Showing posts with label giant stature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label giant stature. Show all posts

Tuesday 2 February 2016

Rhinos


"WWF Director General de Haes was notorious among his staff for his reported statement that he "couldn't give a continental f***" about the rhino. 

But if the WWF has not been saving endangered species, as it clearly has not, then on what has it been spending its hundreds of millions of dollars?

A look at the WWF's "Operation Stronghold," and its sister, "Operation Lock," two more "save the rhino" gambits, gives the answer."

http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1994/eirv21n43-19941028/eirv21n43-19941028_041-the_oligarchs_real_game_is_killi.pdf


“Rhodes’ biographer, Sara Millin, was a little more direct. As she puts it: ‘the government of the world was Rhodes’ simple desire’.” “Quigley quotes: 

‘In the middle 1890’s Rhodes had a personal income of at least a million pounds sterling a year which he spent so freely for mysterious purposes that he was usually overdrawn on his account… Cecil Rhodes’ commitment to a conspiracy to establish World Government was set down in a series of wills described by Frank Aydelotte in his book American Rhodes Scholarships.’ 

‘Aydelotte writes: 

‘….In his first will Rhodes states his aim still more specifically: the extension of British rule throughout the world…(with English as the world language), the foundation of so great a power as to hereafter render wars impossible and promote the interest of humanity. ‘The ‘Confession of Faith’ (part of the testament) enlarges upon these ideas. The model for this proposed secret society was the Society of Jesus, though he mentions also the Masons.’ 

“Gary Allen continues: 

“It should be noted that the originator of this type of secret society was Adam Weishaupt, the monter who founded the Order of (Bavarian) Illuminati on May 1, 1776, for the purpose of conspiracy to control the world. The role of Weishaupt’s (Bavarian) Illuminati has long been recognized as models for Communist methodology. Weishaupt also used the structure of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) as the model, and rewrote his Code in Masonic terms.”

“Aydelotte continues: 

‘In 1888 Rhodes made his third will…leaving everything to LORD ROTHSCHILD (his financier in mining enterprises), with an accompanying letter enclosing ‘the written matter discussed between us.’ This, one surmises, consisted of the first will and the ‘Confession of Faith’, since in a postscript Rhodes says ‘in considering questions suggest take Constitution of the Jesuits if obtainable’… ‘Apparently for strategic reasons Lord Rothschild was subsequently removed from the forefront of the scheme. Professor Quigley reveals that Lord Rosebury, replaced his father-in-law Lord Rothschild, in Rhodes’ next (and last) will. 


‘The ‘secret society’ was organized on the conspiratorial pattern of circles within circles. Professor Quigley informs us that the central part of the ‘secret society’ was established by March, 1891, using Rhodes’ money. The organization was run for Rothschild by Lord Alfred Milner – The ROUND TABLE worked behind the scenes at the highest levels of British government, influencing foreign policy and England’s involvement and conduct of WW I.’ 





The oligarchs' real game is killing animals and killing people
by Allen Douglas

"Crack! The rifle shot hits its target, and a mother rhino dies. Its little calf, now abandoned, is also condemned to death. As another of our endangered species is pushed nearer to extinction, the poachers' blood-lust grows." 

- World Wildlife Fund circular of July 17, 1987 condemning the "proud men of the Middle East" for their "criminal ignorant waste" of the rhino, because they use its carved horn as handles for their ceremonial knives.

In January 1961, a few months before he would launch the new "Noah's Ark," the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), to save the world's endangered animal species, Prince Philip accompanied Queen Elizabeth on a royal tour of India. 

Among the attractions that one of his hosts, a local Rajah in Jaipur, put on for the royal party was a tiger hunt. From a platform high in the trees out of all danger, Philip shot one of the famed Indian tigers, which had been lured by the tethered goats which the rajah had staked out. 

The photo of Philip standing proudly by his victim, nearly 10 feet long from nose to tail, caused a worldwide outcry.


Philip, president of the World Wildlife Fund, on the left, 

looking after a tiger just killed.

Shaken, the royal consort continued his tour, arriving in Kathmandu with a conspicuous bandage on his trigger finger, explaining that an injury would prevent his participation in the king's "traditional hunt," which he would, nevertheless, accompany. 

Philip and Elizabeth rode perched atop some of the 300 elephants which were used to flush the game, as the Queen whirred away with her camera. Several tigers were killed that day, none officially attributed to Philip. Nor did Philip receive official credit for another animal killed that day, an exceedingly rare Indian rhinoceros. Only 250 were then left in the world, after British tea planters had finished slaughtering them to make way for their crop.

As the elephants lumbered on, a female rhino with an infant calf became trapped within their closing circle. One of the royal party, Lord Alex Douglas-Home, known as one of the finest shots in England, fired near the animal in an attempt to scare it away. 

But the rhino blundered on, into Philip's path. 

"To everyone's horror, Philip shot it," Ian MacPhail, the WWF's first international appeals director, later told a British film crew. 

The dead rhino's terrified calf escaped by darting away through the elephants' legs. 

Said MacPhail, 

"It must have died as well. It was far too young to have managed on its own."

The whole business was covered up, MacPhail explained, for plans were already afoot to found the World Wildlife Fund. 

"I was a party to the cover-up," he told the film crew in 1990, believing that the greater good was to save various animal species as a whole. 

Reflecting on the WWF's utter failure to do so over the three previous decades, he concluded: 

"But with a heavy heart I have to report to you that I was wrong. The rhino, the elephant, and the panda missed the boat, and the new Noah's Ark sailed on without them."

Philip's personal behavior has characterized that of his World Wildlife Fund as a whole. 

From 1961 until the present, the WWF has presided over, and in many cases organized and financed, including the purchase of weapons, the systematic slaughter and near extinction of the most prominent species under its self-appointed control. And, under cover of concern for the animals, it used substantial portions of the several hundred million dollars it has raised to date, to finance the slaughter of human beings, in particular in sub-Saharan Africa.

In the account to follow, it must be understood that the WWF was, from the outset, the personal fiefdom of Philip, who oversaw its operations almost down to the smallest detail. 

Sir Peter Scott, a WWF founder and longtime chairman, explained to EIR in an interview conducted in the early 1980s why Prince Bernhard, rather than Philip, became the WWFInternational's first president: 

"When we started WWF, a British president would have looked too colonial." 

But, Scott emphasized, it was Philip, not his friend Prince Bernhard, who was the driving force - testimony echoed by others in the WWF hierarchy. 

Longtime Director General Charles de Haes told a journalist, 

"Prince Philip is brilliant, he has a remarkable knowledge. He's been involved with WWF since its founding in 1961. He's incredibly active. He chairs all the executive committee meetings. He's involved right down to every aspect of policy." 

Added the WWF's Dr. Anne Schiotz

"The Duke of Edinburgh devotes perhaps one-fourth of his time to the WWF - he is remarkable."

The WWF is best-known for its efforts to conserve four animal species, all of which were in vastly better condition in 1961 than they are today. Two of these, the panda and the African black rhinoceros, are near extinction, andtwoothers, the African elephant and the Indian tiger, are rapidly heading in that direction.

At numerous times during the past 33 years, the WWF has been made aware, often through reports it has itself commissioned, of the approaching extinction of various species. In each case, it has suppressed, sometimes brutally so, the information. 

Three of the more notorious instances include:
 


The "Black Ebur Report

In 1972, WWF founder Sir Peter Scott commissioned a Nairobi-based big game hunter, Ian Parker, to look into the lucrative and burgeoning illegal trade in animal products such as elephant tusks and rhino horn. 

Among other things, Parker found that the family of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta were notorious traders in illegal products, and that his daughter Margaret was the secretary of a company which sold rhino horns and elephant tusks to the Far East, a trade which had probably done more to decimate Kenya's large animals than any other single cause. Parker also named many of Kenya's most prominent "conservationists" as poachers.

Within hours of turning his report over to Scott, Parker was picked up, taken to the Kenyan Special Branch's notorious Langatta Road station, beaten for three days and told to shut up about what he had written or his wife would be killed. 

The report, then the most comprehensive inquiry into African wildlife slaughter ever conducted, remained suppressed until 17 years later, when Irish filmmaker Kevin Dowling unearthed it to use for his scathing expose of the WWF, "Tenpence in the Panda," for Britain's Independent Television network.

At almost the same time that Parker was being beaten, then WWF-International President Prince Bernhard bestowed on Kenyatta his specially created "Order of the Golden Ark," for "saving the rhino." Bernhard was well aware that vast numbers of animals had disappeared during Kenyatta's tenure, because he had received - even signed for - a copy of the Black Ebur Report. 

When word leaked out that Bernhard possessed this devastating report, WWF Director General de Haes claimed that this was not a WWF corporate affair, that it was merely Bernhard's "private investigation."
 


The Phillipson Report

In late 1989, Oxford professor John Phillipson completed his internal audit, commissioned by the WWF, of the organization's effectiveness. 

Phillipson's 252-page report, excerpts of which are made public here for the first time, was a scathing indictment of WWF's outrageous incompetence and blundering, or worse. It concluded that what the WWF had adopted as its special mission - saving individual species - was what it was least good at. 

Upon receiving a copy of the report, Philip immediately sent a secret memo to Director General de Haes, directing that Phillipson be urged to tone down his findings or, failing that, that the report's key findings be suppressed.
 


Operation Lock

Under this code name, in 1987, the WWF authorized a lavishly funded "emergency effort to save the rhino." The premise of this extremely secret operation was to organize infiltration, from a base in South Africa, of the continent's wildlife smuggling rings in order to stop the animal slaughter. By all accounts, a vast amount of information was gathered. Once again, nothing was done with it, except to suppress it.

