you used - the artistic, that is; In short, when one looked at the thing from another point of view - the medical, for example. That's all so enormously to the point, you know -I do beg your pardon, Herr Hofrat, but what I mean is that it is so exactly and precisely right, because after all it is not a question of any funda-mentally different relations or points of view, but at bottom just variations of one and the same, just shadings of it, so to speak, I mean: variations of one and the same universal interest, the artistic impulse itself being a part and a manifestation of it too, if I may say so. Yes, if you will pardon me, I will take down this picture, there s postively no light here where it hangs, permit me to carry it over to the sofa, we shall see if it won't look entirely - what I meant to / Page 260 / say was: what is the main concern of the study of medicine? I know nothing about it, of course - but after all isn't its main con-cern with human beings? And jurisprudence - making laws, pro- nouncing judgment - its main concern is with human beings too. And philology, which is nearly always bound up with the profes- sion of pedagogy? And theology, with the care of souls, the office of spiritual shepherd? All of them have to do with human beings, all of them are degrees of one and the same important, the same fundamental interest, the interest in humanity. In other words, they are the humanistic callings, and if you go in for them you have to study the ancient languages by way of foundation, for the sake of formal training, as they say. Perhaps you are surprised at my talk-ing about them like that, being only a practical man and on the technical side. But I have been thinking about these questions lately, m the rest-cure; and I find it wonderful, I find it a simply priceless arrangement of things, that the formal, the idea of form, of beautiful form, lies at the bottom of every sort of humanistic calling. It gives it such nobility, I think, such a sort of disinterested- ness, and feeling, too, and - and - courtliness - it makes a kind of chivalrous adventure out of it. That is to say - I suppose I am ex-pressing myself very ridiculously, but - you can see how the things of the mind and the love of beauty come together, and that they always really have been one and the same - in other words, science and art; and that the calling of being an artist surely belongs with the others, as a sort of fifth faculty, because it too is a humanistic calling, a variety of humanistic interest, in so far as its most im-portant theme or concern is with man - you will agree with me on that point. When I experimented in that line in my youth, I never painted anything but ships and water, of course. But notwithstanding, in my eyes the most interesting branch of painting is and remains portraiture, because it has man for its immediate object- that was why I asked at once if you had done anything in that field. - Wouldn't this be a far more favourable place for it to hang? "

Both of them, Behrens no less than Joachim, looked at him amazed - was he not ashamed of this confused, impromptu ha- rangue? But no, Hans Castorp was far too preoccupied to feel self- conscious. He held the painting against the sofa wall, and demanded to know if it did not get a much better light. Just then the servant brought a tray, with hot water, a spirit-lamp, and coffee-cups.

Behrens motioned them into the cabinet, saying: " Then you must have been more interested in sculpture, originally, than in painting, I should think. Yes, of course, it gets more light there; if you think it can stand it. I should suppose so, because sculpture /  Page 261 / concerns itself more purely and exclusively with the human form. But we mustn't let the water boil away."

" Quite right, sculpture, " Hans Castorp said, as they went. He forgot either to hang up or put down the picture he had been hold- ing, but tugged it with him into the neighbouring room. " Cer- tainly a Greek Venus or athlete is more humanistic, it is probably at bottom the most humanistic of all the arts, when one comes to think about it!"

" Well, as far as little Chauchat goes, she is a better subject for painting than sculpture. Phidias, or that other chap with the Mo- saic ending to his name, would have stuck up their noses at her style of physiognomy. - Hullo, where are you going with the ham?"

" Pardon me, I'll just lean it here against the leg of my chair, that will do very well for the moment. The Greek sculptors did not trouble themselves about the head and face, their interest was more with the body, I suppose that was their humanism.-And the plasticity of the female form - so that is fat, is it? "

" That is fat," the Hofrat said concisely. He had opened a hang-ing cabinet, and taken thence the requisites for his coffee-making: a cylindrical Turkish mill, a long-handled pot, a double receptacle for sugar and ground coffee, all in brass. " Palmitin, stearin, olein," he went on, shaking the coffee berries from a tin box into the mill, which he began to turn. " You see I make it all myself, it tastes twice as good. - Did you think it was ambrosia? "

" No, of course I knew. Only it sounds strange to hear it like that," Hans Castorp said.

They were seated in the comer between door and window, at a bamboo tabouret which held an oriental brass tray, upon which Behrens had set the coffee-machine, among the smoking utensils. Joachim was next Behrens on the ottoman, overflowing with cush- ions; Hans Castorp sat in a leather arm-chair on castors, against which he had leaned Frau Chauchat's picture. A gaily-coloured carpet was beneath their feet. The Hofrat ladled coffee and sugar into the long-handled pot, added water, and let the brew boil up over the flame of the lamp. It foamed brownly in the little onion- pattern cups, and proved on tasting both strong and sweet.

" Your own as well," Behrens said. " Your' plasticity' - so far as you have any - is fat too, though of course not to the same ex-tent as with a woman. With us fat is only about five per cent of the body weight, in females it is one sixteenth of the whole. Without that subcutaneous cell structure of ours, we should all be nothing but fungoid growths. It disappears, with time, and then come the unaesthetic wrinkles in the drapery. The layer is thickest on the fe- / Page 262 / male breast and belly, on the front of the thighs, everywhere, in short, where there is a little something for heart and hand to take hold of. The soles of the feet are fat and ticklish."

Hans Castorp turned the cylindrical coffee-mill about in his hands. It was, like the rest of the set, Indian or Persian rather than Turkish; the style of the engraving showed that, with the bright surface of the pattern standing out against the purposely dulled background. He looked at the design, without immediately seeing what it was. When he did, he blushed unawares.

" Yes, that is a set for single gentlemen, " Behrens said. " I keep it locked up, you see, my kitchen queen might hurt her eyes looking at it. It won't do you gentlemen any harm, I take it. It was given to me by a patient, an Egyptian princess who once honoured us with a year or so of her presence. You see, the pattern repeats itself on the whole set. Pretty roguish, what? "

" Yes, it is quite unusual, " Hans Castorp answered. " Ha ha! No, it doesn't trouble me. But one can take it perfectly seriously;

solemnly, in fact - only then it is rather out of place on a coffee-machine. The ancients are said to have used such motifs on their sarcophagi. The sacred and the obscene were more or less the same thing to them."

" I should say the princess was more for the second," Behrens said. " Anyhow she still sends me the most wonderful cigarettes, superfinissimos, you know, only sported on first-class occasions." He fetched the garish-coloured box from the cupboard and offered them. Joachim drew his heels together as he received his cigarette. Hans Castorp helped himself to his; it was unusually large and thick, and had a gilt sphinx on it. He began to smoke - it was won-derful, as Behrens had said.

" Tell us some more about the skin," he begged the Hofrat; " that is, if you will be so kind." He had taken Frau Chauchat's portrait on his knee, and was gazing at it, leaning back in his chair, the cigarette between his lips. Not about the fat-layer, we know about that now. About the human skin in general, that you know so well how to paint. "

" About the skin. You are interested in physiology? "

" Very much. Yes, I've always felt a good deal of interest in it. The human body - yes, I've always had an uncommon turn for it. I'vc sometimes asked myself whether I ought not to have been a physician - it would.n't have been a bad idea,. in a way: Because if you are interested in the body, you must be interested m disease - specially interested, isn't that so? But it doesn't signify, I might have been such a lot of things - for example, a clergyman."

/ Page 263 / Indeed? "

" Yes, I've sometimes had the idea I should have been decidedly in my element there."

" How did you come to be an engineer, then? "

" I Just happened to - it was more or less outward circumstances that decided the matter."

"Well, about the skin. What do you want to hear about your sensory sheath? You know, don't you, that it is your outside brain - ontogenetically the same as that apparatus of the so-called higher centres up there in your cranium? The central nervous system is nothing but a modification of the outer skin-layer; among the lower animals the distinction between central and peripheral doesn't exist, they smell and taste with their skin, it is the only sensory organ they have. Must be rather nice - if you can put yourself in their place. On the other hand, in such highly differen-tiated forms of life as you and I are, the skin has fallen from its high estate; it has to confine itself to feeling ticklish; that is to say, to being simply a protective and registering apparatus - but devil-ishly on the qui vive for anything that tries to come too close about the body. It even puts out feelers - the body hairs, which are noth-ing but hardened skin cells - and they get wind of the approach of whatever it is, before the skin itself is touched. Just between our- selves, it is quite possible that this protecting and defending func- tion of the skin extends beyond the physical. Do you know what makes you go red and pale? "

" Not very precisely."

" Well, neither do we, ' very precisely,' to be frank - at least, as far as blushing is concerned. The situation is not quite clear; for the dilatory muscles which are presumably set in action by the vaso- motor nerves haven't yet been demonstrated in relation to the blood-vessels. How the cock really swells his comb, or any of the other well-known instances come about, is still a mystery, par- ticularly where it is a question of emotional influences in play. We assume that a connexion subsists between the outer rind of the cerebrum and the vascular centre in the medulla. Certain stimuli - for instance, let us say, like your being powerfully embarrassed, set up the connexion, and the nerves that control the blood-vessels function toward the face, and they expand and fill, and you get a face like a turkey-cock, all swelled up with blood so you can't see out of your eyes. On the other hand, suppose you are in suspense, something is going to happen - it may be something tremendously beautiful, for aught I care - the blood-vessels that feed the skin contract, it gets pale and cold and sunken, you look like a dead / Page 264  /  man, with big, lead-coloured eye-sockets and a peaked nose. But the Sympathicus makes your heart thump away like a good fellow."

"So that is how it happens," Hans Castorp said.

" Something like that. Those are reactions, you know. But it is the nature of reactions and reflexes to have a reason for happening; we are beginning to suspect, we physiologists, that the phenomena accompanying emotion are really defence mechanisms, protective reflexes of the system. Goose-flesh, now. Do you know how you come to have goose-flesh? "

"Not very clearly either, I'm afraid."

" That is a little contrivance of the sebaceous glands, which se- crete the fatty, albuminous substance that oils your skin and keeps it supple, and pleasant to feel of. Not very appetizing, maybe, but without it the skin would be all withered and cracked. Without the cholesterin, it is hard to imagine touching the human skin at all. These sebaceous glands have little erector-muscles that act upon them, and when they do so, then you are like the lad when the princess poured the pail of minnows over him. Your skin gets like a file, and if the stimulus is very powerful, the hair ducts are erected too, the hair on your head bristles up and the little hairs on your body, like quills upon the fretful porcupine - and you can say, like the youth in the story, that now you know how to shiver and shake."

