So here was my predicament: I knew that within myself was a Golconda of
memories of other lives, yet I was unable to do more than flit like a
madman through those memories. I had my Golconda but could not mine it.

I remembered the case of Stainton Moses, the clergyman who had been
possessed by the personalities of St. Hippolytus, Plotinus, Athenodorus,
and of that friend of Erasmus named Grocyn. And when I considered the
experiments of Colonel de Rochas, which I had read in tyro fashion in
other and busier days, I was convinced that Stainton Moses had, in
previous lives, been those personalities that on occasion seemed to
possess him. In truth, they were he, they were the links of the chain of
recurrence.

But more especially did I dwell upon the experiments of Colonel de
Rochas. By means of suitable hypnotic subjects he claimed that he had
penetrated backwards through time to the ancestors of his subjects. Thus,
the case of Josephine which he describes. She was eighteen years old and
she lived at Voiron, in the department of the Isere. Under hypnotism
Colonel de Rochas sent her adventuring back through her adolescence, her
girlhood, her childhood, breast-infancy, and the silent dark of her
mother's womb, and, still back, through the silence and the dark of the
time when she, Josephine, was not yet born, to the light and life of a
previous living, when she had been a churlish, suspicious, and embittered
old man, by name Jean-Claude Bourdon, who had served his time in the
Seventh Artillery at Besancon, and who died at the age of seventy, long
bedridden. _Yes_, and did not Colonel de Rochas in turn hypnotize this
shade of Jean-Claude Bourdon, so that he adventured farther back into
time, through infancy and birth and the dark of the unborn, until he
found again light and life when, as a wicked old woman, he had been