Of course, as many conservationists noted at the time, trying to stop wildlife poaching "at the source" was a ridiculous proposition, akin to trying to stop the world's drug trade by rounding up local pushers, while leaving the bankers who finance the trade and launder its hundreds of billions, untouched. 

The center of trade in illegal wildlife products was, as with the drag trade, the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong.
 


Saving the animals?
Let us review some of the WWF's most highly publicized, as well as lucrative, efforts to save individual species.

Counter posing these efforts by what might seem at first to be merely a gang that can't shoot straight, to the most sensitive mission WWF has ever launched, Operation Lock, lays bare WWF's true purpose.

  • The panda

    At the time of its formation in November 1961, the WWF proclaimed that it had the answer to what it claimed was the threatened extinction of many species: "There is only one hope for them symbolized by the loveable giant panda. He was saved from extinction because man acted in time. Now the panda is the emblem of a world crusade to beat the 20th century death flood - the World Wildlife Fund." , .

    The WWF claimed that "scientific breeding" had saved the panda, an approach which now must be applied to all other species. After raising money off the symbolism of the cuddly mammal for 23 years, the. WWF suddenly discovered that it, too, was an endangered species. In 1987, Philip launched a new appeal for still more millions to "save the panda."

    The WWF's efforts, which included "relocating" thousands of poor Chinese peasants out of their homes in the pandas' "range," and building an expensive laboratory in an attempt to breed pandas, were appraised by consultant Phillipson. 

    After noting that WWF had spent 4,493,021 Swiss francs on eight projects since 1980, Phillipson observed that, 

    • "despite a staff of 43 (23 allegedly science-trained), panda breeding has not been a success and research output negligible.... The laboratories, equipped at a cost to WWF of SFr 0.53 million, are essentially non-functional. .. . A lack of proper advice, inadequately trained staff, and poor direction have resulted in a'moribund'laboratory.... The obvious conclusion must be that WWF has not been effective or efficient in safeguarding its massive investment.... WWF subscribers would be dismayed to learn that the capital input has been virtually written off."

    Finally, wrote Phillipson, 

    • "It must be accepted that WWF activities in China are largely in disarray.... The policy of widening WWF involvement to cover other interests has, in my opinion, been counterproductive and, in view of the virtual cessation of support for all forms of panda research, amounts to an abrogation of responsibility for the much publicized 'Panda Program.' "

    After 30 years of raising money off the animal, Prince Philip was forced to admit in 1990 that the panda was "probably doomed."

     

  • The elephant

    A study by noted animal population ecologist E. Caughey in 1988 concluded that there were 3 million elephants in Africa in the early 1950s. By all accounts, there was little or no decline in elephant numbers during the colonial period, that is, approximately up to the "Winds of Change" policy enunciated by British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan in 1960, almost contemporaneous with the founding of the WWF. 

    The first systematic field survey, done in 1976 by the Scottish Kenya-based conservationist Iain Douglas-Hamilton, found 1.3 million elephants alive at the time.

    Throughout the 1970s and most of the 1980s, the WWF stoutly maintained that there was no "elephant crisis," fighting the efforts of various conservationists to ban trading of the animals' valuable ivory. By the time the "Year of the Elephant" was declared in 1988-89, the WWF maintained that there were 750,000 left, a number that mounting evidence forced them to revise downward to 650,000. 

    However, a survey done in 1988 by the former WWF president in France, Pierre Pfeffer, who was forced off the board, found that there were only 400,000 left. That number has dropped still further, till various experts interviewed in the 1989 British film "The Elephant Man," spoke of the great beast's looming extinction.

    Once again, the WWF had done its bit. In 1963, WWF-International Chairman Peter Scott, in a report to the Ugandan Parks Board, recommended the "culling" of 2,500 elephants. The job was contracted to game hunter Ian Parker, who massacred 4,000 hippos while he was at it. 

    Scott had recommended the slaughter on the malthusian premise that "overpopulation" required the killing of many individuals in order to "save the species." In reality, as it later emerged, Scott wanted to create a valuable mahogany plantation in the forests where the elephants fed, and they were in the way.

    While Parker shot the elephants, WWF directors made a tidy profit from the business. Scott tipped off fellow WWF founder and Prince Philip's Extra Equerry, Lord Aubrey Buxton, that the slaughters were to happen. Buxton, chairman of Survival Anglia, makers of some of the world's leading "nature documentaries," and on whose board Scott also sat, arranged to film the slaughter.

    In the early 1970s, the bloody Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was installed in power by British intelligence, and maintained there until 1979. The British government watched benignly as Amin slaughtered thousands and thousands more elephants.

    Today, there are fewer elephants left in Uganda than Scott had ordered Parker to kill in one drive.

    In 1975, the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation, founded by U.S. WWF President Russell Train, contracted with Parker to kill virtually all the elephants in Rwanda, on the basis that the Rwandans could not protect both the mountain gorilla and the elephant, so the elephant had to go. 

    One of gorilla expert Diane Fossey's assistants later charged that the elephants had been killed because the land they lived on was ideal for the production of pyrethrum, a natural "nonpolluting" insecticide. 

    Within a few years, an artificial substitute for pyrethrum was found and production collapsed. 

    Now cleared of trees, the slopes where the elephants had lived lost their topsoil through erosion, while the rivers backed up with sediment and flooded.



The slaughter continued
In 1986, former Rhodesian bush fighter Clem Coetzee of Zimbabwe was awarded the WWF Conservation Award by Director General de Haes for overseeing a campaign in which 44,000 elephants were killed. 

This was necessary, said the WWF, "to protect the environment" of Zimbabwe's "overcrowded" national parks. De Haes lauded Coetzee's work as "exemplary and a model for all Africa."

While other conservation groups worldwide were screaming about the plight of the elephant and calling for an ivory trade ban, the WWF was still maintaining things were fine. 

When the WWF belatedly rang the alarm bells in 1989, the "Year of the Elephant," their assistance to the elephants of Uganda was most curious. With funds raised through tear-jerking campaigns "to save Nell the elephant," the WWF set up a camp to rescue the beleaguered behemoths, into which the standard extensive paramilitary gear was flown.

This camp was near the Mountains on the Moon on the Rwandan border, despite the fact that virtually all of Uganda's elephants were in Murchison Park, nearly 1,000 miles away. 

But it was from precisely this area that the Rwandan Patriotic Front was to invade Rwanda a short time later.
 

  • The black rhino

    The WWF was launched in London with a special "shock edition" of the Daily Mirror on Oct. 6, 1961. Virtually the entire front page of the newspaper was given over to a banner headline, "Doomed - by Man's Folly, Greed and Neglect," and to a giant picture of a black rhinoceros. 

    Only 100,000 "short-sighted and likeably ugly rhinos" like Gertie, as she was christened, who stood there with one of her infant calves at her foot, survived in the wild, Mirror readers were told. And they were dwindling fast. If the rhino were to be "saved" in the troubled times ahead, the whole African herd would have to be "scientifically managed."

    Support from the Mirror's working-class readership poured in. 

    Widows sent their pension money, and children their pennies saved up for school. In all, £45,000 was collected, a huge sum for the time. The WWF thus obtained "a basis for its financial security," and it was off and running. Yet it spent virtually nothing on saving rhinos until almost 10 years later, and sponsored only two rhino projects in its first two decades! 

    Behind its trumpet blare of concern for the rhino, the WWF had by 1980 spent only 118,533 tax-sheltered Swiss francs, out of more than $110 million raised, to "save the wild black rhino," whose population in the meantime had declined by 95.5%. And when the WWF finally did sponsor "rhino projects," the rhinos invariably died, or at best were sent off to zoos or, more frequently, private game farms.

    Today the black rhino is virtually extinct in the wild.

    Exemplary of the WWF's work for the "likeably ugly beasts," is a sampling of the rhino projects scathingly criticized by the Phillipson report, chronicled below. 

    In 1965, a Kenyan resident gave the WWF SFr 36,300 to move six white rhino from Natal, South Africa to Meru Game Reserve in Kenya, which, according to the WWF Yearbook 1965-67 "was felt to contain the right sort of habitat."

From 1961 until the present, the
WWF has presided over, and in
many cases organized and financed,
the systematic slaughter and near
extinction of the most prominent
species under its self-appointed
control. And, under cover of concern for the animals, it used substantial
portions of the several hundred
million dollars it has raised to
date, to finance the slaughter of
human beings.

Said Phillipson: 

"The project was ill-conceived and indefensible in conservation terms; the Southern White Rhino has never, at least in historic times, occurred in Kenya: More over, there is no evidence that the Northern White Rhino ever roamed the lands which now constitute the 87,044 hectare Meru National Park. 

The assumption must be that in the mid 1960s WWF was either scientifically incompetent, hungry for publicity, greedy for money, or unduly influenced by scientifically naive persons of stature."

Phillipson concluded, 

"The program came to an abrupt end in November 1988, perhaps mercifully in that it removed a constant source of embarrassment. Insurgent Somali poachers shot all the remaining white rhino in an act of defiance, an unfortunate end for the rhino but no doubt a welcome relief for concerned conservationists. Project 0195 is not a project that WWF should look back on with any pride."

Nor was Project 917, in which 85 "surplus rhino" from Natal were shipped into Mozambique; all of them died. Nor was the Lake Nakuru National Park rhino project in Kenya. 

Half of all the money the WWF spent on Kenya has gone into what it calls "the protected area management" of this park. 

