There was, however, another man on board, so to speak, at the
time. Him, also, by a curious coincidence, the professor had not
invented, and him he had not even very greatly improved, though
he had fished him up with a lasso out of his own back garden, in
Western Bulgaria, with the pure object of improving him. He was
an exceedingly holy man, almost entirely covered with white hair.
You could see nothing but his eyes, and he seemed to talk with
them. A monk of immense learning and acute intellect he had made
himself happy in a little stone hut and a little stony garden in
the Balkans, chiefly by writing the most crushing refutations of
exposures of certain heresies, the last professors of which had
been burnt (generally by each other) precisely 1,119 years
previously. They were really very plausible and thoughtful
heresies, and it was really a creditable or even glorious
circumstance, that the old monk had been intellectual enough to
detect their fallacy; the only misfortune was that nobody in the
modern world was intellectual enough even to understand their
argument. The old monk, one of whose names was Michael, and the
other a name quite impossible to remember or repeat in our
Western civilization, had, however, as I have said, made himself
quite happy while he was in a mountain hermitage in the society
of wild animals. And now that his luck had lifted him above all
the mountains in the society of a wild physicist, he made himself
happy still.

"I have no intention, my good Michael," said Professor Lucifer,
"of endeavouring to convert you by argument. The imbecility of
your traditions can be quite finally exhibited to anybody with
mere ordinary knowledge of the world, the same kind of knowledge