suddenly discover that pure gold could be produced by treating
common yellow clay with sulphuric acid, or that some genius
should set up a machine on the border of the Sahara that received
sand at one end and turned out sacked wheat at the other! What,
then, would our hoarded gold be worth, or the wheat-lands of
Australia, Canada or our Northwest?

The illustrations are fantastic. But the thing Rodman was after
was a practical fact. He had it on the way. Giovanni and Lord
Bayless Truxley were convinced that the man would work out the
formulae. They tried, over their signatures, to prepare the world
for it.

The whole of Asia was appalled. The rajahs of the native states
in India prepared a memorial and sent it to the British
Government.

The thing came out after the mysterious, incredible tragedy. I
should not have written that final sentence. I want you to
think, just now, about the great hulk of a man that sat in his
big chair beyond me at the window.

It was like Rodman to turn up with an outlandish human creature
attending him hand and foot. How the thing came about reads like
a lie; it reads like a lie; the wildest lie that anybody ever put
forward to explain a big yellow Oriental following one about.

But it was no lie. You could not think up a lie to equal the
actual things that happened to Rodman. Take the way he died!....