Originally set up as a bird park, with hundreds of thousands of flamingos and many other varieties of tropical birds breeding on the lake and its environs, WWF decided by the late 1980s to turn it into a rhino park in which to place the last of the Kenyan rhinos. Seventeen black rhino were translocated, and penned in behind an electric fence. Soon it became obvious that the project was a disaster. 

As Phillipson remarked with biting irony:

"The logic behind the choice of Nakuru as a site for the release of black rhinos remains something of a mystery. About one-third of the park is a lake and another third is open grassland, quite unsuitable in the normal course of events, as rhino habitat.... 

Nakuru was a daft place. What price walking safaris for birdwatchers now that there might be a rhino around the next bush? The park was, after all, created for the birds."

WWF Director General de Haes was notorious among his staff for his reported statement that he "couldn't give a continental f***" about the rhino. But if the WWF has not been saving endangered species, as it clearly has not, then on what has it been spending its hundreds of millions of dollars? 

A look at the WWF's "Operation Stronghold," and its sister, "Operation Lock," two more "save the rhino" gambits, gives the answer.


Operation Stronghold
Funded with 1 million Swiss francs and coordinated with Operation Lock, Stronghold was nominally to enable the Zimbabwe Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management to save the 700 black rhino left in the Zambezi Valley, the last major population in the wild in Africa. 

Chief Game Ranger Glen Tatham toured the United States, announcing that, with WWF's help, he and his rangers "were going to war" against the poachers allegedly coming over the border from Zambia.

On Nov. 10, 1988, Tatham and two of his assistants were brought before a court in Zimbabwe and charged with murder. It was alleged that they had set up a sting operation against poachers, who, when they approached the meeting place, had been shot dead from ambush without warning by the accused. It soon emerged in a parliamentary debate that Tatham and his men had killed 70 poachers since early 1987. 

A law was rushed through parliament, the Protection of Wildlife (Indemnity) Act, which gave game guards immunity from civil and criminal prosecution for killings or woundings carried out in the course of their duties. 

Ten parliamentarians opposed the bill on the grounds that it would "legalize murder." 

As one of them, Mica Bhebe, put it, 

"We are giving people a blank check to kill people."

Official figures show that between July 1984 and September 1991, some 145 "poachers" were killed. 

Of the 84 killed in the Zambezi Valley, most were shot from a helicopter paid for by WWF and manned by WWF contract employees. According to the Game Department's figures, of the 228 people killed or taken prisoner, only 107 guns were recovered. 

Given that another 202 individuals were recorded as having fled, some badly injured, some of whom would have lost or been unable to carry away their weapons, this means that Tatham et al. failed to recover weapons from three-quarters of those killed, taken prisoner, or driven away. This raises the question of whether those targeted by the guards were in fact armed poachers at all. 

According to sources interviewed by the British film crew which made Ten Pence in the Panda, several of the dead were in fact associated with the military wing of the African National Congress.
 


And what happened to the rhino?
From the moment that the project was agreed to in February 1987, the WWF's aim had been "to translocate rhinos captured in the valley to safer areas elsewhere." 

Drugged and immobilized, the rhinos were shipped off to privately owned game farms in Zimbabwe, elsewhere in Africa, and to the United States and Australia. In other words, the WWF paid to slaughter human beings, in order to destroy the last living rhino herd in the world. The reason for the "relocation" became quickly clear - aside from the immense profits it generated for private, WWF-associated interests. 

It emerged that the International Monetary Fund (IMF), then dictating a "restructuring" of Zimbabwe's economy, had mandated that a beef ranching business be set up in the Zambezi Valley, in the rhino range, to provide beef to the European Commission. 

After the rhino had been "relocated," squads of animal exterminators moved into the valley and killed scores of elephants and 5,000 buffalo to make way for the IMF-mandated beef ranch, which soon collapsed into bankruptcy, leaving large debts and no rhinos.
 


Operation Lock
In late 1989 and early 1990, a scandal broke into the British and European press which threatened to cause immense damage to the green oligarchs at WWF. 

One of WWF's most secretive operations, code-named "Operation Lock," ostensibly an aggressive attempt to save the endangered rhino by sending an elite squad of British Special Air Services (SAS) operatives into southern Africa to penetrate, expose, and neutralize the illegal wildlife smuggling cartels, had gone badly awry. 

A million pounds sterling had disappeared, and it appeared that the SAS team had started dealing in the very products, in particular rhino horn and ivory, which it had been sent to stop. There were also, as in Operation Stronghold, whispers of rising death tolls of "poachers."

WWF hastily prepared its own version of the matter. In 1986, they said, Prince Bernhard and the new head of the WWF's Africa Program, John Hanks, became alarmed while on a tour of Africa, at the rapidly dwindling rhino numbers. The two cooked up the notion of sending a team of elite trained sabotage experts and killers, SAS men, to Africa to deal with the problem by unorthodox means. 

Prince Bernhard, unbeknownst to WWF, put the £500,000 or more he received from the sale of a valuable painting into the project, and off it went. It was completely secret, so the story goes, from the WWF headquarters in Gland, Switzerland, even though Bernhard was at the time president of the Netherlands WWF and two other national WWF organizations.

The SAS team, which had been organized into a company named KAS Enterprises Ltd. for the purpose, was led by Col. David Stirling, the legendary founder of Britain's SAS regiments during World War II, and the veteran of dozens, if not hundreds of special operations all over the Mideast and Africa in the postwar period. 

Stirling chose the intials to echo those of his earlier Capricorn Africa Society (CAS), whose purpose had been to "preserve apartheid in a sugar coating," in the words of Kenya governor Sir Philip Kerr

Capricorn's treasurer had been Mervyn Cowie, the architect of the Kenyan Park system and controller of the Mau Mau, while its chief propagandist was Elspeth Huxley, the wife of Julian Huxley' s cousin Gervas.

Curiously, the most detailed revelations about Operation Lock, which obviously relied on internal WWF documents, came from the newsletter Africa Confidential, widely regarded in Africa and elsewhere as an MI-5 asset, and which had been founded in Stirling's flat in London.

The issue, as defined by Africa Confidential and its editor, who left the newsletter at this time and authored a series of exposes on Operation Lock in the British and Dutch press, became: 

  • Who in the WWF bureaucracy knew about this crazy, if deadly, scheme and when? 

  • Was this another "offline" operation by Bernhard, as the "Black Ebur Report" supposedly had been, or was this official WWF policy?

It soon emerged, contrary to the lies that the WWF leadership and its Director General de Haes spread, that the entire operation from the beginning was official policy, and that a WWF project description - later called a "mistake" - explicitly called for the purchase of arms. 

Files existed in the Gland international office titled "Anti-Poaching Units," which operations had indeed been funded by WWF.

Though scandalous, the various exposes missed the point of Operation Lock.

First, as anyone familiar with Africa's parks is well aware, the main "poachers" are usually the guards themselves, often financed and armed by the WWF. Second, the man whom Bernhard (again, according to the received version of events) approached to carry out this delicate "save the rhino" work, was a man who had not only founded the SAS and who had extensive covert operations experience in Africa, but who had been the "Gold Stick" at the coronation of Elizabeth II as queen in 1952. 

Though an Anglo-Catholic educated at the Benedictine monastery at Ampleforth contemporaneously with Lord Buxton, Philip's Extra Equerry, and with others of the WWF crowd, Stirling was chosen for the extraordinary honor, coveted among all British peerage,

Special Offprint 37 to be the personal defender of the body of the queen, the head of the Protestant Church of England. And, as do all the men of SAS as well as MI-5, MI-6, and the Life Guards, he had sworn his loyalty not to the British state, but to the person of the monarch.

Throughout the postwar period, Stirling had carried out dozens of the most sensitive political-military operations for the British Crown. A Scottish aristocrat, he was close personally to the Queen Mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, herself of the very cream of the Scottish aristocracy. The aging Stirling chose as the operational officer for his KAS company, Lt. Col. Ian Crooke. Crooke was also a legend. 

Decorated with the rarefied Distinguished Service Order for his service during the Falklands campaign, he was the hooded "man on the balcony" who commanded the SAS team which stormed the Iranian Embassy in London in May 1980, and whose picture was flashed round the world. His brother Alastair was a British consular official in Islamabad, Pakistan, reportedly in charge of arming the Afghan mujahideen. 

Crooke's number two man in Operation Lock, Nish Bruce, was reportedly the most highly decorated British soldier in the Falklands fighting. (Curiously, WWF founder Lord Buxton's daughter was in the Falkland Islands "birdwatching" just as the fighting broke out.) Others on the team had extensive service in Northern Ireland, and were specialists in hunting down IRA men.

Thus the unit pulled together to "stop poaching" comprised some of the very elite of the British special forces.

Crooke was the head at the time of the 23rd SAS Regiment, the part-time SAS unit which is used, as are dozens of "private" security firms in London such as Stirling's, for operations sanctioned by Her Majesty's Government, but ones which "HMG" prefers to deny. 

That Operation Lock was official government policy is obvious: 

The chain of command in the WWF led to Prince Philip, the royal consort, and Stirling even admitted to the press that he was in close contact with the British Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs. 

One SAS member familiar with Operation Lock reported that there were regular toasts to the Queen Mother in SAS's favorite pub, while another, himself a Lock participant, stated in writing that among Lock's consortium of financial backers was the Queen Mother

Another subscriber to Lock was Laurens van der Postthe tutor to Prince Charles and at the time Mrs. Thatcher's chief adviser on Africa policy.
 


What was KAS really?
Stirling was a curious choice to save Africa's wildlife. 

He was very close to, among other well-known traffickers in wildlife, the Unita organization of Jonas Savimbi, who in 1988 admitted that his men had killed some 100,000 elephants in order to finance their war against the MPLA government in Luanda. 

