mangy hermit with his rock-roweled ribs and stinking water-skin.
And I gained back, neither to Nephi nor the Nile, but to -

But here I must pause in the narrative, my reader, in order to
explain a few things and make the whole matter easier to your

comprehension. This is necessary, because my time is short in which
to complete my jacket-memoirs. In a little while, in a very little

while, they are going to take me out and hang me. Did I have the
full time of a thousand lifetimes, I could not complete the last

details of my jacket experiences. Wherefore I must briefen the
narrative.

First of all, Bergson is right. Life cannot be explained in
intellectual terms. As Confucius said long ago: "When we are so

ignorant of life, can we know death?" And ignorant of life we truly
are when we cannot explain it in terms of the understanding. We

know life only phenomenally, as a savage may know a dynamo; but we
know nothing of life noumenonally, nothing of the nature of the

intrinsic stuff of life.
Secondly, Marinetti is wrong when he claims that matter is the only

mystery and the only reality. I say and as you, my reader, realize,
I speak with authority--I say that matter is the only illusion.

Comte called the world, which is tantamount to matter, the great
fetich, and I agree with Comte.

It is life that is the reality and the mystery. Life is vastly
different from mere chemic matter fluxing in high modes of notion.

Life persists. Life is the thread of fire that persists through all
the modes of matter. I know. I am life. I have lived ten thousand

generations. I have lived millions of years. I have possessed many
bodies. I, the possessor of these many bodies, have persisted. I

am life. I am the unquenched spark ever flashing and astonishing
the face of time, ever working my will and wreaking my passion on

the cloddy aggregates of matter, called bodies, which I have
transiently inhabited.

For look you. This finger of mine, so quick with sensation, so
subtle to feel, so delicate in its multifarious dexterities, so firm

and strong to crook and bend or stiffen by means of cunning
leverages--this finger is not I. Cut it off. I live. The body is

mutilated. I am not mutilated. The spirit that is I is whole.
Very well. Cut off all my fingers. I am I. The spirit is entire.

Cut off both hands. Cut off both arms at the shoulder-sockets. Cut
off both legs at the hip-sockets. And I, the unconquerable and

indestructible I, survive. Am I any the less for these mutilations,
for these subtractions of the flesh? Certainly not. Clip my hair.

Shave from me with sharp razors my lips, my nose, my ears--ay, and
tear out the eyes of me by the roots; and there, mewed in that

featureless skull that is attached to a hacked and mangled torso,
there in that cell of the chemic flesh, will still be I,

unmutilated, undiminished.
Oh, the heart still beats. Very well. Cut out the heart, or,

better, fling the flesh-remnant into a machine of a thousand blades
and make mincemeat of it--and I, I, don't you understand, all the

spirit and the mystery and the vital fire and life of me, am off and
away. I have not perished. Only the body has perished, and the

body is not I.
I believe Colonel de Rochas was correct when he asserted that under

the compulsion of his will he sent the girl Josephine, while she was
in hypnotic trance, back through the eighteen years she had lived,

back through the silence and the dark ere she had been born, back to
the light of a previous living when she was a bed-ridden old man,

the ex-artilleryman, Jean-Claude Bourdon. And I believe that
Colonel de Rochas did truly hypnotize this resurrected shade of the

old man and, by compulsion of will, send him back through the
seventy years of his life, back into the dark and through the dark

into the light of day when he had been the wicked old woman,
Philomene Carteron.

Already, have I not shown you, my reader, that in previous times,
inhabiting various cloddy aggregates of matter, I have been Count

Guillaume de Sainte-Maure, a mangy and namelesshermit of Egypt, and
the boy Jesse, whose father was captain of forty wagons in the great

westward emigration. And, also, am I not now, as I write these
lines, Darrell Sanding, under sentence of death in Folsom Prison and

one time professor of agronomy in the College of Agriculture of the
University of California?

Matter is the great illusion. That is, matter manifests itself in
form, and form is apparitional. Where, now, are the crumbling rock-

cliffs of old Egypt where once I laired me like a wild beast while I
dreamed of the City of God? Where, now, is the body of Guillaume de

Sainte-Maure that was thrust through on the moonlit grass so long
ago by the flame-headed Guy de Villehardouin? Where, now, are the

forty great wagons in the circle at Nephi, and all the men and women
and children and lean cattle that sheltered inside that circle? All

such things no longer are, for they were forms, manifestations of
fluxing matter ere they melted into the flux again. They have

passed and are not.
And now my argument becomes plain. The spirit is the reality that

endures. I am spirit, and I endure. I, Darrell Standing, the
tenant of many fleshly tenements, shall write a few more lines of

these memoirs and then pass on my way. The form of me that is my
body will fall apart when it has been sufficiently hanged by the

neck, and of it naught will remain in all the world of matter. In
the world of spirit the memory of it will remain. Matter has no

memory, because its forms are evanescent, and what is engraved on
its forms perishes with the forms.

One word more ere I return to my narrative. In all my journeys
through the dark into other lives that have been mine I have never

been able to guide any journey to a particular destination. Thus
many new experiences of old lives were mine before ever I chanced to

return to the boy Jesse at Nephi. Possibly, all told, I have lived
over Jesse's experiences a score of times, sometimes taking up his

career when he was quite small in the Arkansas settlements, and at
least a dozen times carrying on past the point where I left him at

Nephi. It were a waste of time to detail the whole of it; and so,
without prejudice to the verity of my account, I shall skip much

that is vague and tortuous and repetitional, and give the facts as I
have assembled them out of the various times, in whole and part, as

I relived them.
CHAPTER XIII

Long before daylight the camp at Nephi was astir. The cattle were
driven out to water and pasture. While the men unchained the wheels

and drew the wagons apart and clear for yoking in, the women cooked
forty breakfasts over forty fires. The children, in the chill of

dawn, clustered about the fires, sharing places, here and there,
with the last relief of the night-watch waitingsleepily for coffee.

It requires time to get a large train such as ours under way, for
its speed is the speed of the slowest. So the sun was an hour high

and the day was already uncomfortably hot when we rolled out of
Nephi and on into the sandy barrens. No inhabitant of the place saw

us off. All chose to remain indoors, thus making our departure as
ominous as they had made our arrival the night before.

Again it was long hours of parching heat and biting dust, sage-brush
and sand, and a land accursed. No dwellings of men, neither cattle

nor fences, nor any sign of human kind, did we encounter all that
day; and at night we made our wagon-circle beside an empty stream,

in the damp sand of which we dug many holes that filled slowly with
water seepage.

Our subsequent journey is always a broken experience to me. We made
camp so many times, always with the wagons drawn in circle, that to