"Oh," said Hans Castorp, " I know how already. I shiver rather easily, on all sorts of provocation. Only what surprises me is that the glands are erected for such different reasons. It gives one goose-flesh to hear a slate-pencil run across a pane of glass; but when you hear particularly beautiful music you suddenly find you have it too, and when I was confirmed and took my first communion, I had one shiver after another, it seemed as though the prickling and stickling would never leave off. Imagine those little muscles acting for such different reasons! "

Oh," Behrens said, " tickling's tickling. The body doesn't give a hang for the content of the stimulus. It may be minnows, it may be the Holy Ghost, the sebaceous glands are erected just the same."

Hans Castorp regarded the picture on his knee.

" Herr Hofrat," he said, " I wanted to come back to something you said a moment ago, about internal processes, lymphatic action, and that sort of thing. Tell us about it - particularly about the lymphatic system, it interests me tremendously "

"I believe you," Behrens responded. " The lymph is the most refined, the most rarefied, the most intimate of the body juices. I dare say you had an inkling of the fact in your mind ", when you / Page 265 / asked. People talk about the blood, and the mysteries of its com- position, and what an extraordinary fluid it is. But it is the lymph that is the juice of juices, the very essence, you understand, ichor, blood-milk, creme de la creme; as a matter of fact, after a fatty diet it does look like milk." And he went on, in his lively and whimsical phraseology, to gratify Hans Castorp's desire. And first he characterized the blood, a serum composed of fat, albumen, iron, sugar and salt, crimson as an opera-cloak, the product of respira- tion and digestion, saturated with gases, laden with waste products, which was pumped at 98.4° of heat from the heart through the blood-vessels, and kept up metabolism and animal warmth through- out the body - in other words, sweet life itself. But, he said, the blood did not come into immediate contact with the body cells. What happened was that the pressure at which it was pumped caused a milky extract of it to sweat through the walls of the blood- vessels, and so into the tissues, so that it filled every tiny interstice and cranny, and caused the elastic cell-tissue to distend. This dis- tension of the tissues, or turgor, pressed the lymph, after it had nicely swilled out the cells and exchanged matter with them, into the vasa lymphatica, the lymphatic vessels, and so back into the blood again, at the rate of a litre and a half a day. He went on to speak of the lymphatic tubes and absorbent vessels; described the secretion of the breast milk, which collected lymph from legs, abdomen, and breast, one arm, and one side of the head; described the very delicately constructed filters called lymphatic glands which were placed at certain points in the lymphatic system, in the neck, the arm-pit, and the elbow-joint, the hollow under the knee, and other soft and intimate parts of the body.

" Swellings may occur in these places," Behrens explained. In-durations of the lymphatic glands, let us say, in the knee-pan or the arm-joint, dropsical tumours here and there, and we base our diag- nosis on them - they always have a reason, though not always a very pretty one. Under such circumstances there is more than a suspicion of tubercular congestion of the lymphatic vessels."

Hans Castorp was silent a little space.

" Yes," he said, then, in a low voice, " it is true, I might very well have been a doctor. The flow of the breast milk - the lymph of the legs - all that interests me very, very much. What is the body? " he rhapsodically burst forth. What is the flesh? What is the physical being of man? What is he made of? Tell us this after- noon, Herr Hofrat, tell us exactly, and once and for all, so that we mar know!" " Of water," answered Behrens. " So you are interested in or- / Page 266 / ganic chemistry too? The human body consists, much the larger part of it, of water. No more and no less than water, and nothing to get wrought up about. The solid parts are only twenty-five per cent of the whole, and of that twenty are ordinary white of egg, protein, if you want to use a handsomer word. Besides that, a little fat and a little salt, that's about all."

" But the white of egg - what is that? "

" Various primary substances: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxy- gen, sulphur. Sometimes phosphorus. Your scientific curiosity is running away with itself. Some albumens are in composition with carbo-hydrates; that is to say, grape-sugar and starch. In old age the flesh becomes tough, that is because the collagen increases in the connective tissue - the lime, you know, the most important constituent of the bones and cartilage. What else shall I tell you? In the muscle plasma we have an albumen called fibrin; when death occurs, it coagulates in the muscular tissue, and causes the rigor mortis."

" Right-oh, I see, the rigor mortis," Hans Castorp said blithely.

" Very good, very good. And then comes the general analysis- the anatomy of the grave."

" Yes, of course. But how well you put it! Yes, the movement becomes general, you flow away, so to speak - remember all that water! The remaining constituents are very unstable; without life, they are resolved by putrefaction into simpler combinations, anor- ganic."

" Dissolution, putrefaction," said Hans Castorp. "They are the same thing as combustion: combination with oxygen - am I right? "

" To a T. Oxidization."

" And life? "

" Oxidization too. The same. Yes, young man, life too is prin- cipally oxidization of the cellular albumen, which gives us that beautiful animal warmth, of which we sometimes have more than we need. Tut, living consists in dying, no use mincing the matter- une destruction organique, as some Frenchman with his native levity has called it. It smells like that, too. If we don't think so, our judgment is corrupted."

" And if one is interested in life, one must be particularly in- terested in death, mustn't one? "

" Oh, well, after all, there is some sort of difference. Life is life which keeps the form through change of substance."

" Why should the form remain? " said Hans Castorp

 Page 267 / Why? Young man, what you are saying now sounds far from humanistic."

" Form is folderol."

" Well, you are certainly in great form to-day - you're regu- larly kicking over the traces. But I must drop out now," said the Hofrat. " I am beginning to feel melancholy," and he laid his huge hand over his eyes. " I can feel it coming on. You see, I've drunk coffee with you, and it tasted good to me, and all of a sudden it comes over me that I am going to be melancholy. You gentlemen must excuse me. It was an extra occasion, I enjoyed it no end - "

The cousins had sprung up. They reproached themselves for having taxed the Hofrat's patience so long. He made proper pro-test. Hans Castorp hastened to carry Frau Chauchat's portrait into the next room and hang it once more on the wall. They did not need to re-traverse the garden to arrive at their own quarters; Behrens directed them through the building, and accompanied them to the dividing glass door. In the mood that had come over him so unexpectedly, his goggling eyes blinked, and the bone of his neck stuck out, both more than ever; his upper lip, with the clipped, one-sided moustache, had taken on a querulous expression.

As they went along the corridors Hans Castorp said to his cousin: . " Confess that it was a good idea of mine."

" It was a change,at least," responded Joachim. .. And you cer- tainly took occasion to air your views on a good many subjects. It was a bit complicated for me. It is high time now that we went in to the rest-cure, we shall have at least twenty minutes before tea. You probably think it is folderol to pay so much attention to it, now you've taken to kicking over the traces. But you don't need it so much as I do, after all. "

         
         THE  MAGIC MOUNTAIN 
         Thomas Mann 1924
         Research

AND now came on, as come it must, what Hans Castorp had never thought to experience: the winter of the place, the winter of these high altitudes. Joachim knew it already: it had been in full blast when he arrived the year before - but Hans Castorp rather dreaded it, however well he felt himself equipped. Joachim sought to reassure him.

" You must not imagine it grimmer than it is," he said, " not really arctic. You will feel the cold less on account of the dryness of the air and the absence of wind. It's the thing about the change of temperature above the fog line; they've found out lately that it / Page 268 /  gets warmer in the upper reaches, something they did not know be- fore. I should say it is actually colder when it rains. But you have your sleeping-bag, and they turn on the heat when they absolutely must."

And in fact there could be no talk of violence or surprises; the winter came mildly on, at first no different from many a day they had seen in the height of summer. The wind had been two days in the south, the sun bore down, the valIey seemed shrunken, the side walls at its mouth looked near and bald. Douds came up, behind Piz Michel and Tinzenhorn. and drove north-eastwards. It rained heavily. Then the rain turned foul, a whitish-grey, mingled with snow-flakes - soon it was all snow, the vaIley was full of flurry; it kept on and on, the temperature fell appreciably, so that the fallen snow could not quite melt, but lay covering the valley with a wet and threadbare white garment, against which showed black the pines on the slopes. In the dining-room the radiators were luke- warm. That was at the beginning of November - All Souls'- and there was no novelty about it. In August it had been even so; they had long left off regarding snow as a prerogative of winter. White traces lingered after every storm in the crannies of the rocky Rhatikon, the chain that seemed to guard the end of the vaIley, and the distant monarchs to the south were aIways in snow. But the storm and the fall in the temperature both continued. A pale grey sky hung low over the valley; it seemed to dissolve in flakes and faIl soundlessly and ceaselessly, until one almost felt un- easy. It turned colder by the hour. A morning came when the ther- mometer in Hans Castorp's room registered 44°, the next morning it was only 40°. That was cold. It kept within bounds, but it per- sisted. It had frozen at night; now it froze in the day-time as well, and all day long; and it snowed, with brief intervaIs, through the fourth, the fifth, and the seventh days. The snow mounted apace, it became a nuisance. Paths had been shovelled as far as the bench by the watercourse, and on the drive down to the valley; but these were so narrow that you could only walk single file, and if you met anyone, you must step off the pavement and at once sink knee- deep in snow. A stone-roller drawn by a horse, with a man at his haIter, rolled all day long up and down the streetS of the cure, while a yellow diligence on runners, looking like an old-fashioned post-coach, plied between village and cure, with a snow-plough attached in front, shovelling the white masses aside. The \vorld, this narrow, lofty, isolated world up here, looked now well wadded and uphol-stered indeed: no pillar or post but wore its white cap; the steps up to the entrance of the Berghof had turned into an inclined / Page 269 / plane; heavy cushions, in the drollest shapes, weighed down the branches of the Scotch firs - now and then one slid off and raised up a cloud of powdery white dust in its fall. Round about, the heights lay smothered in snow; their lower regions rugged with the evergreen growth, their upper parts, beyond the timber line, softly covered up to their many-shaped summits. The air was dark, the sun but a pallid apparition behind a veil. Yet a mild reflected bright- ness came from the snow, a milky gleam whose light became both landscape and human beings, even though these latter did show red noses under their white or gaily-coloured woollen caps.

