eeks.
Yet have I talked in simplicity and straightness, as a man may well talk
who has lived life from the ships of Tostig Lodbrog and the roof of
Brunanbuhr across the world to Jerusalem and back again. And straight
talk and simple I gave Sulpicius Quirinius, when I went away into Syria
to report to him of the various matters that had been at issue in
Jerusalem.

CHAPTER XVIII

Suspended animation is nothing new, not alone in the vegetable world and
in the lower forms of animal life, but in the highly evolved, complex
organism of man himself. A cataleptic trance is a cataleptic trance, no
matter how induced. From time immemorial the fakir of India has been
able voluntarily to induce such states in himself. It is an old trick of
the fakirs to have themselves buried alive. Other men, in similar
trances, have misled the physicians, who pronounced them dead and gave
the orders that put them alive under the ground.

As my jacket experiences in San Quentin continued I dwelt not a little on
this problem of suspended animation. I remembered having read that the
far northern Siberian peasants made a practice of hibernating through the
long winters just as bears and other wild animals do. Some scientist
studied these peasants and found that during these periods of the "long
sleep" respiration and digestion practically ceased, and that the heart
was at so low tension as to defy detection by ordinary layman's
examination.

In such a trance the bodily processes are so near to absolute suspension
that the air and food consumed are practically negligible. On this
reasoning, partly, was based my defiance of Warden Atherton and Doctor
Jackson. It was thus that I dared challenge them to give me a hundred
days in the jacket. And they did not dare accept my challenge.

Nevertheless I did manage to do without water, as well as food, during my
ten-days' bouts. I found it an intolerable nuisance, in the deeps of
dream across space and time, to be haled back to the sordid present by a
despicable prison doctor pressing water to my lips. So I warned Doctor
Jackson, first, that I intended doing without water while in the jacket;
and next, that I would resist any efforts to compel me to drink.

Of course we had our little struggle; but after several attempts Doctor
Jackson gave it up. Thereafter the space occupied in Darrell Standing's
life by a jacket-bout was scarcely more than a few ticks of the clock.
Immediately I