ct.

"Next night, when we were pigging it at the Geant cabane, he started
again on the same tack. He asked me how I accounted for the fact that
animals could find their way back over great tracts of unknown country.
I said I supposed it was the homing instinct.

"'Rubbish, man,' he said. 'That's only another name for the puzzle,
not an explanation. There must be some reason for it. They must KNOW
something that we cannot understand. Tie a cat in a bag and take it
fifty miles by train and it will make its way home. That cat has some
clue that we haven't.'

"I was tired and sleepy, and told him that I did not care a rush about
the psychology of cats. But he was not to be snubbed, and went on
talking.

"'How if Space is really full of things we cannot see and as yet do not
know? How if all animals and some savages have a cell in their brain
or a nerve which responds to the invisible world? How if all Space be
full of these landmarks, not material in our sense, but quite real? A
dog barks at nothing, a wild beast makes an aimless circuit. Why?
Perhaps because Space is made up of corridors and alleys, ways to
travel and things to shun? For all we know, to a greater intelligence
than ours the top of Mont Blanc may be as crowded as Piccadilly Circus.'

"But at that point I fell asleep and left Hollond to repeat his
questions to a guide who knew no English and a snoring porter.

"Six months later, one foggy January afternoon, Hollond rang me up at
the Temple and proposed to come to see me that night after dinner. I
thought he wanted to talk Alpine shop, but he turned up in Duke Street
about nine with a kit-bag full of papers. He was an odd fellow to look
at--a yellowish face with the skin stretched tight on the cheek-bones,
clean-shaven, a sharp chin which he kept poking forward, and deep-set,
greyish eyes. He was a hard fellow, too, always in pretty good
condition, which was remarkable considering how he slaved for nine
months out of the twelve. He had a quiet, slow-spoken manner, but that
night I saw that he was considerably excited.

"He said that he had come to me because we were old friends. He
proposed to tell me a tremendous secret. 'I must get another mind to
work on it or I'll go crazy. I don't want a scientist. I want a plain
man.'

"Then he fixed me with a look like a tragic actor's. 'Do you remember
that talk we had in August at Chamonix--about Space? I daresay you
thought I was playi