In the dining-room the onset of winter - the "season " of the region - was the subject of conversation at all seven tables. Many tourists and sportsmen \vere said to have arrived and taken up resi- dence at the hotels in the Dorf and the Platz. The height of the piled-up snow was estimated at two feet; its consistency was said to be ideal for skiing. The bob-run, which led down from the north-western slope of the Schatzalp into the valley, was zealously worked on, it would be possible to open it in the next few days, unless a thaw put out all calculations. Everyone looked forward eagerly to the activities of these sound people down below - to the sports and races, which it was forbidden to attend, but which num- bers of the patients resolved to see, by cutting the rest-cure and slipping out of the Berghof. Hans Castorp heard of a new sport that had come from Scandinavia, .. ski-joring ": it consisted in races in which the panicipants were drawn by horses while standing in their skis. It was to see this that so many of the patients had re- solved to slip out. - There was talk too of Christmas.

Christmas! Hans Castorp had never once thought of it. To be sure, he had blithely said, and written, that he must spend the win- ter up here with Joachim, because of what the doctors had dis- covered to be the state of his health. But now he was startled to realize that Christmas would be included in the programme - per- haps because (and yet not entirely because) he had never spent the Chrismas season anywhere but in the bosom of the family. Well, if he must he must; he would have to put up with it. He was no longer a child; Joachim seemed not to mind, or else to have ad- justed himself uncomplainingly to the prospect; and, after all, he said to himself, think of all the places and all the conditions in which Christmas has been celebrated before now!

Yet it did seem to him rather premature to begin thinking about Christrnas even before the Advent season, six weeks at least before the holiday! True, such an interval was easily overleaped by the guests in the dining-hall: it was a mental process in which Hans / Page 270 / Castorp had already some facility, though he had not yet learned to practise it in the grand style, as the older inhabitants did. Christ-mas, like other holidays in the course of the year, served them for a fulcrum, or a vaulting-pole, with which to leap over empty inter- vening spaces. They all had fever, their metabolism was acceler- ated, their bodily processes accentuated, keyed up - all this per-haps accounted for the wholesale way they could put time behind them. It would not have greatly surprised him to hear them dis- count the Christmas holiday as well, and go on at once to speak of the New Year and Carnival. But no-so capricious and unstable as this they were not, in the Berghof dining-room. Christmas gave them pause, it gave them even matter for concern and brain-rack- ing. It was customary to present Hofrat Behrens with a gift on Christmas eve, for which a collection was taken up among the guests - and this gift was the subject of much deliberation. A meet-ing was called. Last year, so the old inhabitants said, they had given him a travelling-trunk; this time a new operating-table had been considered, an easel, a fur coat, a rocking-chair, an inlaid ivory stethoscope. Settembrini, asked for suggestions, proposed that they give the Hofrat a newly projected encyclopzdic work called The Sociology of Suffering; but he found only one person to agree with him, a book-dealer who sat at Hermine Kleefeld's table. In short, no decision had been reached. There was difficulty about coming to an agreement with the Russian guests; a divergence of views arose. The Muscovites declared their preference for making an independent gift. Frau Stohr went about for days quite outraged on account of a loan of ten francs which she inadvisedly laid out for Frau Iltis at the meeting, and which the latter had " forgotten " to return. She " forgot " it. The shades of meaning Frau Stohr con-trived to convey in this word were many and varied, but one and all expressive of an entire disbelief in Frau Iltis's lack of memory, which, it appeared, had been proof against the hints and proddings Frau Stohr freely admitted having administered. Several times she declared she would resign herself make Frau Iltis a present of the sum. " I'll pay for both of us," she said. "Then my skirts will be cleared " But in the end she hit upon another p!an and communi-cated it to her table-mates, to their great delight: she had the "management" refund her the ten francs and insert it in Frau Iltis's weekly bill. Thus was the reluctant debtor outwitted, and at least this phase of the matter settled.

It had stopped snowing, the sky began to clear. The blue-grey cloud-masses parted to admit glimpses of the sun, whose rays gave a bluish cast to the scene. Then it grew altogether fair; a bright / Page 271 / hard frost and settled winter splendour reigned in the middle of November. The arch of the loggia framed a glorious panorama of snow-powdered forest, softly filled passes and ravines, white, sun- lit valleys, and radiant blue heavens above all. In the evening, when the almost full moon appeared, the world lay in enchanted splen-dour, marvellous. Crystal and diamond it glittered far and wide, the forest stood up very black and white, the quarter of the heavens where the moon was not showed deeply dark, embroidered with stars. On the flashing surface of the snow, shadows, so strong, so sharp and clearly outlined that they seemed almost more real than the objects themselves, fell from houses, trees, and telegraph-poles. An hour or so after sunset there would be some founeen degrees of frost. The world seemed spellbound in icy purity, its earthly blemishes veiled; it lay fixed in a deathlike, enchanted trance.

Hans Castorp stopped until far into the night in his balcony above the ensorcelled winter scene - much longer than Joachim, who retired at ten or a little later. His excellent chair, with the sectional mattress and the neck-roll, he pulled close to the snow- cushioned balustrade; at his hand was the white table with the lighted reading-lamp, a stack of books, and a glass of creamy milk, the "evening milk" which was brought to each of the guests' rooms at nine o'clock. Hans Castorp put a dash of cognac in his, to make it more palatable. Already he "had availed himself of all his means of protection against the cold, the entire outfit: lay en- sconced well up to his chest in the buttoned-up sleeping-sack he had acquired in one of the well-furnished shops in the Platz, with the two camel's-hair rugs folded over it in accordance with the ritual. He wore his winter suit, with a shon fur jacket atop, a woollen cap, felt boots, and heavily lined gloves, which, however, could not prevent the stiffening of his fingers.

What held him so late - often until midnight and beyond, long after the " bad " Russian pair had left their loge - was partly the magic of the winter night, into which, until eleven, were woven the mounting strains of music from near and far. But even more it was inertia and excitement, both of these at once, and in combina-tion: bodily inertia, the physical fatigue which hated any idea of moving; and mental excitement, the busy preoccupation of his thoughts with certain new and fascinating studies upon which the young man had embarked, and which left his brain no rest. The weather affected him, his organism was stimulated by the cold; he ate enormously, attacking the mighty Berghof meals, where the roast goose followed upon the roast beef, with the usual Berghof appetite, which was always even larger in winter than in summer. / Page 272 / At the same time he had a perpetual craving for sleep; in the day-time, as well as on the moonlit evenings, he would drop off over his books, and then, after a few minutes' unconsciousness, betake himself again to research. Talk fatigued him. He was more in-clined than had been his habit to rapid, unrestrained, even reckless speech; but if he talked with Joachim, as they went on their snowy walks, he was liable to be overtaken by giddiness and trembling, would feel dazed and tipsy, and the blood would mount to his head. His curve had gone up since the oncoming of winter, and Hofrat Behrens had let fall something about injections; these were usually given in cases of obstinate high temperature, and Joachim and at least two-thirds of the guests had them. But he himself felt sure that the increase in his bodily heat had to do with the mental activity and excitation which kept him in his chair on the balcony until deep into the glittering, frosty night. The reading which held him so late suggested such an explanation to his mind.

No little reading was done, in the rest-halls and private loggias of the International Sanatorium Berghof; largely, however, by the new-comers and " short-timers," for the patients of many months' or years' standing had long learned to kill time without mental effort or means of distraction, by dint of a certain inner virtuosity they came to possess. They even considered it beginners' awkward-ness to glue yourself to a book. It was enough to have one lying in your lap or on your little table, in case of need. The collection of the establishment was an amplification of the literature found in a dentist's waiting-room - in many languages, profusely illustrated, and offered free of charge. The guests exchanged volumes from the loan-library down in the Platz; now and again there would be a book for which everybody scrambled, even the condescending old inhabitants reaching out their hands with ill-concealed eager-ness. At the moment it was a cheap paper-backed volume, intro-duced by Herr Albin, and entitled The Art of Seduction: a very literal translation from the French, preserving even the syntax of that language, and thus gaining in elegance and pungency of pres-entation. In matter it was an exposition of the philosophy of sen-sual passion, developed in a spirit of debonair and man-of-the-worldly paganism. Frau Stohr had read it early, and pronounced it simply ravishing. Frau Magnus, the same who had lost her albu-men tolerance, agreed unreservedly. Her husband the brewer pur- portc:d to have profited personally by a perusal, but regretted that his wife should have taken up that sort of thing, because such read-ing spoiled the women and gave them immodest ideas. His remarks not a little increased the circulation of the volume. Two ladies of / Page 273 / the lower rest-hall, Frau Redisch, the wife of a Polish industrial magnate, and Frau Hessenfeld, a widow from Berlin, both of these new arrivals since October, claimed the book at the same time, and a regrettable incident arose after dinner, yes, more than regrettable, for there was a violent scene, overheard by Hans Castorp, in his loggia above. It ended in spasms of hysteria on the part of one of the women - it might have been Frau Redisch, but equally well it might have been Frau Hessenfeld - and she was borne away be-side herself to her own room. The youth of the place had got hold of the treatise before those of riper years; studying it in part in groups, after supper, in their various rooms. Hans Castorp himself saw the youth with the finger-nail hand it to Franzchen Oberdank in the dining-room - she was a new arrival and a light case, a flaxen- hrored young thing whose mother had just brought her to the sanatorium.

There may have been exceptions; there may have been those who employed the hours of the rest-cure with some serious in- tellectual occupation, some conceivably profitable study, either by way of keeping in touch with life in the lowlands, or in order to give weight and depth to the passing hour, that it might not be pure time and nothing else besides. Perhaps here and there was one - not, of course, to mention Herr Settembrini, with his zeal for eliminating human suffering, or Joachim with his Russian primer - yes, there might be one, or two, thus occupied; if not among the guests in the dining-room, which seemed not very likely, then among the bedridden and moribund. Hans Castorp inclined to be-lieve it. He himself, after imbibing all that Ocem Steamships had to offer him, had ordered certain books from home, some of them bearing on his profession, and they had arrived with his winter clothing: scientific engineering, technique of ship-building, and the like. But these volumes lay now neglected in favour of other text- books belonging to quite a different field, an interest in which had seized upon the young man: anatomy, physiology, biology, works in German, French and English, sent up to the Berghof by the book-dealer in the village, obviously because Hans Castorp had ordered them, as was indeed the case. He had done so of his own motion, without telling anyone, on a solitary walk he took down to the Platz while Joachim was occupied with the weekly weigh-ing or injection. His cousin was surprised when he saw the books in Hans Castorp's hands. They were expensive, as scientific works always are: the prices were marked on the wrappers and inside the front covers. Joachim asked why, if his cousin wanted to read such books, he had not borrowed them of the Hofrat, who surely / Page 274 / possessed a well-chosen stock. The young man answered that it was quite a different thing to read when the book was one's own; for his part, he loved to mark them and underline passages in pencil. Joachim could hear, hours on end, the noise made by the paper- knife going through the uncut leaves.