Furthermore, internal KAS documents showed that Stirling's company planned to make a profit out of trading in the very ivory, rhino horn, etc. which they had ostensibly been sent to Africa to stop. 

Under Crook's command, 25 SAS veterans set up a fortified headquarters in Pretoria with sophisticated computer equipment and imported (illegally, due to the embargo then on against South Africa) large amounts of highly sophisticated weaponry. But, if they weren't saving the rhinos, what were they doing?

Zimbabwean Minister for National Security Sydney Sekerayami had an idea. 

According to the Dutch paper de Volkrants of Aug. 24, 1991, he,

"plainly stated in public that he suspected KAS of being a cover for the destabilization of southern Africa." 

Numerous other governments, including wildlife officials in Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia were suspicious of the Lock men, and refused to work with them. 

Rowan Martin, director of research in Zimbabwe's wildlife department, declined to cooperate with Crooke, who flew from Johannesburg to see him because Crooke was "vague about his sponsors and the objectives of his mission." 

It also seemed odd to Martin that, 

"they seemed more interested in military technology than wildlife... They hinted at some pretty irregular methods."

South African Military Intelligence, evaluating the "antipoachers" as obviously an elite British intelligence unit, sent their own man in to infiltrate the Lock crew. 

Crooke managed to work out liaisons with Namibia and Mozambique, and with elements of the South African special forces and intelligence community. Then in a war against the African National Congress (ANC), South West African People's Organization (SWAPO), and the majority-ruled front-line states, some South Africans viewed the paramilitary training capabilities of the British as an asset.

From an operational headquarters in Bophuthatswana's Pilanesberg Park, and in numerous other parks such as Etosha in Namibia and in the game parks in the KaNgwana homeland on the South Africa-Mozambique border, the KAS crew turned out "anti-poaching units."

One such unit which Crooke' s men trained, and the political circumstances in which it operated, is of particular interest.
 


The 'third force'
From before Nelson Mandela's release in 1990 until the present, well over 10,000 black South Africans have been killed through black-on-black violence. 

Observers have attributed much of this murder and mayhem to the agent provocateur actions of a mysterious "third force," which is neither the ANC, nor its Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party rival. The third force, by attacking each of the rival groups in turn - which then blame each other - keeps the deadly violence going. Such activity must be gridded against the work of Crooke's unit in Namibia.

After being taken from the Germans following World War I, South West Africa became a protectorate of South Africa. 

In the 1980s, as the SWAPO guerilla force of Sam Nujoma waged war against the South African-backed, white-dominated government of the country, South African special forces trained the notorious "Koevoet," Afrikaans for "crowbar," black special warfare units, whose savagery was notorious. Crooke and his crew retrained the Koevoet men as "antipoaching units." 

Simultaneously, they set up liaison with the then-minuscule "stock theft unit" of the South African Police.

In late June 1992, shortly after the notorious Boipatong massacre of June 18, in which 39 were killed and many more injured by mysterious "third force" assassins, a joint task force of ANC intelligence, the Goldstone Commission (an inquiry into violence), and a special police unit raided the premises of the British-owned Gold Fields firm.

There, to their surprise, they discovered a "stock theft unit" of 40 men, mainly re-trained Koevoet veterans from Namibia. 

According to the South African Weekly Mail of June 26-July 2, 1992, 

"The African National Congress says it has witnesses who will testify before the [Goldstone] commission on the unit's role in the Boipatong massacre."

Gold Fields was chaired by Robin Plumbridge, an Oxford graduate and a Trustee of the South African Nature Foundation, the WWF's South African affiliate. 

As the Weekly Mail put it, 

"The presence of a 'third force' on a British-owned mine will have major international repercussions."

Though £1 million had been spent, 

"As one of [Operation Lock's] employees himself put it, there is no proof that the [project] ever even saved one single rhinoceros," according to the Dutch newspaper de Volkrants.


Population controller John Hanks
The story that Prince Bernhard and John Hanks ran Operation Lock as a rogue operation out of their back pockets is nonsense, but it is clear that Hanks did play a key role in the affair. 

His career and specialties help shed further light on the operation. Hanks had gotten his start in the conservation business cutting up elephants in an abattoir in Zambia, where elephants were butchered to feed the workers in southern Africa's mines. He spent some time in Rhodesia where, according to his own account, he worked for military intelligence. 

In the mid-1970s, he became the chief parks officer of the National Parks Board at Pietmaritzburg in Natal.

But his overwhelming preoccupation from 1976 on, was with human population control. In numerous speeches, he railed about how "Durban will [soon] be worse than Bombay." 

The problem, he said, was that, 

"African women are among the world's most prolific breeders, with the average woman bearing 5.2 children." 

With all these mouths to feed, 

"demands are being placed on our natural resources which are not sustainable and can only lead to chronic environmental degradation." 

In 1977, he called for a "national population control policy," and the liberal use of contraception, abortion, and sterilization.

In 1979, Hanks became the first director of the Institute of Natural Resources in KwaZulu, founded with a grant from the K.E. Taeubner Management Trust, named for a member of the 1001 Club. He continued to specialize in population matters, and became an executive member of the Family Planning Association of South Africa. In 1986, he became the head of the Africa Program of the WWF.

When Operation Lock was exposed in 1990 (at least certain aspects of it), it caused a bit of a stink, and Hanks was forced to leave the WWF. 

He issued a statement on Jan. 4, 1990: 

"My own involvement in the project ceased when Prince Bernhard's funds had been exhausted in late 1989. I am aware that similar operations are continuing, but I am no longer involved in any way."

He took up the post of executive director of the WWF's South African branch, the South African Nature Foundation, which Prince Philip called "an elegant solution" to the embarrassment of what to do with him. 

However, the Dutch paper de Volksrant reported on Aug. 24, 1991, 

"He still works on operations like Lock, together with some of the former British soldiers who also took part in the original project."

Indeed, as an internal KAS situation report of Jan. 18May 31, 1989 marked "Secret" stated, 

"KAS should seize this opportunity to become the leading expert on all forms of anti-poaching training throughout Africa." 

The document furthermore noted that "the experience gained so far in SWA/ Namibia has proved invaluable."
 


Who are the poachers?
The nominal purpose of Operation Lock and Operation Stronghold was to "stop poachers." But as the case of the 120-square-mile Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania demonstrates once again, it is usually the WWF which is paying the poachers.

In the late 1950s, WWF founder-to-be Dr. Bernard Grzimek of the Frankfurt Zoo took an animal census in the Ngorongoro Crater, claiming to find that wildlife was disappearing. 

This Grzimek blamed on the Masai pastoralists, who herded their cattle across the area, but who rarely killed anything except the lions which attacked their flocks. As a result of the hysteria Grzimek and his allies kicked up, in particular around the associated Hollywood film "Serengeti Shall Not Die!" the Masai were banned from entering vast areas of the national park around the crater, their traditional territory.

In 1964, some 108 rhinos had been individually photographed and given an identity, the most carefully documented population in Africa. A WWF program was set up to "save" them. 

Despite the WWF-financed game guard program, by 1981 there were only 20 left. Not one poacher had been caught by the three anti-poaching teams in years. 

In that year, an eyewitness wrote to the offices of the African Wildlife Leadership Federation in Nairobi, shedding some light on the disappearing rhino herd. The WWF-financed game guards, she reported, had shot dead two large tame males and wounded a female, "all in broad daylight." 

She concluded, 

"Isn't it fairly obvious what is going on in the crater

Saturday 30 January 2016

Julian Huxley - MemeSmith Creator of the Tin-foil Hat Mythos



Julian Huxley, brother of "Brave New World" author Aldous Huxley, coined the concept in his 1927 work "The Tissue-Culture King":

"Well, we had discovered that metal was relatively impervious to the telepathic effect, and had prepared for ourselves a sort of tin pulpit, behind which we could stand while conducting experiments. 

This, combined with caps of metal foil, enormously reduced the effects on ourselves."

“The lowest strata are reproducing too fast.

Therefore… they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization."

- Julian Huxley



In 1929, Huxley first visited Africa in order to deal with the educational problems and needs of the African people and formulated a series of questions in response. 

I)      How far is the African individual capable of improvement, of profiting by education?
II)     Can we free tropical Africa of malaria, sleeping sickness, plague, relapsing fever, dysentery, and the rest?
III)    Will the black races blindly copy the white, or will they develop a new civilian of their own?
IV)    Is Christianity a good religion for the African?
V)     Who were the prehistoric inhabitants of tropical Africa, and what were the series of event by which the present tribes reached their present status?
VI)    Will game and game reserves continue to exist on the grand scale, or must they dwindle and disappear before modern firearms and the white man’s economic greed?
VII)   What was the intention of the British Government with regard to the African’s right to vote?

The Tissue-Culture King

We had been for three days engaged in crossing a swamp. At last we were out on dry ground, winding up a gentle slope. Near the top the brush grew thicker. The look of a rampart grew as we approached; it had the air of having been delibentely planted by men. We did not wish to have to hack our way through the spiky barricade, so turned to the right along the front of the green wall After three or four hundred yards we came on a clearing which led into the bush, narrowing down to what seemed a regular passage or trackway. This made us a little suspicious. However, I thought we had better make all the progress we could, and so ordered the caravan to turn into the opening, myself taking second place behind the guide.

Suddenly the tracker stopped with a guttural exclamation. I looked, and there was one of the great African toads, hopping with a certain ponderosity across the path. But it had a second head growing upwards from its shoulders! I had never seen anything like this before, and wanted to secure such a remarkable monstrosity for our collections; but as I moved forward, the creature took a couple of hops into the shelter of the prickly scrub.

