You must know that these are the islands of the
mind-readers."

Such were the circumstances of my introduction to this extraordinary
people. The official interpreter being charged by virtue of his office
with the first entertainment of shipwrecked members of the talking
nations, I became his guest, and passed a number of days under his roof
before going out to any considerable extent among the people. My first
impression had been the somewhat oppressive one that the power to read
the thoughts of others could be possessed only by beings of a superior
order to man. It was the first effort of the interpreter to disabuse me
of this notion. It appeared from his account that the experience of the
mind-readers was a case simply of a slight acceleration, from special
causes, of the course of universal human evolution, which in time was
destined to lead to the disuse of speech and the substitution of direct
mental vision on the part of all races. This rapid evolution of these
islanders was accounted for by their peculiar origin and circumstances.

Some three centuries before Christ, one of the Parthian kings of
Persia, of the dynasty of the Arsacid, undertook a persecution of the
soothsayers and magicians in his realms. These people were credited
with supernatural powers by popular prejudice, but in fact were merely
persons of special gifts in the way of hypnotizing, mind-reading,
thought transference, and such arts, which they exercised for their own
gain.

Too much in awe of the soothsayers to do them outright violence, the
king resolved to banish them, and to this end put them, with their
families, on ships and sent them to Ceylon. When, however, the fleet was
in the neighborhood of that island, a great storm scattered it, and one
of the ships, after being driven for many days before the tempest, was
wrecked upon one of an archipelago of uninhabited islands far to the
south, where the survivors settled. Naturally, the posterity of the
parents possessed of such peculiar gifts had developed extraordinary
psychical powers.

Having set before them the end of evolving a new and advanced order
of humanity, they had aided the development of these powers by a rigid
system of stirpiculture. The result was that, after a few centuries,
mind-reading became so general that language fell into disuse as a means
of communicating ideas. For many generations the power of speech still
remained voluntary, but gradually the vocal organs had b