The volumes were heavy, unhandy. Hans Castorp propped them against his chest or stomach as he lay; they were heavy, but he did not mind. Lying there, his mouth half open, he let his eye glide down the learned page, upon which fell the light from his red- shaded lamp, though he might have read, if need were, by the bril- liance of the moonlight alone. He read, following the lines down the page with his head, until at the bottom his chin lay sunk upon his breast - and in this position the reader would pause perhaps for reflection, dozing a little or musing in half-slumber, before lifting his eyes to the next page. He probed profoundly. While the moon took its appointed way above the crystalline splendours of the mountain valley, he read of organized matter, of the proper-ties of protoplasm, that sensitive substance maintaining Itself in extraordinary fluctuation between building up and breaking down; of form developing out of rudimentary, but always present, pri- mordia; read wIth compelling interest of life, and it sacred, im- pure mysteries.

What was life? No one knew. It was undoubtedly aware of it-self, so soon as it was life; but it did not know what it was. Con- sciousness, as exhibited by susceptibility to stimulus, was undoubt-edly, to a certain degree, present in the lowest, most undeveloped stages of life; it was impossible to fix the first appearance.of con-scious processes at any point In the history of the mdividual or the race; immpossible to make consciousness contingent upon, say, the presence of a nervous system. The lowest animal forms had no nervous systems, still less a cerebrum; yet no one would venture to deny them the capacity for responding to stimuli. One could sus-pend life; not merely particular sense-organs, not only nervous reactions, but life itself. One could temporarily suspend the irrita- bility to sensation of every form of living matter in the plant as well as in the animal kingdom; one could narcotize ova and sperma- tozoa with chloroform, chloral hydrate, or morp!une. Conscious- ness, then, was simply a function of matter organized into life; a function that in higher manifestations turned upon its avatar and became an effort to explore and explain the pnenomenon it dis-played - a hopeful-hopeless project of life to achieve self-knowl-edge, nature in recoil-and vainly, in the event, since she cannot be resolved in knowledge, nor life, when all is said, listen to itself.

Page 275 What was life? No one knew. No one knew the actual point whence it sprang, where it kindled itself. Nothing in the domain of life seemed uncausated, or insufficiently causated, from that point on; but life itself seemed without antecedent. If there was anything that might be said about it, it was this: it must be so highly developed, structurally, that nothing even distantly related to It was present in the inorganic world. Between the protean amreba and the vertebrate the difference was slight, unessential, as com- pared to that between the simplest living organism and that nature which did not even deserve to be called dead, because it was in- organic. For death was only the-logical negation of life; but be- tween life and inanimate nature yawned a gulf which research strove in vain to bridge. They tried to close it with hypotheses, which it swallowed down without becoming any the less deep or broad. Seeking for a connecting link, they had condescended to the preposterous assumption of structureless living matter, unorgan-ized organisms, which darted together of themselves in the albu-men solution, like crystals in the mother-liquor; yet organic dif- ferentiation still remained at once condition and expression of all life. One could point to no form of life that did not owe its exist- ence to procreation by parents. They had fished the primeval slime out of toe depth of the sea, and great had been the jubilation - but the end of it all had been shame and confusion. For it turned out that they had mistaken a precipitate of sulphate of lime for proto-plasm. But then, to avoid giving pause before a miracle - for life that built itself up out of, and fell in decay into, the same sort of matter as inorganic nature; would have been, happening of itself, miraculous - they were driven to believe in a spontaneous genera-tion - that is, in the emergence of the organic from the inorganic - which was just as much of a miracle. Thus they went on, devis-ing intermediate stages and transitions, assuming the existence of organisms which stood lower down than any yet known, but them-selves had as forerunners still more primitive efforts of nature to achieve life: primitive forms of which no one would ever catch sight, for they were all of less than microscopic size, and previous to whose hypothetic existence the synthesis of protein compounds must already have taken place.

What then was life? It was warmth, the warmth generated by a form-preserving instability, a fever of matter, which accom-panied the process of ceaseless decay and repair of albumen mole-cules that were too impossibly complicated, too impossibly ingen-ious in structure. It was the existence of the actually impossible-to-exist, of a half-sweet, half-painful balancing, or scarcely balancing, / Page 276 / in this restricted and feverish process of decay and renewal, upon the point of existence. It was not matter and it was not spirit, but something between the two, a phenomenon conveyed by mat-ter, like the rainbow on the waterfall, and like the flame. Yet why not material- it was sentient to the point of desire and disgust, the shamelessness of matter become sensible of itself. the inconti-nent form of being. It was a secret and ardent stirring in the frozen chastity of the universal; it was a stolen and voluptuous impurity of sucking and secreting; an exhalation of carbonic acid gas and ma-terial impurities of mysterious origin and composition. It was a pul-lulation, an unfolding, a form-building (made possible by the over-balancing of its instability, yet controlled by the laws of growth inherent within it), of something brewed out of water, albumen, salt and fats, which was called flesh, and which became form, beauty, a lofty image, and yet all the time the essence of sensuality and desire. For this form and beauty were not spirit-borne; nor, like the form and beauty of sculpture, conveyed by a neutral and spirit-consumed substance, which could in all purity make beauty perceptible to the senses. Rather was it conveyed and shaped by the somehow awakened voluptuousness of matter, of the organic. dying-living substance itself, the reeking flesh.

As he lay there above the glittering valley, lapped in the bodily warmth reserved to him by fur and wool, in the frosty night illumined by the brilliance from a lifeless star, the image of life displayed itself to young Hans Castorp. It hovered before him, somewhere in space, remote from his grasp, yet near his sense; this body, this opaquely whitish form, giving out exhalations, moist, clammy; the skin with all its blemishes and native impurities, with its spots, pimples, discolorations, irregularities; its horny, scalelike regions, covered over by soft streams and whorls of rudimentary lanugo. It leaned there, set off against the cold lifelessness of the inanimate world, in its own vaporous sphere, relaxed, the head crowned with something cool, horny, and pigmented, which was an outgrowth of its skin; the hands clasped at the back of the neck. It looked down at him beneath drooping lids, out of eyes made to appear slanting by a racial variation in the lid-formation. Its lips were half open, even a little curled. It rested its weight on one leg, the hip-bone stood out sharply under the flesh, while the other, relaxed, nestled its slightly bent knee against the inside of the sup-porting leg, and poised the foot only upon the toes. It leaned thus, turning to smile, the gleaming elbows akimbo, in the paired sym-metty of its limbs and trunk. The acrid. steaming shadows of the arm-pits corresponded in a mystic triangle to the pubic dark- / Page277 /  ness, just as the eyes did to the red, epithelial mouth-opening, and the red blossoms of the breast to the navel lying perpendicularly below. Under the impulsion of a central organ and of the motor nerves originating in the spinal marrow, chest and abdomen func- tioned, the peritoneal cavity expanded and contracted, the breath, warmed and moistened by the mucous membrane of the respira- tory canal, saturated with secretions, streamed out between the lips, after it had joined its oxygen to the haemoglobin of the blood in the air-cells of the lungs. For Hans Castorp understood that this living body, in the mysterious symmetry of its blood-of its nourished structure, penetrated throughout by nerves, veins, arteries, and capillaries; with its inner framework of bones - marrow-filled tubular bones, blade-bones, vertebrre - which with the addition of lime had developed out of the original gelatinous tissue and grown strong enough to support the body weight; with the cap-sules and well-oiled cavities, ligaments and cartilages of its joints, Its more than two hundred muscles, its central organs that served for nutrition and respiration, for registering and transmitting stimuli, its protective membranes, serous cavities, its glands rich in secre-tions; with the system of vessels and fissures of its highly compli-cated interior surface, communicating through the body-openings with the outer world - he understood that this ego was a livmg unit of a very high order, remote indeed from those very simple forms of life which breathed, took in nourishment, even thought, with the entire surface of their bodies. He knew it was built up out of myriads of such small organisms, which had had their origin in a single one; which had multiplied by recurrent division, adapted themselves to the most varied uses, and functions, separated, dif-ferentiated themselves, thrown out forms which were the condition and result of their growth.

This body, then, which hovered before him, this individual and living I, was a monstrous multiplicity of breathing and self-nourishing individuals, which, through organic conformation and adaptation to special ends, had parted to such an extent with their essential individuality, their freedom and living immediacy, had so much become anatomic elements that the functions of some had become limited to sensibility toward light, sound, contact, warmth; others only understood how to change their shape or produce di-gestive secretions through contraction; others, again, were de-veloped and functional to no other end than protection, support, the conveyance of the body juices, or reproduction. There were modifications of this organic plurality united to form the higher ego: cases where the multitude of subordinate entities were only / Page 278 / grouped in a loose and doubtful way to form a higher living uait. The student buried himself in the phenomenon of cell colonies; he read about half-organisms, algae, whose single cells, enveloped.. a mantle of gelatine, often lay apart from one another, yet were multiple-cell formations, whIch, if they had been asked, would not have known whether to be rated as a settlement of single-celled individuals, or as an individual single unit, and, in bearing witness, would have vacillated quaintly between the I and the we. Nature here presented a middle stage, between the highly social union of countless elementary individuals to form the tissues and organs of a superior I, and the free individual existence of these simpler forms; the multiple-celled organism was only a stage in the cyclic process, which was the course of life itself, a periodic revolution from procreation to procreation. The act of fructification, the sexual merging of two cell-bodies, stood at the beginning of the upbuilding of every rnultiple-celled individual, as it did at the beginning of every row of generations of single elementary forms,. and led back to itself. For this act was carried through many species which had no need of it to multiply by means of proliferation;until a moment came when the non-sexually produced offspring found thcmselves once more constrained to a renewal of the copu- lative function, and the circle came full. Such was the multiple state of life, sprung from the union of two parent cells, the asso- ciation of many non-sexually originated generations of cell units; its growth meant their increase, and the generative circle came full again when sex-cells, specially developed elements for the pur-pose of reproduction, had established themselves and found the way to a new mingling that drove life on afresh.

