In vain and often I asked him
this very question. In vain he tried to describe in words that mental
image of something he had never seen but which nevertheless he was able
to handle in such masterly fashion as to bring confusion upon me
countless times in the course of play.

I can only contemplate such exhibitions of will and spirit and conclude,
as I so often conclude, that precisely there resides reality. The spirit
only is real. The flesh is phantasmagoria and apparitional. I ask you
how--I repeat, I ask you _how_ matter or flesh in any form can play chess
on an imaginary board with imaginary pieces, across a vacuum of thirteen
cell spanned only with knuckle-taps?

CHAPTER XV

I was once Adam Strang, an Englishman. The period of my living, as near
as I can guess it, was somewhere between 1550 and 1650, and I lived to a
ripe old age, as you shall see. It has been a great regret to me, ever
since Ed Morrell taught me the way of the little death, that I had not
been a more thorough student of history. I should have been able to
identity and place much that is obscure to me. As it is, I am compelled
to grope and guess my way to times and places of my earlier existences.

A peculiar thing about my Adam Strang existence is that I recollect so
little of the first thirty years of it. Many times, in the jacket, has
Adam Strang recrudesced, but always he springs into being full-statured,
heavy-thewed, a full thirty years of age.

I, Adam Strang, invariably assume my consciousness on a group of low,
sandy islands somewhere under the equator in what must be the western
Pacific Ocean. I am always at home there, and seem to have been there
some time. There are thousands of people on these islands, although I am
the only white man. The natives are a magnificent breed, big-muscled,
broad-shouldered, tall. A six-foot man is a commonplace. The king, Raa
Kook, is at least six inches above six feet, and though he would weigh
fully three hundred pounds, is so equitably proportioned that one could
not call him fat. Many of his chiefs are as large, while the women are
not much smaller than the men.

There are numerous islands in the group, over all of which Raa Kook is
king, although the cluster of islands to the south is restive and
occasionally in revolt. These natives with whom I live are Polynesian, I
know, because their hair is straight and black. Their skin is a sun-warm
golden-brown. Their speech,