Part 10 (2/2)
Ill.u.s.tration: CURIOUS PHOTOGRAPHIC EFFECT REFERRED TO IN THE TEXT.
Taken by the Official Photographer, Brisbane, ”Absolutely mystifying” is his description.
We returned from Brisbane to Sydney in the Orient Liner ”Orsova,” which is a delightful alternative to the stuffy train. The sea has always been a nursing mother to me, and I suppose I have spent a clear two years of my life upon the waves. We had a restful Sunday aboard the boat, disturbed only by the Sunday service, which left its usual effect upon my mind. The Psalms were set to some unhappy tune, very different from the grand Gregorian rhythm, so that with its sudden rise to a higher level it sounded more like the neighing of horses than the singing of mortals. The words must surely offend anyone who considers what it is that he is saying--a mixture of most unmanly wailing and spiteful threats. How such literature has been perpetuated three thousand years, and how it can ever have been sacred, is very strange. Altogether from first to last there was nothing, save only the Lord's Prayer, which could have any spiritual effect. These old observances are like an iron ball tied to the leg of humanity, for ever hampering spiritual progress.
If now, after the warning of the great war, we have not the mental energy and the moral courage to get back to realities, we shall deserve what is coming to us.
On January 17th we were back, tired but contented, in the Medlow Bath Hotel in the heart of the Blue Mountains--an establishment which I can heartily recommend to any who desire a change from the summer heats of Sydney.
CHAPTER XI
Medlow Bath.--Jenolan Caves.--Giant skeleton.--Mrs. Foster Turner's mediums.h.i.+p.--A wonderful prophecy.--Final results.--Third sitting with Bailey.--Failure of State Control.--Retrospection.--Melbourne presentation.--Crooks.--Lecture at Perth.--West Australia.--Rabbits, sparrows and sharks.
We recuperated after our Brisbane tour by spending the next week at Medlow Bath, that little earthly paradise, which is the most restful spot we have found in our wanderings. It was built originally by Mr.
Mark Foy, a successful draper of Sydney, and he is certainly a man of taste, for he has adorned it with a collection of prints and of paintings--hundreds of each--which would attract attention in any city, but which on a mountain top amid the wildest scenery give one the idea of an Arabian Nights palace. There was a pa.s.sage some hundreds of yards long, which one has to traverse on the way to each meal, and there was a certain series of French prints, representing events of Byzantine history, which I found it difficult to pa.s.s, so that I was often a late comer. A very fair library is among the other attractions of this remarkable place.
Before leaving we spent one long day at the famous Jenolan Caves, which are distant about forty-five miles. As the said miles are very up-and-down, and as the cave exploration involves several hours of climbing, it makes a fairly hard day's work. We started all seven in a motor, as depicted by the wayside photographers, but Baby got sick and had to be left with Jakeman at the half-way house, where we picked her up, quite recovered, on our return. It was as well, for the walk would have been quite beyond her, and yet having once started there is no return, so we should have ended by carrying her through all the subterranean labyrinths. The road is a remarkably good one, and represents a considerable engineering feat. It pa.s.ses at last through an enormous archway of rock which marks the entrance to the cave formations. These caves are hollowed out of what was once a coral reef in a tropical sea, but is now sixty miles inland with a mountain upon the top of it--such changes this old world has seen. If the world were formed only that man might play his drama upon it, then mankind must be in the very earliest days of his history, for who would build so elaborate a stage if the play were to be so short and insignificant?
Ill.u.s.tration: OUR PARTY EN ROUTE TO THE JENOLAN CAVES, JANUARY 20TH, 1921, IN FRONT OF OLD COURT HOUSE IN WHICH BUSHRANGERS WERE TRIED.
The caves are truly prodigious. They were discovered first in the pursuit of some poor devil of a bushranger who must have been hard put to it before he took up his residence in this damp and dreary retreat. A brave man, Wilson, did most of the actual exploring, lowering himself by a thin rope into noisome abysses of unknown depth and charting out the whole of this devil's warren. It is so vast that many weeks would be needed to go through it, and it is usual at one visit to take only a single sample. On this occasion it was the River Cave, so named because after many wanderings you come on a river about twenty feet across and forty-five feet deep which has to be navigated for some distance in a punt. The stalact.i.te effects, though very wonderful, are not, I think, superior to those which I have seen in Derbys.h.i.+re, and the caves have none of that historical glamour which is needed in order to link some large natural object to our own comprehension. I can remember in Derbys.h.i.+re how my imagination and sympathy were stirred by a Roman lady's brooch which had been found among the rubble. Either a wild beast or a bandit knew best how it got there. Jenolan has few visible links with the past, but one of them is a tremendous one. It is the complete, though fractured, skeleton of a very large man--seven foot four said the guide, but he may have put it on a little--who was found partly imbedded in the lime. Many ages ago he seems to have fallen through the roof of the cavern, and the bones of a wallaby hard by give some indication that he was hunting at the time, and that his quarry shared his fate. He was of the Black fellow type, with a low-cla.s.s cranium. It is remarkable the proportion of very tall men who are dug up in ancient tombs. Again and again the bogs of Ireland have yielded skeletons of seven and eight feet. Some years ago a Scythian chief was dug up on the Southern Steppes of Russia who was eight feet six. What a figure of a man with his winged helmet and his battle axe! All over the world one comes upon these giants of old, and one wonders whether they represented some race, further back still, who were all gigantic. The Babylonian tradition in our Bible says: ”And there were giants in those days.” The big primeval kangaroo has grown down to the smaller modern one, the wombat, which was an animal as big as a tapir, is now as small as a badger, the great saurians have become little lizards, and so it would seem not unreasonable to suppose that man may have run to great size at some unexplored period in his evolution.
