“There are clues that offer themselves--that come, perhaps in sleep, perhaps by direct experiment, and, regardless of space, give hints----”
“Psychometry?” I asked, remembering a word just coined.
He shrugged his shoulders. “All objects radiate,” he said, “no matter how old they are. Their radiation never ceases till they are disintegrated; and if you are sensitive you can receive their messages. If you have certain powers, due to relation and affinity, you may interpret them. There is an instantaneous linking-up--in picture-form--impossible to mistake.”
“You knew, then, she was somewhere on the earth--waiting for you?” I repeated, wondering what was coming next. That night in the Edinburgh lodgings, when he had been “searching,” came back to me.
“For _us_,” he corrected me. “It was something from a Private Collection that gave me the clue by which I finally traced her--something from the older sands.”
Julius nodded. “Egypt, for all of us, was a comparatively recent section--nearer to To-day, I mean. Many a time has each of us been back there--Thebes, Memphis, even as lately ago as Alexandria at its zenith, learning, developing, reaping what ages before we sowed--for in Egypt the knowledge that was _our_ knowledge survived longer than anywhere else. Yet never, unfortunately, returning together, and thus never finding the opportunity to achieve the great purpose of our meeting.”
He smiled again at the eagerness that again betrayed me.
“This old world,” he resumed quietly, “is strewn, of course, with the remnants of what once has been our bodies--‘suits of clothes’ we have inhabited, used, and cast aside. Here and there, from one chance or another, some of these may have been actually preserved. The Egyptians, for instance, went to considerable trouble to ensure that they should survive as long as possible, thus assisting memory later.”
“As you wander through the corridors of a modern museum,” he continued imperturbably, “you may even look through a glass covering at the very tenement your soul has occupied at an earlier stage! Probably, of course, without the faintest whisper of recognition, yet, possibly, with just that acute and fascinated interest which _is_ the result of stirring memory. For the ‘old clothes’ still radiate vibrations that belong to _you;_ the dried blood and nerves once thrilled with emotions, spiritual or otherwise, that were you--the link may be recoverable. You think it is wild nonsense! I tell you it is in the best sense scientific. And, similarly,” he added, “you may chance upon some such remnant of another--the body of ancient friend or enemy.” He paused abruptly in his extraordinary recital. “I had that good fortune,” he added, “if you like to call it so.”