We pushed on, and I became convinced that the gap we were following was artificial. After a little, a droning sound came to our ears, which we very soon set down as that of a human voice. The party was halted, and I crept forward with the guide. Peeping through the last screen of brush we looked down into a hollow and were immeasurably startled at what we saw there. The voice proceeded from an enormous Negro man at least eight feet high, the biggest man I had ever seen outside a circus. He was squatting, from time to time prostrating the forepart of his body, and reciting some prayer or incantation. The object of his devotion was before him on the ground; it was a small flat piece of glass held on a little carved ebony stand. By his side was a huge spear, together with a painted basket with a lid.

After a minute or so, the giant bowed down in silence, then took up the ebony-and-glass object and placed it in the basket. Then to my utter amazement he drew out a two-headed toad like the first I had seen, but in a cage of woven grass, placed it on the ground, and proceeded to more genuflection and ritual murmurings. As soon as this was over, the toad was replaced, and the squatting giant tranquilly regarded the landscape.

Beyond the hollow or dell lay an undulating country, with clumps of bush. A sound in the middle distante attracted attention; glimpses of color moved through the scrub; and a party of three or four dozen men were seen approaching, most of them as gigantic as our first acquaintance. All marched in order, armed with great spears, and wearing colored loin straps with a sort of sportran, it seemed, in front. They were preceded by an intelligent-looking Negro of ordinary stature armed with a club, and accompanied by two figures more remarkable than the giants. They were undersized, almost dwarfish, with huge heads, and enormously fat and brawny both in face and body. They wore bright yellow cloaks over their black shoulders.

At sight of them, our giant rose and stood stiffly by the side of his basket. The party approached and halted. Some order was given, a giant stepped out from the ranks towards ours, picked up the basket, handed it stiffly to the newcomer, and fell into place in the little company. We were clearly witnessing some regular routine of relieving guard, and I was racking my brains to think what the whole thing might signify--guards, giants, dwarfs, toads--when to my dismay I heard an exclamation at my shoulder.

It was one of those damned porters, a confounded fellow who always liked to show his independence. Bored with waiting, I suppose, he had self-importantly crept up to see what it was all about, and the sudden sight of the company of giants had been too much for his nerves. I made a signal to lie quiet, but it was too late. The exclamation had been heard; the leader gave a quick command, and the giants rushed up and out in two groups to surround us.

Violence and resistance were clearly out of the question. With my heart in my mouth, but with as much dignity as I could muster, I jumped up and threw out my empty hands, at the same time telling the tracker not to shoot. A dozen spears seemed towering over me, but none were launched; the leader ran up the slope and gave a command. Two giants came up and put my hands through their arms. The tracker and the porter were herded in front at the spear point. The other porters now discovered there was something amiss, and began to shout and run away, with half the spearmen after them. We three were gently but firmly marched down and across the hollow.

I understood nothing of the language, and called to my tracker to try his hand. It turned out that there was some dialect of which he had a little understanding, and we could learn nothing save the fact that we were being taken to some superior authority.

For two days we were marched through pleasant park-like country, with villages at intervals. Every now and then some new monstrosity in the shape of a dwarf or an incredibly fat woman or a two-headed animal would be visible, until I thought I had stumbled on the original source of supply of circus freaks.

The country at last began to slope gently down to a pleasant river valley; and presently we neared the capital. It turned out to be a really large town for Africa, its mud walls of strangely impressive architectural form, with their heavy, slabby buttresses, and giants standing guard upon them. Seeing us approach, they shouted, and a crowd poured out of the nearest Gate. My God, what a crowd! I was getting used to giants by this time, but here was a regular Barnum and Bailey show; more semidwarfs; others like them but more so--one could not tell whether the creatures were precociously mature children or horribly stunted adults; others portentously fat, with arms like sooty legs of mutton, and rolls and volutes of fat crisping out of their steatopygous posteriors; still others precociously senile and wizened, others hateful and imbecile in looks. Of course, there were plenty of ordinary Negroes too, but enough of the extraordinary to make one feel pretty queer. Soon after we got inside, I suddenly noted something else which appeared inexplicable--a telephone wire, with perfectly good insulators, running across from tree to tree. A telephone--in an unknown African town. I gave it up.

But another surprise was in store for me. I saw a figure pass across from one large building to another--a figure unmistakably that of a white man. In the first place, it was wearing white ducks and sun helmet; in the second, it had a pale face.

Page 2 of 8

He turned at the sound of our cavalcade and stood looking a moment; then walked towards us.

"Halloa!" I shouted. "Do you speak English?"

"Yes," he answered, "but keep quiet a moment," and began talking quickly to our leaders, who treated him with the greatest deference. He dropped back to me and spoke rapidly: "You are to be taken into the council hall to be examined; but I will see to it that no harm comes to you. This is a forbidden land to strangers, and you must be prepared to be held up for a time. You will be sent down to see me in the temple buildings as soon as the formalities are over, and I'll explain things. They want a bit of explaining," he added with a dry laugh. "By the way, my name is Hascombe, lately research worker at Middlesex Hospital, now religious adviser to His Majesty King Mgobe." He laughed again and pushed ahead. He was an interesting figure--perhaps fifty years old, spare body, thin face, with a small beard, and rather sunken, hazel eyes. As for his expression, he looked cynical, but also as if he were interested in life.

By this time we were at the entrance to the hall. Our giants formed up outside, with my men behind them, and only I and the leader passed in. The examination was purely formal, and remarkable chiefly for the ritual and solemnity which characterized all the actions of the couple of dozen fine-looking men in long robes who were our examiners. My men were herded off to some compound. I was escorted down to a little hut, furnished with some attempt at European style, where I found Hascombe.

As soon as we were alone I was after him with my questions. "Now you can tell me. Where are we? What is the meaning of all this circus business and this menagerie of monstrosities? And how do you come here?" He cut me short. "It's a long story, so let me save time by telling it my own way."

I am not going to tell it as he told it; but will try to give a more connected account, the result of many later talks with him, and of my own observations.


Hascombe had been a medical student of great promise; and after his degree had launched out into research. He had first started on parasitic protozoa, but had given that up in favor of tissue culture; from these he had gone off to cancer research, and from that to a study of developmental physiology. Later a big Commission on sleeping sickness had been organized, and Hascombe, restless and eager for travel, had pulled wires and got himself appointed as one of the scientific staff sent to Africa. He was much impressed with the view that wild game acted as a reservoir for the Trypanosoma gambiense. When he learned of the extensive migrations of game, he saw here an important possible means of spreading the disease and asked leave to go up country to investigate the whole problem. When the Commission as a whole had finished its work, he was allowed to stay in Africa with one other white man and a company of porters to see what he could discover. His white companion was a laboratory technician, a taciturn noncommissioned officer of science called Aggers.

There is no object in telling of their experiences here. Suffice it that they lost their way and fell into the hands of this same tribe. That was fifteen years ago; and Aggers was now long dead--as the result of a wound inflicted when he was caught, after a couple of years, trying to escape.

On their capture, they too had been examined in the council chamber, and Hascombe (who had interested himself in a dilettante way in anthropology as in most other subjects of scientific inquiry) was much impressed by what he described as the exceedingly religious atmosphere. Everything was done with an elaboration of ceremony; the chief seemed more priest than King, and performed various rites at intervals, and priests were busy at some sort of altar the whole time. Among other things, he noticed that one of their rites was connected with blood. First the chief and then the councillors were in turn requisitioned for a drop of vital fluid pricked from their finger tips, and the mixture, held in a little vessel, was slowly evaporated over a flame.

Some of Hascombe's men spoke a dialect not uplike that of their captors, and one was acting as interpreter. Things did not look too favorable. The country was a "holy place," it seemed, and the tribe a "holy race." Other Africans who trespassed there, if not killed, were enslaved, but for the most part they let well alone, and did not trespass. White men they had heard of, but never seen till now, and the debate was what to do-to kill, let go, or enslave? To let them go was contrary to all their principles: the holy place would be defiled if the news of it were spread abroad. To enslave them--yes; but what were they good for? and the Council seemed to feel an instinctive dislike for these other-colored creatures. Hascombe had an idea. He turned to the interpreter. "Say this: 'You revere the Blood. So do we white men; but we do more--we can render visible the blood's hidden nature and reality, and with permission I will show this great magic.'" He beckoned to the bearer who carried his precious microscope, set it up, drew a drop of blood from the tip of his finger with his knife and mounted it on a slide under a coverslip. The bigwigs were obviously interested. They whispered to each other. At length, "Show us," commanded the chief.

Hascombe demonstrated his preparation with greater interest than he had ever done to first-year medical students in the old days. He explained that the blood was composed of little people of various sorts, each with their own lives, and that to spy upon them thus gave us new powers over them. The elders were more or less impressed. At any rate the sight of these thousands of corpuscles where they could see nothing before made them think, made them realize that the white man had power which might make him a desirable servant.

They would not ask to see their own blood for fear that the sight would put them into the power of those who saw it. But they had blood drawn from a slave. Hascombe asked too for a bird, and was able to create a certain interest by showing how different were the little people of its blood.

"Tell them," he said to the interpreter, "that I have many other powers and magics which I will show them if they will give me time."

The long and short of it was that he and his party were spared--He said he knew then what one felt when the magistrate said: "Remanded for a week."

Page 3 of 8

He had been attracted by one of the elder statesmen of the tribe--a tall, powerful-looking man of middle-age; and was agreeably surprised when this man came round next day to see him. Hascombe later nicknamed him the Prince-Bishop, for his combination of the qualities of the statesman and the ecclesiastic. His real name was Bugala. He was as anxious to discover more about Hascombe's mysterious powers and resources as Hascombe was to learn what he could of the people into whose hands he had fallen, and they met almost every evening and talked far into the night.