Our young adventurer, supporting a volume of embryology on the pit of his stomach, followed the development of the or-ganism from the moment when the spermatozoon, first among a host of its fellows, forced itself forward by a lashing motion of its hinder part, struck with its forepart against the gelatine mantle of the egg, and bored its way into the mount of concep- tion, which the protoplasm of the outside of the ovum arched agajnst its approach. There was no conceivable trick or absurdity it would not have pleased nature to commit by way of variation upon this fixed procedure. In some animals, the male was a para-site in the intestine of the female. In others, the male parent reached with his arm down the gullet of the female to deposit the semen within her; after which, bitten off and spat out, it ran away by itself upon its fingers, to the confusion of scientists, who for long had given it Greek and Latin names an independent form / Page 279 / of life. Hans Castorp lent an ear to the learned strife between ovists and animalculsts: the first of whom asserted that the egg was in itself the complete little frog, dog, or human being, the male element being only the incitement to its growth; while the sec-ond saw in a spermatozoon, possessing head, arms, and legs, the perfected form of life shadowed forth, to which the egg performed only the office of " nourisher in life's feast." In the end they agreed to concede equal meritoriousness to ovum and semen, both of which, after all sprang from originally indistinguishable procre-ative cells. He saw the single-celled organism of the fructified egg on the point of being transformed into a multiple-celled organism, by striation and division; saw the cell-bodies attach themselves to the lamellae of the mucous membrane; saw the germinal vesicle, the blastula, close itself in to form a cup or basin-shaped cavity, and begin the functions of receiving and digesting food. That was the gastrula, the protozoon, primeval form of all animal life, pri-meval form of flesh-borne beauty. Its two epithelia, the outer and the inner, the ectoderm and the entoderm, proved to be prim:tive organs out of whose foldings-in and-out, were developed the glands, the tissues, the sensory organs, the body processes. A strip of the outer germinal layer, the ectoderm, thickened, folded into a groove, closed itself into a nerve canal, became a spinal column, became the brain. And as the foetal slime condensed into fibrous connective tissue, into cartilage, the colloidal cells begirming to show gelatinous substance instead of mucin. he saw in certain places the connective tissue take lime and fat to itself out of the sera that washed it, and begin to form bone. Embryonic man squatted in a stooping posture, tailed, indistinguishable from em-bryonic pig; with enormous abdomen and stumpy, formless extremities, the facial mask bowed over the swollen paunch; the story of his growth seemed a grim, unflattering science, like the cursory record of a zoological family tree. For a while he had gill-pockets like a roach. It seemed permissible, or rather unavoidable, contemplating the various stages of development through which he passed, to infer the very little humanistic aspect presented by primitive man in his mature state. His skin was furnished with twitching muscles to keep off insects; it was thickly covered with hair; there was a tremendous development of the mucous mem-brane of the olfactory organs; his ears protruded, were movable, took a lively part in the play of the features, and were much better adapted than ours for catching sounds. His eyes were protected by a third, nictating lid; they were placed sidewise, excepting the third, of which the pineal gland was the rudimentary trace, and / Page 280 / which was able, looking upwards, to guard him from dangers from the upper air. Primitive man had a very long intestine, many molars, and sound-pouches on the larnyx the better to roar with, also he carried his sex-glands on the inside of the intestinal cavity.

Anatomy presented our investigator with charts of human limbs, skinned and prepared for his inspection; he saw their superficial and their buried muscles, sinews, and tendons: those of the thighs, the foot, and especially of the arm, the upper and the forearm. He learned the Latin names with which medicine, that subdivision of the humanities, had gallantly equipped them. He passed on to the skeleton, the development of which presented new points of view - among them a clear perception of the essential unity of all that pertains to man, the correlation of all branches of learning. For here, strangely enough, he found himself reminded of his own field - or shall we say his former field? - the scientific calling which he had announced himself as having embraced, introducing himself thus to Dr. Krokowski and Herr Settembrini on his ar- rival up here. In order to learn something - it had not much mat-tered what - he had learned in his technical school about statics, about supports capable of flexion, about loads, about construction as the advantageous utilization of mechanical material. It would of course be childish to think that the science of engineering, the rules of mechanics, had found application to organic nature; but just as little might one say that they had been derived from organic nature. It was simply that the mechanical laws found themselves repeated and corroborated in nature. The principle of the hollow cylinder was illustrated in the structure of the tubular bones, in such a way that the static demands were satis-fied with the precise minimum of solid structure. Hans Castorp had learned that a body which is put together out of staves and bands of mechanically utilizable matter, conformably to the de- mands made by draught and pressure upon it, can withstand the same weight as a solid column of the same material. Thus in the development of the tubular bones, it was comprehensible that, step for step with the formation of the solid exterior, the inner parts, which were mechanically superfluous, changed to a fatty tissue, the marrow. The thigh-bone was a crane, in the construction of which organic nature, by the direction she had given the shaft, carried out, to a hair, the same draught- and pressure-curves which Hans Castorp had had to plot in drawing an instrument serving a similar purpose. He contemplated this fact with pleasure; he en- joyed the reflection that his relation to the femur, or to organic / Page 281 /  nature generally was now threefold: it was lyrical, it was medical, it was technological; and all of these, he felt, were one in being human, they were variations of one and the same pressing human concern, they were schools of humanistic thought.

But with all this the achievements of the protoplasm remained unaccountable: it seemed forbidden to life that it should under-stand itself. Most of the bio-chemical processes were not only unknown, it lay in their very nature that they should escape at-tention. Almost nothing was known of the structure or composi-tion of the living unit called the " cell." What use was there in establishing, the components of lifeless muscle, when the living did not let itself be chemically examined? The changes that took place when the rigor mortis set in were enough to make worthless all investigation. Nobody understood metaboIism, nobody under- stood the true inwardness of the functioning of the nervous sys- tem. To what properties did the taste corpuscles owe their reaction? In what consisted the various kinds of excitation of cer- tain sensory nerves by odour-possessing substances? In what, in- deed, the property of smell itself? The specific odours of man and beast consisted in the vaporization of certain unknown substances. The composition of the secretion called sweat was little under- stood. The glands that secreted it produced aromata which among mammals undoubtedly played an imporant role, but whose sig-nificance for the human species we were not in a position to ex- plain. The physiological significance of imponant regions of the body was shrouded in darkness. No need to mention the vermi- form appendix, which was a mystery; in rabbits it was regularly found full of a pulpy substance, of which there was nothing to say as to how it got in or renewed itself. But what about the white and grey substance which composed the medulla, what of the optic thalamus and the grey inlay of the pons Varolii? The sub-stance composing the brain and marrow was so subject to dis- integration, there was no hope whatever of determining its struc-ture. What was it relieved thie cortex of activity during slumber? What prevented the stomach from digesting itself - as sometimes, in fact, did happen after death? One might answer, life: a special power of resistance of the living protoplasm; but this would be not to recognize the mystical character of such an explanation. The theory of such an everyday phenomenon as fever was full of contradictions. Heightened oxIdization resulted in increased warmth, but why was there not an increased expenditure of warmtth to correspond? Did the paralysis of the sweat-secretions depend upon contraction of the skin? But such contraction took / Page 282  / place only in the case of " chills and fever," for otherwise, in fever, the skin was more likely to be hot. Prickly heat indicated the centnl nervous system as the seat of the causes of heightened catabolism as well as the source of that condition of the skin which we were content to call abnormal, because we did not know how to define it.

But what was all this ignorance, compared with our utter help-lessness in the presence of such a phenomenon as memory, or of that other more prolonged and astounding memory which we called the inheritance of acquired characteristics? Out of the question to get even a glimpse of any mechanical possibility of explication of such performances on the part of the cell-substance. The spermatozoon that conveyed to the egg countless complicated individual and racial characteristics of the father was visible only through a microscope; even the most powerful magnification was not enough to show it as other than a homogeneous body, or to determine its origin; it looked the same in one animal as in another. These factors forced one to the assumption that the cell was in the same case as with the higher form it went to build up: that it too was already a higher form, composed in its turn by the division of living bodies, individual living units. Thus one passed from the supposed smallest unit to a still smaller one; one was driven to separate the elementary into its elements. No doubt at all but just as the animal kingdom was composed of various species of animals, as the human-animal organism was composed of a whole animal kingdom of cell species, so the cell organism was composed of a new and varied animal kingdom of elementary units, far below microscopic size, which grew spontaneously, increased spontaneously according to the law that each could bring forth only after its kind, and, acting on the principle of a division of labour, served together the next higher order of existence.

Those were the genes, the living germs, bioblasts, biophores-lying there in the frosty night, Hans Castorp rejoiced to make acquaintance with them by name. Yet how, he asked himself ex-citedly, even after more light on the subject was forthcoming. how could their elementary nature be established? If they were living. they must be organic, since life depended upon organiza-tion. But if they were organized, then they could not be ele-mentary. since an organism is not single but multiple. They were units within the organic unit of the cell they built up. But if they were, then, however impossibly small they were. they must them-selves be built up. organically built up. as a law of their existence; for the conception of a living unit meant by definition that it was / Page 283 / built up out of smaller units which were subordinate; that is, organized with reference to, a higher form. As long as division yielded organIc unIts possessing the propertIes of life - asslmila-tion and reproduction - no limits were set to it. As long as one spoke of living units, one could not correctly speak of elementary units, for the concept of unity carried with it in perpetuity the concept of subordinated, upbuilding unity; and there was no such thing as elementary life, in the sense of something that was already life, and yet elementary. And still, though without logical existence, something of the kind must be eventually the case; for it was not possible. to brush aside like that the idea of the original procreation, the rise of life ; out of what was not life. That gap which in exterior nature we vainly sought to close, that between living and dead matter, had its counterpart in nature's organic existence, and must somehow either be closed up or bridged over. Soon or late, division must yield " units " which, even though in composition, were not organ- ized, and which mediated betWeen life and absence of life; molec- ular groups, which represented the transition between vitalized organization and mere chemistry. But then, arrived at the mole-cule, one stood on the brink of another abyss, which yawned yet more mysteriously than that between organic and inorganic na-ture: the gulf between the material and the immaterial. For the molecule was composed of atoms, and the atom was nowhere near large enough eveh to be spoken of as extraordinarily small. It was so small, such a tiny, early, transitional mass, a coagulation of the unsubstantial, of the not-yet-substantial and yet substance-like, of energy, that it was scarcely possible yet - or, if it had been, was now no longer possible - to think of it as material, but rather as mean and border-line between material and immaterial. The prob- lem of another original procreation arose, far more wild and mys- terious than the organic: the primeval birth of matter out of the immaterial. In fact the abyss between material and. immaterial yawned as widely, pressed as importunately - yes, more impor-tunately - to be closed, as that between organic and inorganic -nature. There must be a chemistry of the immaterial, there must be combinations of the insubstantial, out of which sprang the material - the atoms might represent protozoa of material, by their nature substance and still not yet qulte substance. Yet arrived at the .. not even small," the measure slipped out of the hands; for " not even small " meant much the same as enormously large "; and the step to the atom provecl: to be without exaggeration portentous in the highest degree. For at the very moment when one had assisted at / Page 284 / the final division of matter, when one had divided it into the im-possibly small, at that moment there suddenly appeared upon the horizon the astronomical cosmos!