We all emerged rather exhausted from the bowels of the earth, dazed with the endless succession of strange gypsum formations which we had seen, minarets, thrones, shawls, coronets, some of them so made that one could imagine that the old kobolds had employed their leisure hours in fas.h.i.+oning their freakish outlines. It was a memorable drive home in the evening. Once as a bird flew above my head, the slanting ray of the declining sun struck it and turned it suddenly to a vivid scarlet and green. It was the first of many parrots. Once also a couple of kangaroos bounded across the road, amid wild cries of delight from the children.
Once, too, a long snake writhed across and was caught by one of the wheels of the motor. Rabbits, I am sorry to say, abounded. If they would confine themselves to these primeval woods, Australia would be content.
This was the last of our pleasant Australian excursions, and we left Medlow Bath refreshed not only by its charming atmosphere, but by feeling that we had gained new friends. We made our way on January 26th to Sydney, where all business had to be settled up and preparations made for our homeward voyage.
Whilst in Sydney I had an opportunity of examining several phases of mediums.h.i.+p which will be of interest to the psychic reader. I called upon Mrs. Foster Turner, who is perhaps the greatest all-round medium with the highest general level of any sensitive in Australia. I found a middle-aged lady of commanding and pleasing appearance with a dignified manner and a beautifully modulated voice, which must be invaluable to her in platform work. Her gifts are so many that it must have been difficult for her to know which to cultivate, but she finally settled upon medical diagnosis, in which she has, I understand, done good work.
Her practice is considerable, and her help is not despised by some of the leading pract.i.tioners. This gift is, as I have explained previously in the case of Mr. Bloomfield, a form of clairvoyance, and Mrs. Foster Turner enjoys all the other phases of that wonderful power, including psychometry, with its application to detective work, the discerning of spirits, and to a very marked degree the gift of prophecy, which she has carried upon certain occasions to a length which I have never known equalled in any reliable record of the past.
Here is an example for which, I am told, a hundred witnesses could be cited. At a meeting at the Little Theatre, Castlereagh Street, Sydney, on a Sunday evening of February, 1914, Mrs. Turner addressed the audience under an inspiration which claimed to be W. T. Stead. He ended his address by saying that in order to prove that he spoke with a power beyond mortal, he would, on the next Sunday, give a prophecy as to the future of the world.
Next Sunday some 900 people a.s.sembled, when Mrs. Turner, once more under control, spoke as follows. I quote from notes taken at the time. ”Now, although there is not at present a whisper of a great European war at hand, yet I want to warn you that before this year, 1914, has run its course, Europe will be deluged in blood. Great Britain, our beloved nation, will be drawn into the most awful war the world has ever known.
Germany will be the great antagonist, and will draw other nations in her train. Austria will totter to its ruin. Kings and kingdoms will fall.
Millions of precious lives will be slaughtered, but Britain will finally triumph and emerge victorious. During the year, also, the Pope of Rome will pa.s.s away, and a bomb will be placed in St. Paul's Church, but will be discovered in time and removed before damage is done.”
Can any prophecy be more accurate or better authenticated than that? The only equally exact prophecy on public events which I can recall is when Emma Hardinge Britten, having been refused permission in 1860 to deliver a lecture on Spiritualism in the Town Hall of Atlanta, declared that, before many years had pa.s.sed, that very Town Hall would be choked up with the dead and the dying, drawn from the State which persecuted her.
This came literally true in the Civil War a few years later, when Sherman's army pa.s.sed that way.
Mrs. Foster Turner's gift of psychometry is one which will be freely used by the community when we become more civilised and less ignorant.
As an example of how it works, some years ago a Melbourne man named Cutler disappeared, and there was a considerable debate as to his fate.
His wife, without giving a name, brought Cutler's boot to Mrs. Turner.
She placed it near her forehead and at once got _en rapport_ with the missing man. She described how he left his home, how he kissed his wife good-bye, all the succession of his movements during that morning, and finally how he had fallen or jumped over a bridge into the river, where he had been caught under some snag. A search at the place named revealed the dead body. If this case be compared with that of Mr. Foxhall, already quoted, one can clearly see that the same law underlies each.
But what an ally for our C.I.D.!
There was one pleasant incident in connection with my visit to Mrs.
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