Bugala's inquiries were as little prompted as Hascombe's by a purely academic curiosity. Impressed himself by the microscope, and still more by the effect which it had had on his colleagues, he was anxious to find out whether by utilizing the powers of the white man he could not secure his own advancement. At length, they struck a bargain. Bugala would see to it that no harm befell Hascombe. But Hascombe must put his resources and powers at the disposal of the Council; and Bugala would take good care to arrange matters so that he himself benefited. So far as Hascombe could make out, Bugala imagined a radical change in the national religion, a sort of reformation based on Hascombe's conjuring tricks; and that he would emerge as the High Priest of this changed system.

Hascombe had a sense of humor, and it was tickled. It seemed pretty clear that they could not escape, at least for the present. That being so, why not take the opportunity of doing a little research work at state expense--an opportunity which he and his like were always clamoring for at home? His thoughts began to run away with him. He would find out all he could of the rites and superstitions of the tribe. He would, by the aid of his knowledge and his scientific skill, exalt the details of these rites, the expression of those superstitions, the whole physical side of their religiosity, on to a new level which should to them appear truly miraculous.

It would not be worth my troubling to tell all the negotiations, the false starts, the misunderstandings. In the end he secured what he wanted--a building which could be used as a laboratory; an unlimited supply of slaves for the lower and priests for the higher duties of laboratory assistants, and the promise that when his scientific stores were exhausted they would do their best to secure others from the coast--a promise which was scrupulously kept, so that he never went short for lack of what money could buy.

He next applied himself diligently to a study of their religion and found that it was built round various main motifs. Of these, the central one was the belief in the divinity and tremendous importance of the Priest-King. The second was a form of ancestor-worship. The third was an animal cult, in particular of the more grotesque species of the African fauna. The fourth was sex, con variazioni.Hascombe reflected on these facts. Tissue culture; experimental embryology; endocrine treatment; artificial parthenogenesis. He laughed and said to himself: "Well, at least I can try, and it ought to be amusing."


That was how it all started. Perhaps the best way of giving some idea of how it had developed will be for me to tell my own impressions when Hascombe took me round his laboratories. One whole quarter of the town was devoted entirely to religion--it struck me as excessive, but Hascombe reminded me that Tibet spends one-fifth of its revenues on melted butter to burn before its shrines. Facing the main square was the chief temple, built impressively enough of solid mud. On either side were the apartments where dwelt the servants of the gods and administrators of the sacred rites. Behind were Hascombe's laboratories, some built of mud, others, under his later guidance, of wood. They were guarded night and day by patrols of giants, and were arranged in a series of quadrangles. Within one quadrangle was a pool which served as an aquarium; in another, aviaries and great hen houses; in yet another, cages with various animals; in the fourth a little botanic garden. Behind were stables with dozens of cattle and sheep, and a sort of experimental ward for human beings.

He took me into the nearest of the buildings. "This," he said, "is known to the people as the Factory (it is difficult to give the exact sense of the word, but it literally means producing-place), the Factory of Kingship or Majesty, and the Well-spring of Ancestral Immortality." I looked round, and saw platoons of buxom and shining African women, becomingly but unusually dressed in tight-fitting dresses and caps, and wearing rubber gloves. Microscopes were much in evidence, also various receptacles from which steam was emerging. The back of the room was screened off by a wooden screen in which were a series of glass doors; and these doors opened into partitions, each labeled with a name in that unknown tongue, and each containing a number of objects like the one I had seen taken out of the basket by the giant before we were captured. Pipes surrounded this chamber, and appeared to be distributing heat from a fire in one corner.

"Factory of Majesty!" I exclaimed. "Wellspring of Immortality! What the dickens do you mean?"

Page 4 of 8

"If you prefer a more prosaic name," said Hascombe, "I should call this the Institute of Religious Tissue Culture." My mind went back to a day in 1918 when I had been taken by a biological friend in New York to see the famous Rockefeller Institute; and at the word tissue culture I saw again before me Dr. Alexis Carrel and troops of white-garbed American girls making cultures, sterilizing, microscopizing, incubating and the rest of it. The Hascombe Institute was, it is true, not so well equipped, but it had an even larger, if differently colored, personnel.

Hascombe began his explanations. "As you probably know, Frazer's 'Golden Bough' introduced us to the idea of a sacred priest-king, and showed how fundamental it was in primitive societies. The welfare of the tribe is regarded as inextricably bound up with that of the King, and extraordinary precautions are taken to preserve him from harm. In this kingdom, in the old days, the King was hardly allowed to set his foot to the ground in case he should lose divinity; his cut hair and nail-parings were entrusted to one of the most important officials of state, whose duty it was to bury them secretly, in case some enemy should compass the King's illness or death by using them in black magic rites. If anyone of base blood trod on the King's shadow, he paid the penalty with his life. Each year a slave was made mock-king for a week, allowed to enjoy all the King's privileges and was decapitated at the close of his brief glory; and by this means it was supposed that the illnesses and misfortunes that might befall the King were vicariously got rid of.

"I first of all rigged up my apparatus, and with the aid of Aggers, succeeded in getting good cultures, first of chick tissues and later, by the aid of embryo-extract, of various and adult mammalian tissues. I then went to Bugala, and told him that I could increase the safety, if not of the King as an individual, at least of the life which was in him, and that I presumed that this would be equally satisfactory from a theological point of view. I pointed out that if he chose to be made guardian of the King's subsidiary lives, he would be in a much more important position than the chamberlain or the burier of the sacred nail-parings, and might make the post the most influential in the realm.

"Eventually I was allowed (under threats of death if anything untoward occurred) to remove small portions of His Majesty's subeutaneous connective tissue under a local anesthetic. In the presence of the assembled nobility I put fragments of this into culture medium, and showed it to them under the microscope. The cultures were then put away in the incubator, under a guard--relieved every eight hours--of half a dozen warriors. After three days, to my joy they had all taken and showed abundant growth. I could see that the Council was impressed, and reeled off a magnificent speech, pointing out that this growth constituted an actual increase in the quantity of the divine principle inherent in royalty; and what was more, that I could increase it indefinitely. With that I cut each of my cultures into eight, and sub-cultured all the pieces. They were again put under guard, and again examined after three days. Not all of them had taken this time, and there were some murmurings and angry looks, on the ground that I had killed some of the King; but I pointed out that the King was still the King, that his little wound had completely healed, and that any successful cultures represented so much extra sacredness and protection to the state. I must say that they were very reasonable, and had good theological acumen, for they at once took the hint.

"I pointed out to Bugala, and he persuaded the rest without much difficulty, that they could now disregard some of the older implications of the doctrines of kingship. The most important new idea which I was able to introduce was mass production. Our aim was to multiply the King's tissues indefinitely, to ensure that some of their protecting power should reside everywhere in the country. Thus by concentrating upon quantity, we could afford to remove some of the restrictions upon the King's mode of life. This was of course agreeable to the King; and also to Bugala, who saw himself wielding undreamt-of power. One might have supposed that such an innovation would have met with great resistance simply on account of its being an innovation; but I must admit that these people compared very favorably with the average business man in their lack of prejudice. 

"Having thus settled the principle, I had many debates with Bugala as to the best methods for enlisting the mass of the population in our scheme. What an opportunity for scientific advertising! But, unfortunately, the population could not read. However, war propaganda worked very well in more or less illiterate countries--why not here?"


Hascombe organized a series of public lectures in the capital, at which he demonstrated his regal tissues to the multitude, who were bidden to the place by royal heralds. An impressive platform group was always supplied from the ranks of the nobles. The lecturer explained how important it was for the community to become possessed of greater and greater stores of the sacred tissues. Unfortunately, the preparation was laborious and expensive, and it behooved them all to lend a hand. It had accordingly been arranged that to everyone subscribing a cow or buffalo, or its equivalent--three goats, pigs or sheep--a portion of the royal anatomy should be given, handsomely mounted in an ebony holder. Sub-culturing would be done at certain hours and days, and it would be obligatory to send the cultures for renewal. If through any negligence the tissue died, no renewal would be made. The subscription entitled the receiver to sub-culturing rights for a year, but was of course renewable. By this means not only would the totality of the King be much increased, to the benefit of all, but each cultureholder would possess an actual part of His Majesty, and would have the infinite joy and privilege of aiding by his own efforts the multiplication of divinity.

Then they could also serve their country by dedicating a daughter to the state. These young women would be housed and fed by the state, and taught the technique of the sacred culture. Candidates would be selected according to general fitness, but would of course, in addition, be required to attain distinction in an examination on the principles of religion. They would be appointed for a probationary period of six months. After this they would receive a permanent status, with the title of Sisters of the Sacred Tissue. From this, with age, experience and merit, they could expect promotion to the rank of mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers, and grand ancestresses of the same. The merit and benefit they would receive from their close contact with the source of all benefits would overflow on to their families.

The scheme worked like wildfire. Pigs, goats, cattle, buffalos and Negro maidens poured in. Next year the scheme was extended to the whole country, a peripatetic laboratory making the rounds weekly.

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By the close of the third year there was hardly a family in the country which did not possess at least one sacred culture. To be without one would have been like being without one's trousers--or at least without one's hat--on Fifth Avenue. Thus did Bugala effect a reformation in the national religion, enthrone himself as the most important personage in the country, and entrench applied science and Hascombe firmly in the organization of the state.