The atom was a cosmic system, laden with energy; in which heavenly bodies rioted rotating about a centre like a sun; through whose ethereal space comets drove with the speed of light years. kept in their eccentric orbits by the power of the central body. And that was as little a mere comparison as it would be were one to call the body of any multiple-celled organism a " cell state." The city, the state, the social community regulated according to the principle of division of labour, not only might be compared to organic life, it actually reproduced its conditions. Thus in the in-most recesses of nature, as in an endless succession of mirrors. was reflected the macrocosm of the heavens, whose clusters, throngs. groups. and figures, paled by the brilliant moon, hung over the dawing, frost-bound valley, above the head of our muffled adept. Was it too bold a thought that among the planets of the atomic solar system - those myriads and milky ways of solar systems which constituted matter - one or other of these inner-worldly heavenly bodies might find itself in a condition corresponding to that which made it possible for our earth to become the abode of life? For a young man already rather befuddled inwardly. suffering from abnormal skin-conditions. who was not without all and any experience in the realm of the illicit, it was a specularion which, far from being absurd, appeared so obvious as to leap to the eyes, highly evident, and bearing the stamp of logical truth. The " small- ness " of these inner-worldly heavenly bodies would have been an objection irrelevant to the hypothesis; since the conception of large or small had ceased to be pertInent at tlle moment when the cosmic character of the "smallest" particle of matter had been revealed; while at the same time, the conceptions of " outside " and " inside " had also been shaken. The atom-world was an " outside." as, very probably, the earthly star on which we dwelt was, organically re-garded, deeply" inside." Had not a researcher once, audaciously fanciful, referred to the" beasts of the Milky Way," cosmic mon-sters whose flesh, bone, and brain were built up out of solar sys- tems? But in that case, Hans Castorp mused, then in the moment when one thought to have come to to the end, it all began over again from the beginning! For then, in the very innermost of his nature, and in the inmost of that innermost, perhaps there was just himself, just Hans Castorp, again and a hundred times Hans Castorp, with burning face and stiffening fingers, lying muffled on a balcony, with a view across the moonlit, frost-nighted high valley. and prob- / Page 285  ing, with an interest both humanistic and medical, into the life of the body!

He held a volume of pathological anatomy in the red ray from his table-lamp, and conned its text and numerous reproductions. He read of the existcnce of parasitic cell-juncture and of infec- tious tumours. These were forms of tissue - and very luxuriant forms too - produced by foreign cell-bodies in an organism which had proved receptive to them, and in some way or other - one must probably say perversely - had offered them peculiarly fa-vourable conditions.lt was not so much that the parasite took away nourishment from the surrounding tissues, as that, in the process of building up and breaking down which went on in it as in every other cell, it produced organic combinations which were extraor- dinarily toxic - undeniably destructive - to the cells where it had been entenained. They had found out how to isolate the toxin from a number of micro-organisms and produce it in concentrated form; and it was amazing to see what small doses of this substance, which simply belonged to a group of protein combinations, could, when introduced into the circulation of an animal, produce symptoms of acute poisoning and rapid degeneration. The outward sign of this inward decay was a growth of tissue, the pathological tumour, which was the reaction of the cells to the stimulus of the foreign bacilli. Tubercles developed, the size of a millet-seed, composed of cells resembling mucous membrane, among or within which the bacilli lodged; some of these were extraordinarily rich in proto- plasm, very large, and full of nuclei. However, all this good living soon led to ruin; for the nuclei of these monster cells began to break down, the protoplasm they contained to be destroyed by coagulation, and further areas of tissue to be involved. They were attacked by inflammation, the neighbouring blood-vessels suffered by contagion. White blood-corpuscles were attracted to the seat of the evil; the breaking-down proceeded apace; and meanwhile the soluble toxins released by the bacteria half already poisoned the nerve-centres, the entire organization was in a state of high fever, and staggered - so to speak with heaving bosom - toward dissolu- tion.

Thus far pathology, the theory of disease, the accentuation of the physical through pain; yet, in so far as it was the accentuation of the physical, at the same time accentuation through desire. Dis- ease was a perverse, a dissolute form of life. And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the imma- /  Page 286 /  terial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defence, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall. The second creation. the birth of the organic out of the inorganic, was only another fatal stage in the progress of the corporeal toward consciousness, just as disease in the organism was an intoxication. a heightening and unlicensed accentuation of its physical state; and life, life was nothing but next step on the reckless path of the spirit dishonoured; nothing but the automatic blush of matte!' roused to sensation and become receptive for that which awaked it.

The books lay piled upon the table, one lay on the matting next his chair; that whIch he had latest read rested upon Hans Castorp's stomach and oppressed his breath; yet no order went from the cortex to the muscles in charge to take it away. He had read down the page, his chin had sunk upon his chest, over his innocent blue eyes the lids had fallen. He beheld the image of life in flower, its structure, its flesh-borne loveliness. She had lifted her hands from behind her head, she opened her arms. On their inner side, par- ticularly beneath the tender skin of the elbow-points, he saw die blue branchings of the larger veins. These arms were of unspeak- able sweetness. She leaned above him, she inclined unto him and bent down over him, he was conscious of her organic fragrance and the mild pulsation of her heart. Something warm and tender clasped him round the neck; melted with desire and awe, he laid his hands upon the flesh of her upper arms, where the fine-grained skin over the triceps came to his sense so heavenly cool; and upon his lips he felt the moist clinging of her kiss.

ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZA         
         

Page 151 Chapter Fourteen

"On the south wall of St Mary's Chapel, Glastonbury, the words Jesu Maria are carved into the stone. If these words are written in Greek,.." "...their value is 1080. In the crypt beneath the chapel there is an ancient well. There is also a well in the pre - historic buried chamber on which Chartres Cathedral is built, and the same feature is commonly found at other sites of sanctity.

The area of the Stonehenge sarsen circle with diameter 100.8 feet is 1080 square megalithic yards. Guy Underwood, the dowser, in his The Pattern of the Past shows plans of the remarkable pattern of underground water lines he detected below Stonehenge. He found that the site was an important centre of convergence for under-ground streams and fault lines from the surrounding area, and he located a powerful buried spring near the centre. Other dowsers who have investigated the site of Stonehenge are in general aggree-ment with Underwood's conclusions.

Mr B Smithett, Secretary of the Socxiety of Dowsers, writes that many practising dowsers, members of the Society and others, report the presence of underground water below old churches and other sacred sites. In fact, it is now believed by dowsers that not only churches, but all prehistoric stone circles, standing stones, chambered mounds and dolmens are placed above buried springs or at the junction of underground streams, and that their sites may have been determined by these considerations. Over the years a number of articles on this subject have appeared in the Society's Journal, and research among the records of local antiquarian societies reveal several others, the results in all cases being independently obtained. For example, in the 1933 Transactions of the Woolhope Club of Hereford an article by Mr Walter Pritchard describes how he watched a dowser trace the passage of a stream beneath Arthur's /

Page 152 / Stone, a dolmen at Dorstone, Hereford; he later investigated the megalithic Four Stones near Old Radnor, finding it to mark the intersection of two buried water courses. Underwood's observation, which has been confirmed by others, is that the current associated with sacred and megalithic sites reverses the direction of its flow in accordance with a monthly lunar cycle.

Here, the Zed Aliz Zed, had the scribe darken the door of an emphasize.

"...that the current associated with sacred and megalithic sites reverses the direction of its flow in accordance with a monthly lunar cycle."

"These results are obtained in many cases by professional men, engaged by local councils and building contractors to locate under-ground faults, lost waterpipes, drains, etc., who have developed a justifiable confidence in their own accuracy. On the subject of the connection between ancient sites and underground water they are in general agreement. Some important principle of ancient science and civilization is involved here, of which virtually nothing is now known. The solution of the mystery lies in the complete understanding of all the correspondences of the number 1080 and of the others that re-late to it, for they illuminate an aspect of reality which, for the lack of an adequate language, has for too long been allowed to remain beyond the comprehension of science.

In Revelation and in the apocalyptic works of the Old Testament particular emphasis is placed on the waters that flow beneath the holy city or temple. They play an active part both in the destruction of the old city and in the creation of the new. Wherever there is a legend of the Temple, it is said that the waters of the world spring from beneath it. Old maps show the four rivers of paradise as a cross within a circle with the holy city at the centre. Jung finds the arche-type of the New Jerusalem expressed in the cloister with a fountain at the centre. The formal gardens of Persia, which are laid out as figures of cosmic geometry, always surround a central spring of water. In a dry country this water is conveyed with great labour and in-genuity in culverts, often several miles in length from the lower slopes of the hillls. All known ancient cosmic temples, at Jerusalem, Hieropolis, Cnossos and elsewhere are found to have been built over extensive labyrinths of chambers and watercourses. F. Bligh Bond discovered a curious system of tunnels and culverts below Glaston-bury Abbey. Plato's Atlantis, which is a cosmic model, Carthage and other cities were arranged in concentric rings of land and water-ways. In Egypt, Babylon and China elaborate systems of canals were constructed on a geometrical pattern, particularly in the areas surrounding the great temples. The carefully contrived balance between areas of land and water was reflected in the pattern of waterpipes beneath the temple itself. The monks of Glastonbury made and maintained a wonderful canal system alongside the prehistoric / Page 153 / causeways of the country around the abbey, and these waterways have a mystical association with King Arthur's legend.

