ventured so far as to allow me to remain dead, or in a state of suspended vitality, for three days.
It took four hours to bring me back.
Once, he superinduced lockjaw; but the agony of dying was so great that I positively refused to
undergo similar experiments. The easiest deaths were by asphyxiation, such as drowning,
strangling, and suffocation by gas; while those by morphine, opium, cocaine and chloroform,
were not at all hard.
Another time, after being suffocated, he kept me in cold storage for three months, not permitting
me to freeze or decay. This was without my knowledge, and I was in a great fright on
discovering the lapse of time. I became afraid of what he might do with me when I lay dead, my
alarm being increased by the predilection he was beginning to betray towards vivisection. The
A THOUSAND DEATHS
7
last time I was resurrected, I discovered that he had been tampering with my breast. Though he
had carefully dressed and sewed the incisions up, they were so severe that I had to take to my
bed for some time. It was during this convalescence that I evolved the plan by which I ultimately
escaped.
While feigning unbounded enthusiasm in the work, I asked and received a vacation from my
moribund occupation. During this period I devoted myself to laboratory work, while he was too
deep in the vivisection of the many animals captured by the blacks to take notice of my work.
It was on these two propositions that I constructed my theory: First, electrolysis, or the
decomposition of water into its constituent gases by means of electricity; and, second, by the
hypothetical existence of a force, the converse of gravitation, which Astor has named “apergy”.
Terrestrial attraction, for instance, merely draws objects together but does not combine them;
hence, apergy is merely repulsion. Now, atomic or molecular attraction not only draws objects
together but integrates them; and it was the converse of this, or a disintegrative force, which I
wished to not only discover and produce, but to direct at will. Thus, the molecules of hydrogen
and oxygen reacting on each other, separate and create new molecules, containing both elements
and forming water. Electrolysis causes these molecules to split up and resume their original
condition, producing the two gases separately. The force I wished to find must not only do this
with two, but with all elements, no matter in what compounds they exist. If I could then entice
my father within its radius, he would be instantly disintegrated and sent flying to the four
quarters, a mass of isolated elements.
It must not be understood that this force, which I finally came to control, annihilated matter; it
merely annihilated form. Nor, as I soon discovered, had it any effect on inorganic structure; but
to all organic form it was absolutely fatal. This partiality puzzled me at first, though had I
stopped to think deeper I would have seen through it. Since the number of atoms in organic
molecules is far greater than in the most complex mineral molecules, organic compounds are
characterised by their instability and the ease with which they are split up by physical forces and
chemical reagents.
By two powerful batteries, connected with magnets constructed specially for this purpose, two
tremendous forces were projected. Considered apart from each other, they were perfectly
harmless; but they accomplished their purpose by focusing at an invisible point in mid-air. After
practically demonstrating its success, besides narrowly escaping being blown into nothingness, I
laid my trap. Concealing the magnets, so that their force made the whole space of my chamber
doorway a field of death, and placing by my couch a button by which I could throw on the
current from the storage batteries, I climbed into bed.
The blackies still guarded my sleeping quarters, one relieving the other at midnight. I turned on
the current as soon as the first man arrived. Hardly had I begun to doze, when I was aroused by a
sharp, metallic tinkle. There, on the mid-threshold, lay the collar of Dan, my father’s St. Bernard.
My keeper ran to pick it up. He disappeared like a gust of wind, his clothes falling to the floor in
a heap. There was a slight wiff of ozone in the air, but since the principal gaseous components of
his body were hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, which are equally colourless and odourless, there
was no other manifestation of his departure. Yet when I shut off the current and removed the
A THOUSAND DEATHS
8
garments, I found a deposit of carbon in the form of animal charcoal; also other powders, the
isolated, solid elements of his organism, such as sulphur, potassium and iron. Resetting the trap, I
crawled back to bed. At midnight I got up and removed the remains of the second black, and then
slept peacefully till morning.
I was awakened by the strident voice of my father, who was calling to me from across the
laboratory. I laughed to myself. There had been no one to call him and he had overslept. I could
hear him as he approached my room with the intention of rousing me, and so I sat up in bed, the
better to observe his translation–perhaps apotheosis were a better term. He paused a moment at
the threshold, then took the fatal step. Puff! It was like the wind sighing among the pines. He was
gone. His clothes fell in a fantastic heap on the floor. Besides ozone, I noticed the faint, garliclike
odour of phosphorus. A little pile of elementary solids lay among his garments. That was all.
The wide world lay before me. My captors were no more.
SAMUEL
1
SAMUEL
By Jack London
SAMUEL
2
Margaret Henan would have been a striking figure under any circumstances, but never more so
than when I first chanced upon her, a sack of grain of fully a hundredweight on her shoulder, as
she walked with sure though tottering stride from the cart-tail to the stable, pausing for an instant
to gather strength at the foot of the steep steps that led to the grain-bin. There were four of these
steps, and she went up them, a step at a time, slowly, unwaveringly, and with so dogged certitude
that it never entered my mind that her strength could fail her and let that hundred-weight sack
fall from the lean and withered frame that wellnigh doubled under it. For she was patently an old
woman, and it was her age that made me linger by the cart and watch.
Six times she went between the cart and the stable, each time with a full sack on her back, and
beyond passing the time of day with me she took no notice of my presence. Then, the cart empty,
she fumbled for matches and lighted a short clay pipe, pressing down the burning surface of the
tobacco with a calloused and apparently nerveless thumb. The hands were noteworthy. They
were large-knuckled, sinewy and malformed by labour, rimed with callouses, the nails blunt and
broken, and with here and there cuts and bruises, healed and healing, such as are common to the
hands of hard-working men. On the back were huge, upstanding veins, eloquent of age and toil.
Looking at them, it was hard to believe that they were the hands of the woman who had once
been the belle of Island McGill. This last, of course, I learned later. At the time I knew neither
her history nor her identity.
She wore heavy man’s brogans. Her legs were stockingless, and I had noticed when she walked
that her bare feet were thrust into the crinkly, iron-like shoes that sloshed about her lean ankles at
every step. Her figure, shapeless and waistless, was garbed in a rough man’s shirt and in a ragged
flannel petticoat that had once been red. But it was her face, wrinkled, withered and weatherbeaten,
surrounded by an aureole of unkempt and straggling wisps of greyish hair, that caught
and held me. Neither drifted hair nor serried wrinkles could hide the splendid dome of a
forehead, high and broad without verging in the slightest on the abnormal.
The sunken cheeks and pinched nose told little of the quality of the life that flickered behind
those clear blue eyes of hers. Despite the minutiae of wrinkle-work that somehow failed to
weazen them, her eyes were clear as a girl’s – clear, out-looking, and far-seeing, and with an
open and unblinking steadfastness of gaze that was disconcerting. The remarkable thing was the
distance between them. It is a lucky man or woman who has the width of an eye between, but
with Margaret Henan the width between her eyes was fully that of an eye and a half. Yet so
symmetrically moulded was her face that this remarkable feature produced no uncanny effect,
and, for that matter, would have escaped the casual observer’s notice. The mouth, shapeless and