Encouraged by his success, Hascombe soon set out to capture the ancestry-worship branch of the religion as well. A public proclamation was made pointing out how much more satisfactory it would be if worship could be made not merely to the charred bones of one's forbears, but to bits of them still actually living and growing. All who were desirous of profiting by the enterprise of Bugala's Department of State should therefore bring their older relatives to the laboratory at certain specified hours, and fragments would be painlessly extracted for culture.

This, too, proved very attractive to the average citizen. Occasionally, it is true, grandfathers or aged mothers arrived in a state of indignation and protest. However, this did not matter, since, according to the law, once children were twenty-five years of age, they were not only assigned the duty of worshipping their ancestors, alive or dead, but were also given complete control over them, in order that all rites might be duly performed to the greater safety of the commonweal. Further, the ancestors soon found that the operation itself was trifling, and, what was more, that once accomplished, it had the most desirable results. For their descendants preferred to concentrate at once upon the culture which they would continue to worship after the old folks were gone, and so left their parents and grandparents much freer than before from the irksome restrictions which in all ages have beset the officially holy.

Thus, by almost every hearth in the kingdom, instead of the old-fashioned rows of red jars containing the incinerated remains of one or other of the family forbears, the new generation saw growing up a collection of family slides. Each would be taken out and reverently examined at the hour of prayer. "Grandpapa is not growing well this week," you would perhaps hear the young black devotee say; the father of the family would pray over the speck of tissue; and if that failed, it would be taken back to the factory for rejuvenation. On the other hand, what rejoicing when a rhythm of activity stirred in the culture! A spurt on the part of great-grandmother's tissues would bring her wrinkled old smile to mind again; and sometimes it seemed as if one particular generation were all stirred simultaneously by a pulse of growth, as if combining to bless their devout descendants.

To deal with the possibility of cultures dying out, Hascombe started a central storehouse, where dtiplicates of every strain were kept, and it was this repository of the national tissues which had attracted my attention at the back of the laboratory. No such collectidn had ever existed before, he assured me. Not a necropolis, but a histopolis, if I may coin a word: not a cemetery, but a place of eternal growth.

The second building was devoted to endocrine products--an African Armour's--and was called by the people the "Factory of Ministers to the Shrines."

"Here," he said, "you will not find much new. You know the craze for 'glands' that was going on at home years ago, and its results, in the shape of pluriglandular preparations, a new genre of patent medicines, and a popular literature that threatened to outdo the Freudians, and explain human beings entirely on the basis of glandular make-up, without reference to the mind at all.

"I had only to apply my knowledge in a comparatively simple manner. The first thing was to show Bugala how, by repeated injections of pre-pituitary, I could make an ordinary baby grow up into a giant. This pleased him, and he introduced the idea of a sacred bodyguard, all of really gigantic stature, quite overshadowing Frederick's Grenadiers.

"I did, however, extend knowledge in several directions. I took advantage of the fact taat their religion holds in reverence monstrous and imbecile forms of human beings. That is, of course, a common phenomenon in many countries, where half-wits are supposed to be inspired, and dwarfs the object of superstitious awe. So I went to work to create various new types. By employing a particular extract of adrenal cortex, I produced children who would have been a match for the Infant Hercules, and, indeed, looked rather like a cross between him and a brewer's drayman. By injecting the same extract into adolescent girls I was able to provide them with the most copious mustaches, after which they found ready employment as prophetesses.

"Tampering with the post-pituitary gave remarkable cases of obesity. This, together with the passion of the men for fatness in their women, Bugala took advantage of, and I believe made quite a fortune by selling as concubines female slaves treated in this way. Finally, by another pituitary treatment, I at last mastered the secret of true dwarfism, in which perfect proportions are retained.

"Of these productions, the dwarfs are retained as acolytes in the temple; a band of the obese young ladies form a sort of Society of Vestal Virgins, with special religious duties, which, as the embodiment of the national ideal of beauty, they are supposed to discharge with peculiarly propitious effect; and the giants form our Regular Army.

"The Obese Virgins have set me a problem which I confess I have not yet solved. Like all races who set great store by sexual enjoyment, these people have a correspondingly exaggerated reverence for virginity. It therefore occurred to me that if I could apply Jacques Loeb's great discovery of artificial parthenogenesis to man, or, to be precise, to these young ladies, I should be able to grow a race of vestals, self-reproducing yet ever virgin, to whom in concentrated form should attach that reverence of which I have spoken. You see, I must always remember that it is no good proposing any line of work that will not benefit the national religion. I suppose state-aided research would have much the same kinds of difficulties in a really democratic state. Well this, as I say, has so far beaten me. I have taken the matter a step further than Bataillon with his fatherless frogs, and I have induced parthenogenesis in the eggs of reptiles and birds; but so far I have failed with mammals. However, I've not given up yet!"

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Then we passed to the next laboratory, which was full of the most incredible animal monstrosities. "This laboratory is the most amusing," said Hascombe. "Its official title is 'Home of the Living Fetishes.' Here again I have simply taken a prevalent trait of the populace, and used it as a peg on which to hang research. I told you that they always had a fancy for the grotesque in animals, and used the most bizarre forms, in the shape of little clay or ivory statuettes, for fetishes.

"I thought I would see whether art could not improve upon nature, and set myself to recall my experimental embryology. I use only the simplest methods. I utilize the plasticity of the earliest stages to give double-headed and cyclopean monsters. That was, of course, done years ago in newts by Spemann and fish by Stockard; and I have merely applied the mass-production methods of Mr. Ford to their results. But my specialties are three-headed snakes, and toads with an extra heaven-pointing head. The former are a little difficult, but there is a great demand for them, and they fetch a good price. The frogs are easier: I simply apply Harrison's methods to embryo tadpoles."

He then showed me into the last building. Unlike the others, this contained no signs of research in progress, but was empty. It was draped with black hangings, and lit only from the top. In the center were rows of ebony benches, and in front of them a glittering golden ball on a stand.

"Here I am beginning my work on reinforeed telepathy," he told me. "Some day you must come and see what it's all about, for it really is interesting."

You may imagine that I was pretty well flabbergasted by this catalogue of miracles. Every day I got a talk with Hascombe, and gradually the talks became recognized events of our daily routine. One day I asked if he had given up hope of escaping. He showed a queer hesitation in replying. Eventually he said, "To tell you the truth, my dear Jones, I have really hardly thought of it these last few years. It seemed so impossible at first that I deliberately put it out of my head and turned with more and more energy, I might almost say fury, to my work. And now, upon my soul, I am not quite sure whether I want to escape or not."

"Not want to!" I exclaimed, "surely you can't mean that!"

"I am not so sure," he rejoiced. "What I most want is to get ahead with this work of mine. Why, man, you don't realize what a chance I've got! And it is all growing so fast--I can see every kind of possibility ahead"; and he broke off into silence.

However, although I was interested enough in his past achievements; I did not feel willing to sacrifice my future to his perverted intellectual ambitions. But he would not leave his work.


The experiments which most excited his imagination were those he was conducting into mass telepathy. He had received his medical training at a time when abnormal psychology was still very unfashionable in England, but had luckily been thrown in contact with a young doctor who was a keen student of hypnotism, through whom he had been introduced to some of the great pioneers, like Bramwell and Wingfield. As a result, he had become a passable hypnotist himself, with a fair knowledge of the literature.

In the early days of his captivity he became interested in the sacred dances which took place every night of full moon, and were regarded as propitiations of the celestial powers. The dancers all belong to a special sect. After a series of exciting figures, symbolizing various activities of the chase, war and love, the leader conducts his band to a ceremonial bench. He then begins to make passes at them; and what impressed Hascombe was this, that a few seconds sufficed for them to fall back in deep hypnosis against the ebony rail. It recalled, he said, the most startling cases of collective hypnosis recorded by the French scientists. The leader next passed from one end of the bench to the other, whispering a brief sentence into each ear. He then, according to immemorial rite, approached the Priest-King, and, after having exclaimed aloud, "Lord of Majesty, command what thou wilt for thy dancers to perform," the King would thereupon command some action which had previously been kept secret. The command was often to fetch some object and deposit it at the moon-shrine; or to fight the enemies of the state; or (and this was what the company most liked) to be some animal, or bird. Whatever the command, the hypnotized men would obey it, for the leader's whispered words had been an order to hear and carry out only what the King said; and the strangest scenes would be witnessed as they ran, completely oblivious of all in their path, in search of the gourds or sheep they had been called on to procure, or lunged in a symbolic way at invisible enemies, or threw themselves on all fours and roared as lions, or galloped as zebras, or danced as cranes. The command executed, they stood like stocks or stones, until their leader, running from one to the other, touched each with a finger and shouted, "Wake." They woke, and limp, but conscious of having been the vessels of the unknown spirit, danced back to their special hut or clubhouse.

This susceptibility to hypnotic suggestion struck Hascombe, and he obtained permission to test the performers more closely. He soon established that the people were, as a race, extremely prone to dissociation, and could be made to lapse into deep hypnosis with great ease, but a hypnosis in which the subconscious, though completely cut off from the waking self, comprised portions of the personality not retained in the hypnotic selves of Europeans. Like most who have fluttered round the psychological candle, he had been interested in the notion of telepathy; and now, with this supply of hypnotic subjects under his hands, began some real investigation of the problem.

By picking his subjects, he was soon able to demonstrate the existence of telepathy, by making suggestions to one hypnotized man who transferred them without physical intermediation to another at a distance. Later--and this was the culmination of his work--he found that when he made a suggestion to several subjects at once, the telepathic effect was much stronger than if he had done it to one at a time--the hypnotized minds were reinforcing each other. "I'm after the superconsciousness," Hascombe said, "and I've already got the rudiments of it."

I must confess that I got almost as excited as Hascombe over the possibilities thus opened up. It certainly seemed as if he were right in principle. If all the subjects were in practically the same psychological state, extraordinary reinforcing effects were observed. At first the attainment of this similarity of condition was very difficult; gradually, however, we discovered that it was possible to tune hypnotic subjects to the same pitch, if I may use the metaphor, and then the fun really began.

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First of all we found that with increasing reinforcement, we could get telepathy conducted to greater and greater distances, until finally we could transmit commands from the capital to the national boundary, nearly a hundred miles. We next found that it was not necessary for the subject to be in hypnosis to receive the telepathic command. Almost everybody, but especially those of equable temperament, could thus be influenced. Most extraordinary of all, however, were what we at first christened "near effects," since their transmission to a distance was not found possible until later. If, after Hascombe had suggested some simple command to a largish group of hypnotized subjects, he or I went right up among them, we would experience the most extraordinary sensation, as of some superhuman personality repeating the command in a menacing and overwhelming way and, whereas with one part of ourselves we felt that we must carry out the command, with another we felt, if I may say so, as if we were only a part of the command, or of something much bigger than ourselves which was commanding. And this, Hascombe claimed, was the first real beginning of the superconsciousness.

Bugala, of course, had to be considered. Hascombe, with the old Tibetan prayer wheel at the back of his mind, suggested that eventually he would be able to induce hypnosis in the whole population, and then transmit a prayer. This would ensure that the daily prayer, for instance, was really said by the whole population, and, what is more, simultaneously, which would undoubtedly much enhance its efficacy. And it would make it possible in times of calamity or battle to keep the whole praying force of the nation at work for long spells together.


Bugala was deeply interested. He saw himself, through this mental machinery, planting such ideas as he wished in the brain cases of his people. He saw himself willing an order; and the whole population rousing itself out of trance to execute it. He dreamt dreams before which those of the proprietor of a newspaper syndicate, even those of a director of propaganda in wartime, would be pale and timid. Naturally, he wished to receive personal instruction in the methods himself; and, equttilly naturally, we could not refuse him, though I must say that I often felt a little uneasy as to what he might choose to do if he ever decided to override Hascombe and to start experimenting on his own. This, combined with my constant longing to get away from the place, led me to cast about again for means of escape. Then it occurred to me that this very method about which I had such gloomy presentiments, might itself be made the key to our prison.

So one day, after getting Hascombe worked up about the loss to humanity it would be to let this great discovery die with him in Africa, I set to in earnest. "My dear Hascombe," I said, "you must get home out of this. What is there to prevent you saying to Bugala that your experiments are nearly crowned with success, but that for certain tests you must have a much greater number of subjects at your disposal? You can then get a battery of two hundred men, and after you have tuned them, the reinforcement will be so great that you will have at your disposal a mental force big enough to affect the whole population. Then, of course, one fine day we should raise the potential of our mind-battery to the highest possible level, and send out through it a general hypnotic influence. The whole country, men, women and children, would sink into stupor. Next we should give our experimental squad the suggestion to broadcast 'sleep for a week.' The telepathic message would be relayed to each of the thousands of minds waiting receptively for it, and would take root in them, until the whole nation became a single superconsciousness, conscious only of the one thought 'sleep' which we had thrown into it."

The reader will perhaps ask how we ourselves expected to escape from the clutches of the superconsciousness we had created. Well, we had discovered that metal was relatively impervious to the telepathic effect, and had prepared for ourselves a sort of tin pulpit, behind which we could stand while conducting experiments. This, combined with caps of metal foil, enormously reduced the effects on ourselves. We had not informed Bugala of this property of metal.

Hascombe was silent. At length he spoke. "I like the idea," he said; "I like to think that if I ever do get back to England and to scientific recognition, my discovery will have given me the means of escape."

From that moment we worked assiduously to perfect our method and our plans. After about five months everything seemed propitious. We had provisions packed away, and compasses. I had been allowed to keep my rifle, on promise that I would never discharge it. We had made friends with some of the men who went trading to the coast, and had got from them all the information we could about the route, without arousing their suspicions.

At last, the night arrived. We assembled our men as if for an ordinary practice, and after hypnosis had been induced, started to tune them. At this moment Bugala came in, unannounced. This was what we had been afraid of; but there had been no means of preventing it. "What shall we do?" I whispered to Hascombe, in English. "Go right ahead and be damned to it," was his answer; "we can put him to sleep with the rest."

So we welcomed him, and gave him a seat as near as possible to the tightly packed ranks of the performers. At length the preparations were finished. Hascombe went into the pulpit and said, "Attention to the words which are to be suggested." There was a slight stiffening of the bodies. "Sleep," said Hascombe. "Sleep is the command: command all in this land to sleep unbrokenly." Bugala leapt up with an exclamation; but the induction had already begun. 

We with our metal coverings were immune. But Bugala was struck by the full force of the mental current. He sank back on his chair, helpless. For a few minutes his extraordinary will resisted the suggestion. Although he could not move, his angry eyes were open. But at length he succumbed, and he too slept.

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We lost no time in starting, and made good progress through the silent country. The people were sitting about like wax figures. Women sat asleep by their milk-pails, the cow by this time far away. Fat-bellied naked children slept at their games. The houses were full of sleepers sleeping upright round their food, recalling Wordsworth's famous "party in a parlor."

So we went on, feeling pretty queer and scarcely believing in this morphic state into which we had plunged a nation. Finally the frontier was reached, where with extreme elation, we passed an immobile and gigantic frontier guard. A few miles further we had a good solid meal, and a doze. Our kit was rather heavy, and we decided to jettison some superfluous weight, in the shape of some food, specimens, and our metal headgear, or mind-protectors, which at this distance, and with the hypnosis wearing a little thin, were, we thought, no longer necessary.

About nightfall on the third day, Hascombe suddenly stopped and turned his head.

"What's the matter?" I said. "Have you seen a lion?" His reply was completely unexpected. "No. I was just wondering whether really I ought not to go back again."

"Go back again," I cried. "What in the name of God Almighty do you want to do that for?"

"It suddenly struck me that I ought to," he said, "about five minutes ago. And really, when one comes to think of it, I don't suppose I shall ever get such a chance at research again. What's more, this is a dangerous journey to the coast, and I don't expect we shall get through alive."

I was thoroughly upset and put out, and told him so. And suddenly, for a few moments, I felt I must go back too. It was like that old friend of our boyhood, the voice of conscience.

"Yes, to be sure, we ought to go back," I thought with fervor. But suddenly checking myself as the thought came under the play of reason--"Why should we go back?" All sorts of reasons were proffered, as it were, by unseen hands reaching up out of the hidden parts of me. 


And then I realized what had happened. Bugala had waked up; he had wiped out the suggestion we had given to the superconsciousness, and in its place put in another. I could see him thinking it out, the cunning devil (one must give him credit for brains!), and hear him, after making his passes, whisper to the nation in prescribed form his new suggestion: "Will to return! Return!" For most of the inhabitants the command would have no meaning, for they would have been already at home. Doubtless some young men out on the hills, or truant children, or girls run off in secret to meet their lovers, were even now returning, stiffly and in somnambulistic trance, to their homes. It was only for them that the new command of the superconsciousness had any meaning--and for us.

I am putting it in a long and discursive way; at the moment I simply saw what had happened in a flash. I told Hascombe, I showed him it must be so, that nothing else would account for the sudden change. I begged and implored him to use his reason, to stick to his decision, and to come on. How I regretted that, in our desire to discard all useless weight, we had left behind our metal telepathy-proof head coverings!

But Hascombe would not, or could not, see my point. I suppose he was much more imbued with all the feelings and spirit of the country, and so more susceptible. However that may be, he was immovable. He must go back; he knew it; he saw it clearly; it was his sacred duty; and much other similar rubbish. All this time the suggestion was attacking me too; and finally I felt that if I did not put more distance between me and that unisonic battery of will, I should succumb as well as he.

"Hascombe," I said, "I am going on. For God's sake, come with me." And I shouldered my pack, and set off. He was shaken, I saw, and came a few steps after me. But finally he turned, and, in spite of my frequent pauses and shouts to him to follow, made off in the direction we had come. I can assure you that it was with a gloomy soul that I continued my solitary way. I shall not bore you with my adventures. Suffice it to say that at last I got to a white outpost, weak with fatigue and poor food and fever.

I kept very quiet about my adventures, only giving out that our expedition had lost its way and that my men had run away oy been killed by the local tribes. At last I reached England. But I was a broken man, and a profound gloom had invaded my mind at the thought of Hascombe and the way he had been caught in his own net. I never found out what happened to him, and I do not suppose that I am likely to find out now. You may ask why I did not try to organize a rescue expedition; or why, at least, I did not bring Hascombe's discoveries before the Royal Society or the Metaphysical Institute. I can only repeat that I was a broken man. I did not expect to be believed; I was not at all sure that I could repeat our results, even on the same human material, much less with men of another race; I dreaded ridicule; and finally I was tormented by doubts as to whether the knowledge of mass telepathy would not be a curse rather than a blessing to mankind.

However, I am an oldish man now and, what is more, old for my years. I want to tet the story off my chest. Besides, old men like sermonizing and you must forgive, gentle reader, the sermonical turn which I now feel I must take. The question I want to raise is this: Dr. Hascombe attained to an unsurpassed power in a number of the applications of science--but to what end did all this power serve? It is the merest cant and twaddle to go on asserting, as most of our press and people continue to do, that increase of scientific knowledge and power must in itself be good. I commend to the great public the obvious moral of my story and ask them to think what they propose to do with the power which is gradually being accumulated for them by the labors of those who labor because they like power, or because they want to find the truth about how things work.