In the third chapter of Man and Temple Dr Patai gives an exellent account of the legends and rituals referring to the waters beneath the Temple of Jerusalem and at other cosmic centres. They were conceived as the female partner in the annually celebrated marriage between the waters of the earth and of the heavens. When fertilised, they conveyed benefits to all the world.

Quite a number of legends tell in an interesting variety of versions about this subterranean network of irrigation canals that issue from underneath the Temple and bring to each country its proper power to grow its particular assortment of fruits. If a tree were planted in the Temple over a spot whence the water-vein issued forth to a certain country, it would grow fruit peculiar to that country; this was known to King Solomon, who accordingly planted in the Temple specimens of fruit trees of the whole earth.

The waters that issued forth from the Temple had the wonderful property of bestowing fertility and health. Legends have it that as in days of old so again in the days of the Messiah "all the waters of creation" will again spring up from under the threshold of the Temple, will increase and grow mighty as they pour forth all over the land.'

The stone at the centre of the earth in the Temple of Jerusalem was supposed to press down the surging waters of the earth, and the Altar stone at Stonhenge, which could at one time have stood erect, may have had a similar function. The waters beneath the Temple were not mythical, nor are the stories of the advantages to be gained from their proper union with the cosmic element in any way exagerated. These legends are poetically true, they have a deep philosophical and psychological meaning and they recall a vanished world order founded on cosmic principles. But more than that, they record a former system of natural science, practised by men who understood the earth as a living creature, the mother of all her inhabitants, not only in a poetic sense but literally as a fact of nature. The prosperity of all life on the planet was considered to be a reflection of the earths own state of health and morale, which was naturally of the greatest concern to men, the intelligent parasites. According to the philosophy on which the forgotten science of antiquity is based, the earth must be regarded as an essentially female organism, being particu-larly susceptible to the influence of the moon, and craving seasonal intercourse with the fertilising solar shaft.

Every year therefore, the earth was made the bride of the heavens, the terrestrial flow was animated by the radiant power of the sun, Page 154 / all the correspondences of 1080 were brought together with those of 666; the opposites were united in the Temple as in Noah's Ark. At Jerusalem the great ceremony of the year, attended by vast, excited crowds, took place at the start of the rainy season, and was intended by vast, to promote the union between the upper and the lower waters. But its purpose was not simply to invoke the fertilising autumn rains, for the marriage of the elewments prompted a similar desire among the congregation at the Temple, which spread along the chain of magical correspondences, infecting all nature with the urge for union.

Evidently the Temple functioned as the generator and transmitter of a form of energy which was beneficial to the earth and all its in-habitants. This was not the belief of idiots or degenerate savages. To the Jews and to all the civilised people who possessed the institution of the Temple it was a self evident fact, which they percieved with their own eyes. A spirit was generated at the Temple; they saw the operation, felt its power and observed its effect in the increased fertility of the countryside. We may speak of sympathetic magic, mass delusion and invent other names for phenomena which we are not able to explain, but the fact is that the performances at the Temple led to the actual invocation of a spirit that provoked a physical reaction throughout nature.

The numbers with which we are dealing were once the instruments of elemental control. Their first and most essential reference is to the natural forces of the cosmos, to the spirits that are behind all manifestations of movement in wind and water, as well as in the less perceptible electro-magnetic currents of the earth and atmosphere, The earliest passage in the I Ching express the relationship between the principles in terms of cosmic forces. So it is in the oldest forms of myth and in the basic traditions of the cabala. The most ancient art, architecture, mythology is always more impersonal and funda-mental than that which came later . In the case of the I Ching, suc-cessive generations of scholars widened the interpretation of the symbols to provide canons of deportment and etiquette, their original elemental significance becoming obscure in the process.

The Temple was not merely a symbol of the cosmic order; it was an instrument designed to fuse the spirit of the sun, 666, with the soul of the earth, 1080. In the same way the waters and catcombs beneath the Temple were not intended simply to represent the water of inspiration as a monument to the sanctity of the spot, or for any other such picturesque purpose. They played a physical part in the process of fusion as the medium through which the current of fertility, raised in the Temple, was transmitted across the landscape. /

Page 155 As the waters beneath the Temple nourish the earth, so the spiritual water of revelation rises within the human mind. These two aspects of fertility were formerly linked with the power of the moon and classified under the number 1080. But this number, like all others has its dark side. The spirit of the waters..." "...1007), known to the cabalists as the bride..." "...= 1006, is also the mother of a hideous, elemental brood, the atavistic gods of the underworld, represented by St John as the beast from the bottomless pit (1081). In Ezekiel 8, the prophet descends through a secret door into a chamber below the Temple of Jerusalem 'and behold every form of creeping things, and abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel, portrayed upon the wall round about'. He hears a voice, 'Son of man, hast thou seen what the ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in the chambers of his imagery? for they say, the Lord seeth us not.' Here the sinister cavern beneath the Temple represents the deep recesses of the mind, inhabited by the carefully nurtured monsters of individual fantasy. But the beast in the Cretan labyrinth was no less real than the crocodiles that inhabited the subterranean vaults of Egyptian temples. That these creatures are also natives of the imagination is proved by the rumour, endemic in New York, that the city's sewers are haunted by giant alligators, a notion which is poetically true of all drains and tunnels, if not physically so in this particular case.

Under the regime of the Temple poetic or psychological reality was reproduced on the physical plane in a series of magical correspondences which we now find scarcely conceivable, for we are yet infants in the study of the mind, impeded by the linear and materialistic habits of thought to which we have been con-ditioned. Within each man lies the hidden city, the ideal model of the cosmos, a standard of reference in every department of life, com-posed of all the numbers in creation. This is the city of Plato's Republic:

'But perhaps there is a pattern set up in the heavens for one who desires to see it and, having seen it to have found one in himself,' "

 The scribe here added the word herself.

 Hearuponin, Alizzed took a left right, back to front, momentary aside.

GODS of the New Millennium Alan E Alford 1996

Page 270

" Since time immemorial, Jerusalem has been an important and sacred site, but the official reason for this is rather obscure. Its importance cannot be traced to any advantage / Page 271 / of geographic position. Nor was it important as a trade centre. In fact, it lay on the edge of a barren wilderness, and was quite remote from the major international trade routes. 59 Its natural water supplies were limited, and yet its earliest inhabitants went to enormous trouble to construct unusually massive underground 'water cisterns'..."

"...These massive water cisterns of ancient Jerusalem were well in excess of any possible requirements of an urban area which never covered more than three quarters of a square mile. Added to that, what possible motivation could there have been for people to congregate at this site when there were plenty of other less hostile places to live Put simply from a conventional geographical perspective, Jerusalem's location is a huge historical anomaly."

"...Ancient Jericho was built on the site of a natural spring (Ains es Sultan) which still pumps 1,000 gallons of water per minute - a factor which clearly influenced its location ..." 66

The scribe noted the note number of that from wherein the quoted reference surfaced

The scribe noted the note number of that from wherein the quoted reference surfaced

Brother Alan, a del, continued

Page 273 " A further ancient fortified site existed 12 miles north of Jreusalem. The modern town of Beitin marks the spot of ancient Beth-El, the 'House of God', where Jacob saw the angels of the Lord ascending and descending a stairway to Page 274 / heaven. 67 Half a mile to the east of Beitin, the site of Borj Beitin is described as 'one of the great viewpoints of Palestine',68 where the patriarch Abraham once pitched his tent. Nearby, the modern village of Deir Diwan marks the site of the ancient Ai , where excavations have dated the earliest levels to at least 3000 BC. All of these sites stand on a stony plateau watered by four springs..."

HOLY BIBLE Scofield References

Jeremiah B.C. 590

Page 809 8 x 9 + 72 7 + 2 = 9 Chapter 33 Verse 3 x 33 = 99

Fingerprints Of The Gods Graham Hancock 1995

Page 189 1 x 8 x 9 = 72 " The Sun and the Moon and the way of the Dead

Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacan,

  Having climbed more than 200 feet up a series of flights of stone stairs I reached the summit and looked towards the zenith. It was midday 19 May, and the sun was directly overhead, and the sun was directly overhead, as it would be again on 25 /

Page 190 / July. On these two dates, and not by accident, the west face of the pyramid was oriented precisely to the position of the setting sun. 6

  "A more curious but equally deliberate effect could be observed on the equinoxes. 20 March and 22 September. Then the passage of the sun's rays from south to north resulted at noon in the progressive obliteration of a perfectly straight shadow that ran along one of the lower stages of the western facade. The whole process, from complete shadow to complete illumination, took exactly 66.6 seconds. It had done so without fail, year - in year - out, ever since the pyramid had been built and would continue to do so until the giant edifice crumbled into dust. 7

What this meant of course, was that at least one of the many functions of the pyramid had been to serve as a 'perennial clock', precisely signalling the equinoxes and thus facilating calendar corrections as and when necessary for a people apparently obsessed, like the Maya, with the elapse and measuring of time. Another implication was that the master - builders of Teotihuacan must have possessed an enormouse body of astronomic and geodetic data and refferred to this data to set the Sun Pyramid at the precise orientation necessary to achieve the desired equinoctial effects."

CITY OF REVELATION John Michell 1972

Page 36 " St Augustine in The City of God also writes of the perfection of number 6, for 'in this did God make perfect all his works. Wherefore this number is not to be despised, but has the esteem apparently con-firmed by many places of scripture. Nor was it said in vain of God's works: "Thou madest all things in number, weight and measure." ' It is the unique property of number 6, on account of which it was held perfect, that it is both the sum and the product of all its factors excluding itself, for 1 + 2 + 3 = 6 and 1 x 2 x 3 = 6.

6 is the number of the cosmos, and the Greek word " "…sig-nifying the cosmic order, has the value by gematria of 600. The ancient astronomers adopted the mile as the unit which measures the cosmic intervals in terms of the number 6, and procured the follow-ing sacred numbers:

Diameter of sun = 864,000 miles ( 12 x 12 x 6000 )

Diameter of moon = 2160 miles ( 6 x 6 x 60 )

Diameter of earth = 7920 miles ( 12 x 660 )

Mean circumference of earth = 24,883.2 miles (12 x 12 x 12 x 12 x 1.2)

Speed of earth round sun = 66,600 miles per hour

Distance between earth and moon = 6 x 60 x 660 miles or 60 x earth's radius"

Zed Aliz Zed casts an oblique look, a squinting of the other eye bringing a re-focus.

