down against the stagnant Suez. One
felt that he had risen slowly into our world of hard air and sun out of
the vast sweltering ooze of it.

He spoke English with a certain care in the selection of the words, but
with ease and an absence of effort, as though languages were instinctive
to him--as though he could speak any language. And he impressed one with
this same effortless facility in all the things he did.

It is necessary to try to understand this, because it explains the
conception everybody got of the creature, when they saw him in charge of
Rodman. I am using precisely the descriptive words; he was exclusively
in charge of Rodman, as a jinn in an Arabian tale might have been in
charge of a king's son.

The creature was servile--with almost a groveling servility. But one
felt that this servility resulted from something potent and secret. One
looked to see Rodman take Solomon's ring out of his waistcoat pocket.

I suppose there is no longer any doubt about the fact that Rodman was
one of those gigantic human intelligences who sometimes appear in the
world, and by their immense conceptions dwarf all human knowledge--a
sort of mental monster that we feel nature has no right to produce. Lord
Bayless Truxley said that Rodman was some generations in advance of
the time; and Lord Bayless Truxley was, beyond question, the greatest
authority on synthetic chemistry in the world.

Rodman was rich and, everybody supposed, indolent; no one ever thought
very much about him until he published his brochure on the scientific
manufacture of precious stones. Then instantly everybody with any
pretension to a knowledge of synthetic chemistry turned toward him.

The brochure startled the world.

It proposed to adapt the luster and beauty of jewels to commercial uses.
We were being content with crude imitation colors in our commercial
glass, when we could quite as easily have the actual structure and the
actual luster of the jewel in it. We were painfully hunting over the
earth, and in its bowels, for a few crystals and prettily colored stones
which we hoarded and treasured, when in a manufacturing laboratory we
could easily produce them, more perfect than nature, and in unlimited
quantity.

Now, if you want to understand what I am printing here about Rodman,
you must think about this thing as a scientific possibility and not as
a fantastic notion. Take, for example, Rodman's address before the
Sorbonne, or his report to the