Puslapio vaizdai
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white man, and saw no one but natives except when his superior officers came to see how he was getting on. Ultimately the difficulties of making the nine miles of road through precipitous mountain country were overcome, and although it was not designed originally for motor traffic, Lord Kitchener, the first Commander-in-Chief to penetrate these mountain fastnesses, drove his motor-car easily all over this road through the wild precipitous country.

All this happened about twenty years ago. The problem is more than ever important now that the advent of the motor-lorry has altered the conditions of warfare and of commerce. Much development to the existing roads, adding width, reducing gradients, and improving the surface is involved; fords over streams, which could be traversed by laden animals or carts, must now be crossed by adequate bridges. But, unlike a railway, such a road can be used by the nomad hordes of wan

dering traders, whose goods are still dependent, beyond the border, on camel and donkey, but who benefit by our improved traffic conditions and by the increased protection which recent warfare has produced on the frontier routes.

Still the same wedge-shaped masses of mountain territory exist between these routes, and the same crude ideas of right and wrong prevail. A brave lady, Mrs Starr, has recently related to the world in simple language her experience of some of these people and their land, and has shown us that among them there are some kindly natures susceptible of gratitude. It may take many years of patient dealing to convince them of our desire for goodwill, and of our intention to make our roads not only a pathway for war-though this they must be of necessity-but of peace and prosperity. But if we are true to our high ideals, the influence will tell in the longrun, and the roads will remain, as Alexander's have done, for all time.

AN AFFAIR OF SOME GRAVITY.

BY T. B. SIMPSON.

"That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me :
To him my tale I teach."

-COLERIDGE, The Ancient Mariner.

WHEN I go up to London on business I always stay in a hotel, and somehow a hotel is the kind of place in which I never feel quite at home. Some people, I know, are so constituted that they do not feel at home anywhere else, but I am not like that. Domesticity is my strong line, and there is no moment so pleasant to me in the whole day as the one which occurs each evening when I have returned from the office and my wife pulls forward the arm-chair and gives me my slippers in front of the fire. But, of course, my wife never comes with me when I go to London. She has suggested once or twice lately that it is a long time since she has been there she has never seen the presented ; moving stairways on the Tubes, she says, and she would like to go to the Military Tournament. But I give her no encouragement; she would only find it very unsettling.

So it was with the usual strange, rather restless feeling that on the evening of my arrival I took a seat in the lounge of my hotel, in order to pass the hour or so which must elapse before dinner. There was the usual crowd of people

coming and going. They were of every kind, and making a great deal of noise; several of the women were smoking, as I regretted to observe, and one or two were drinking cocktails. I could not help thinking how the times had changed since I was a young man, when, of course, women drank only in private. The corner I was sitting in was a quiet one, and there was no one close to me except a middle-aged man at an adjoining table. When I had looked all round at every one else, I found my eyes resting on him. Certainly there was nothing very remarkable about him. He was cleanshaven, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he the appearance of having been so recently. He had a reflective, somewhat melancholy air, and, although he wasn't exactly shabby, his appearance certainly suggested that he had seen better days. He must have felt that I was looking at him, for he turned and gazed at me. I make point of never staring at people, so I at once looked away. Besides, something told me that this was the kind of man who talks to strangers, and

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Good evening, sir," he said. Instantly resolving that, while I would not on any account tell this man anything about myself or my business, far less lend him money or play cards with him, I must still be reasonably civil, I returned his greeting.

"I see that, like myself, you are stranded alone among these scenes of thoughtless gaiety, if I am not mistaken," he went on, sweeping his arm round the little groups of chatterers.

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"Why, yes," I said, thinking it well to add, that is, for the present."

"Ah, happy man, you expect a companion. Nothing is more melancholy to my mind than to be solitary amidst so much good cheer. But such is my lot. Perhaps you will allow me to while away a few moments with you until your friend appears."

"I shall be delighted," I said, trying in vain to sound as though I were.

But he talked on, without paying very much attention to my replies.

"Did it ever strike you," he asked, "how closely a place like this resembles life?”

I couldn't say it had, and didn't.

when he sings of this gilded caravanserai, whose swinging doors are open Night and Day'? Isn't that just life? We turn up in the hotel, nobody knows where from, and proceed to pay a short visit. Some of us get better rooms than others, and some have more luggage. We must all depart, some one day, others the next; and not all succeed in paying their bills. But as, of course, the visitors leave no address, it doesn't signify."

He paused.

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fully.

Quite," I said, rather doubt

"And yet, mark you," he continued, infusing more spirit into his words, "time was when I was a man much too busy, indeed I may even say too important, to spare a moment to idleness in such a place as this. No, sir; those were the days when I could not have afforded to enter into conversation with-pardon my so describing you-a mere stranger... however attractive," he added, after a melancholy pause.

"Not at all," I mumbled, at a loss for words.

"Yes," he continued moodily, his lack-lustre eye fixed in a retrospective gaze; "if you will bear with me for a moment I will tell you one remarkable incident in my past which will let you know the kind of man I was. But this is dry work. Waiter!"

And, hailing a passing attendant, he looked for a moment

"What does the poet say distinctly less retrospective.

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I thought I had, and said so. After I had taken my degree at Cambridge I acted for a number of years as his principal assistant and confidential adviser. He made his early reputation, you will remember, by his daring investigations into the true nature of π, in the course of which he reduced that symbol to its millionth decimal place. It was for that he received an LL.D. from Wigan. But he was long past that stage when I first came in touch with him, and when I was actually working under him he was chiefly engaged in investigating the phenomena of gravity and levitation."

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"If you will be so good," he concluded, and, adding a tablespoonful of water to his whisky, he drank my health with quite an old-world air.

I registered a firm resolve that no amount of references to dryness would extract another drink from me, and he continued his narrative,

"As I was saying, I was working with Parke Hopkinson, and we were occupied in research of the most varied, intricate, and fascinating character. You are not, I think, a man of science?"

"No," I replied, with perfect truth.

"Happily, it is possible to indicate the broad essentials of what I have to relate without indulging in technicalities, and such few as I may find it necessary to use will easily be understood by one of your ready apprehension."

He was a peculiar fellow in some ways, but I could not help liking him a little. He expressed himself well, and the man was undeniably a gentleman, albeit rather shabby.

"Parke Hopkinson was not only, as you doubtless remember, a man of science in the narrow modern sense, but an eminent linguist, and a scholar of wide general learning. He by no means despised these mediæval writers whom some are content to dismiss as mere

astrologers or magicians, and he devoted many hours of his scanty leisure to translating

the works of Epistaxis of Paphlagonia into Russian."

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Why?" I asked, in order to show an intelligent interest.

"Because, of course, they are more alive to the value of that kind of thing in Russia than they are here; or were, I should say. But, as I was going to observe when you interrupted me "

Here I determined not to show any more intelligent interest than I could help. The man might run down of his own accord. But instead he only ran on. However, from this point in my narrative, or rather in his, I think it well to give merely my recollection of what he said, without my comments, which, truth to tell, really do not form an essential element in the story.

"It was in one of these moth-eaten old folios in dog Latin that Parke Hopkinson found the germ of the greatest discovery he ever made, which was subsequently to cost him his life.

from his power of making things float away from the surface of the earth, sometimes causing them to rise directly into the air, sometimes making them move rapidly through it transversely. Baldermann's modern commentators usually suppose that this was mere superstition or imagination; but Parke Hopkinson, after studying the formulæ, came to the conclusion that he had really discovered a means of counteracting the force of gravity.

"So with all the resources of modern science and of his own great abilities-and, may I add, my own not altogether ineffective assistance ?-he set to work to rediscover the secret. Just imagine what success would mean. The earth, as you know, revolves on its axis once in every twenty-four hours. If you could remove the influence of gravity from anything and simply suspend it, like Mohammed's coffin, for twentyfour hours, the earth would revolve beneath it, and, of "You know what the force course, in that time it would of gravity is, I suppose? travel round the world. Apply Yes, I thought you would. the same principle to persons, Well, of course, there is a per- and, given a few improvements petual pull on everything and here and adjustments there, everybody towards the centre you would entirely supersede of the earth. There is no up such cumbrous means of travel and down really. Things are as ship, railroad, or even aeroup the farther away they are plane. Simply levitate yourfrom the earth's centre, down self for an hour or two, and the nearer they come to it. there you are. Of course, Now it seems that one Albrecht science could provide one with Baldermann of Magdeburg, one the remotest calculations as to of the most celebrated natural the length of time necessary magicians of the Middle Ages, for any particular distance, won tremendous celebrity and to get direction, by an

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