Diameter of sun = 864,000 miles 8 + 6 + 4 = 18 1 + 8 = 9

Diameter of moon = 2160 miles 2 + 1 + 6 = 9

Diameter of earth = 7920 miles 7 + 9 + 2 = 18 1 + 8 = 9

Mean circumference of earth = 24,883.2 miles 2 + 4 + 8 + 8 + 3 + 2 = 27 2 + 7 = 9

Speed of earth round sun = 66,600 miles per hour 6 + 6 + 6 = 18 1 + 8 = 9

Distance between earth and moon = 6 x 60 x 660 miles = 237600" 2 + 3 + 7 + 6 = 18 1 + 8 = 9

Fingerprints Of The Gods Graham Hancock.1995

Page 190  "A more curious but equally deliberate effect could be observed on the equinoxes. 20 March and 22 September. Then the passage of the sun's rays from south to north resulted at noon in the progressive obliteration of a perfectly straight shadow that ran along one of the lower stages of the western facade. The whole process, from complete shadow to complete illumination, took exactly 66.6 seconds. It had done so without fail, year - in year - out, ever since the pyramid had been built and would continue to do so until the giant edifice crumbled into dust. 7

City Of Revelation John Michell 1972

Page 36 "Speed of earth round sun = 66,600 miles per hour 6 + 6 + 6 = 18 1 + 8 = 9

Distance between earth and moon = 6 x 60 x 660 miles = 237600 " 2 + 3 + 7 + 6 = 18 1 + 8 = 9

Fingerprints Of The Gods Graham Hancock 1995

Page 190 "...The whole process, from complete shadow to complete illumination, took exactly 66.6 seconds."

HOLY BIBLE Scofield References

Chapter 13

18 “ Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the num-ber of the beast: for it is the num-ber of a man; and his number is Six hundred three score and six ”

CITY OF REVELATION John Michell 1972

Page 137 Chapter Thirteen

"666

has been the subject of more comment and speculation than any other cabalistic number, principally on account

of the last verse in revelation 13:

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the num-ber of a man;

and his number is

six hundred threescore and six.'

In the Greek text the number is spelt in letters,… "

"…or 600, 60, 6, . ."

HOLY BIBLE Scofield References

Page 401 Kings Chapter 10 B.C. 992.

14 "Now the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was six hundred threescore and six talents"

Herein for good measure the Alizzed introduced a multiple retake.

The Lure and Romance of Alchemy C. J. S. Thompson 1990

Page 26 "…There is further evidence given in the Bible of the richness of the country in the precious metal, for it is recorded that the Queen of Sheba brought much gold and precious stones and /

Page 27 / gave to King Solomon 120 talents, a sum equivalent to £240,000. The navy of Hiram also brought gold from Ophir, and the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was 666 talents,… " "Page 26 Note È 1 Kings x, 10, 14."

FLYING TO 3000 B.C. Pierre Jeannerat 1957

Page 124 "…Enters the Queen of Sheba. "And she gave the king an hun-dred and twenty talents of gold, and of spices great abundance, and precious stones. . . .Now the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was six hundred and three score and six talents of gold;…"

HOLY BIBLE Scofield References

Page 380 Chapter 21 B.C. 1021

20 "And there was yet a battle in Gath, where was a man of great stature, that had on every hand six fingers, and on every foot six toes, four and twenty in number; and he also was born to the giant."

Here yon scribe writ this 6 + 6 + 6 + 6 = 24 and 2 + 4 = 6

Lost Cities Of Ancient Lemuria and The Pacific David Hatcher Childress 1988

    "What was most interesting to von Daniken, and to me, were the giant footprints of Tarawa. A book has even been written about them, entitled The Footprints of Tarawa (it is extracted from the Journal of the Polynesian Society, Vol 58, No 4, December 1949, Wellington, New Zealand, and written by I.G. Turbot). This book mentions a number of places where these footprints can be found in the Kiribatis, but the main spot is the village of Banreaba at a spot called Te Aba-n-Anti, the "Place of the Spirits," or Te Kananrabo, "the Holy place."

Here various footprints can clearly be seen in the volcanic stone, some of them so huge as to seem impossible. Most have six toes on each foot. The largest are about three feet long, easily twice as large as the foot of an especially tall person (though even short people can have big feet). The footprints are reported to be very clear, with the toes, heels and outline distinct: naturally rounded and curved like a normal footprint. They are certainly not natural rock formations coincidently formed into footprints.

The only other explanation other than that they are the actual footprints of giants is that they were chiseled into the rock by the islanders themselves for some unknown purpose. Reverend Scarborough points out in his letter to von Daniken, "If you have some idea that perhaps the islanders themselves have carefully carved these prints in the rocks . . . then you must ask yourself. Why? For what purpose should the islanders on sixteen islands undertake to manufacture marks in the hard rock? Bearing in mind that they have little or no tools, that would be nonesense. The local verbal customs say that they are footprints of the gods who came from heaven." 85

If we discard the theory of the footprints being carved, we must now examine the possibility of the footprints having been created by actual me(?) walking on still-elastic lava just prior to cooling. These men aparently had six toes and were probably ten to twelve feet tall. When did this hypothetical walk take place? According to uni- / Page 194 / formitarian geology, millions of years ago. Such a fantastic date is usually applied to other anomalistic footprints such as those of men and dinosaurs walking together in river beds in Texas and other places. After all, since it is a "scientific fact" that dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago, then the tracks of a man with those of a dinosaur must be at least 65 million years old.

"In light of cataclysmic geology, the footprints of a man with those of a dinosaur could be measured in thousands of years, rather than millions. In those terms, the giant footprints of Kiribati might be as young as 24,000 years old..." "...It is interesting to note that "lava walking" is still practised on Hawaii to this day.

As to giants with six toes who are twelve feet tall, Frank Edwards reports in his book, Stranger Than Science,.." that in 1833 soldiers digging a pit for apowder magazine at Lompock Rancho, California (near San Luis Obispo)... ""...found the skeleton of a man about twelve feet tall..." Edwards goes on to sayin his book:..."

Near Crittenden, Arizona, in 1891, workmen excavating for a commercial building came upon a huge stone sarcophagus eight feet below the surface.The contractors called in expert help, and the sarcophagus was opened to reveal a granite mummy case which had once held the body of a human being more than twelve feet tall-a human with six toes, according to the carving of the case. But the body has been buried so many thousands of yers that it has long since turned to dust. "86

So we suddenly see a correlation with six-toed giants on the west coast of North America with six toed giants leaving footprints in ancient stata in the Kiribati Islands."

Page 11

Alizzed strikes a double wammy

Page v "...The Bible is a book of books. Sixty-six books make up the one Book. Considered with reference to the unity of the one book the separate books may be regarded as chapters. But that is but one side of the truth, for each of the sixty-six books is complete in itself, and has its own theme and analysis."

FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS Graham Hancock 1995  Page number 359 omitted Place of the Beginning Giza, Egypt, I6 March I993, 3.30 p. m.. "It was mid afternoon by the time I left the Great Pyramid. Retracing the route that Santha and I had followed the night before when we had climbed the monument, I walked eastwards along the northern face, southwards along the flank of the eastern face, clambered over mounds of rubble and ancient tombs that clustered closely in this part of the necropolis, and came out on to the sand-covered limestone bedrock of the Giza plateau, which sloped down towards the south and east. At the bottom of this long gentle slope, about half a kilometre from the south-eastern comer of the Great Pyramid, the Sphinx crouched in his rock-hewn pit. Sixty-six feet high and more than 240 feet long, with a head measuring 13 feet 8 inches wide,' he was, by a considerable margin, the largest single piece of sculpture in the world - and the most renowned:       zazazazazazazAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZazazazazazazaz   NUMEROLOGY Geddes and Grosset 1999. Introduction. Page 5 "Nunerology is the name given to an ancient method of study-ing numbers that has been in use for thousands of years." "…The most popular form of numerology in use today is based on the work of Py-thagoras, the famous Greek mathematician and philosopher who lived during the sixth century bc." "…It was Pythagora's belief that numbers were the first of all things in nature. It was his belief that numbers were the basis of everything, in the natural, spiritual and scientific world. He believed that everything could be reduced to mathematical terms and that everything had a numerical value. Through studying the world in numerical form, he sought to achieve greater understanding of the world he lived in. Pythagoras, who believed that numbers created order and beauty, founded a school for students to follow his philosophy, and this was known as the Italic or Pythagorean School." Page 6 "…Pythagoras formulated the concept called the Music of the Spheres', based on the idea that all the planets in the universe formed a harmonious whole consisting of a mu-sical chorus. He discovered that there was a relationship between sound and numbers, and developed this discov-ery to form his metaphysical concept. He suggested that every planet was a certain distance from a central point in the universe and that if an invisible string connected each planet to the central point, when plucked the string would emit a certain tone or vibration. Each sound or vibration could be associated with a particular number. He also be-lieved that the sound or vibration of the universe dictated by the planets would have a strong influ-ence on the character of an individual born at that particu-lar time. Numerologists believe that the numbers one to nine have specific characteristics , and these characteristics are the basis for the methods of analysis described in this book. The numbers one to nine are the only numbers that are / Page 7 / believed to be significant to numerology. All numbers greater than nine can be reduced to a single digit by the process of fadic addition, for example: 12 is reduced to 3 by adding 1 and 2; 49 is reduced to 4 by adding 4 and 9 which equals 13 and subsequently adding 1 and 3 to make 4." Page 7  "All numbers greater than nine can be reduced to a single digit by the process of fadic addition, for example: 12 is reduced to 3 by adding 1 and 2; 49 is reduced to 4 by adding 4 and 9 which equals 13 and subsequently adding 1 and 3 to make 4."   THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN Page 257  "..."Oh, no," the Hofrat demurred. "It was a pretty clumsy piece of work, I don't flatter myself I hit her off very well we had, I suppose, twenty sittings. What can you do with a rum sort of face like that? You might think she would be easy to capture, with those hyperborean cheek-bones, and eyes like cracks in a loaf of bread. Yes, there's something about her-if you get the detail right, you botch the ensemble. Riddle of the sphinx. Do you know her? It would probably be better to paint her from memory instead of having her sit. Did you say you knew her? "..."   ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZA