“You’re fairly fit,
aren’t you?”

Not till he spoke did a light dawn on me. Though I had been thinking so
much of Parkes that day, I had not consciously made the connection. “But Parkes isn’t,” said I. “Is that possible?”

“By Jove!” said he. I found my book, and turned to the accounts of the precinct of
Asclepios in Athens. “Yes, Asclepios had two sons,” I said--“Machaon and Podaleirios. In
Homeric times he wasn’t a god, but only a physician, and his sons were
physicians too. The myth of his godhead is rather a late one----”

I shut the book. “Best not to read any more,” I said. “If we know all about Asclepios,
we shall possibly be suggesting things to the medium’s mind. Let’s
see what Machaon can tell us about himself, and we can verify it
afterwards.”

It was therefore with no further knowledge than this on the subject
of Machaon that we proposed to hold another séance the next day. All
morning the bitter air had been laden with snow, and now the street
in front of my house, a by-way at the best in the slender traffic of
the town, lay white and untrodden, save on the pavement where a few
passengers had gone by. Mrs. Forrest had not appeared at breakfast, and
from then till lunch-time I sat in the bow-window of the garden-room,
for the warmth of the central heating, of which a stack of pipes was
there installed, and for securing the utmost benefit of light that
penetrated this cowl of snow-laden sky, busy with belated letters. The
drowsiness that accompanies snowfall weighed heavily on my faculties,
but as far as I can assert anything, I can assert that I did not
sleep. From one letter I went on to another, and then for the sixth
or seventh time I tried to open my story. It promised better now
than before, and searching for a word that would not come to my pen,
I happened to look up along the street which lay in front of me. I
expected nothing: I was thinking of nothing but my work; probably I
had looked up like that a dozen times before, and had seen the empty
street, with snow lying thickly on the roadway. But now the roadway was not untenanted. Someone was walking down the
middle of it, and his aspect, incredible though it seemed, was not
startling. Why I was not startled I have no idea: I can only say that
the vision appeared perfectly natural. The figure was that of a young
man, whose hair, black and curly, lay crisply over his forehead. A
large white cloak reaching down to his knees enveloped him, and he
had thrown the end of it over his shoulder. Below his knees his legs
and feet were bare, so too was the arm up to the elbow, with which he
pressed his cloak to him, and there he was walking briskly down the
snowy street. As he came directly below the window where I sat, he
raised his head and looked at me directly, and smiled. And now I saw
his face: there was the low brow, the straight nose, the curved and
sunny mouth, the short chin, and I thought to myself that this was none
other than the Hermes of Praxiteles, he whose statue at Olympia makes
all those who look on it grow young again. There, anyhow, was a boyish
Greek god, stepping blithely and with gay, incomparable grace along
the street, and raising his face to smile at this stolid, middle-aged
man who blankly regarded him. Then with the certainty of one returning
home, he mounted the steps outside the front door, and seemed to pass
into and through it. Certainly he was no longer in the street, and, so
real and solid-seeming had he been to my vision, that I jumped up, ran
across the few steps of garden, and went into the house, and I should
not have been amazed if I had found him standing in the hall. But there
was no one there, and I opened the front door: the snow lay smooth
and untrodden down the centre of the road where he had walked and on
my doorstep. And at that moment the memory of the séance the evening
before, about which up till now I had somehow felt distrustful and
suspicious, passed into the realm of sober fact, for had not Machaon
just now entered my house, with a smile as of recognition on some
friendly mission? We sat again that afternoon by daylight, and now, I must suppose, the
control was more actively and powerfully present, for hardly had Mrs.
Forrest passed into trance than the voice began, louder than it had
been the night before, and far more distinct. He--Machaon I must call
him--seemed to be anxious to establish his identity beyond all doubt,
like some newcomer presenting his credentials, and he began to speak of
the precinct of Asclepios in Athens. Often he hesitated for a word in
English, often he put in a word in Greek, and as he spoke, fragments of
things I had learned when an archæological student in Athens came back
into my mind, and I knew that he was accurately describing the portico
and the temple and the well. All this I toss to the sceptic to growl
and worry over and tear to bits; for certainly it seems possible that
my mind, holding these facts in its subconsciousness, was suggesting
them to the medium’s mind, who thereupon spoke of them and, conveying
them back to me, made me aware that I had known them.... My forgotten
knowledge of these things and of the Greek language came flooding back
on me, as he told us, now half in Greek, and half in English, of the
patients who came to consult the god, how they washed in the sacred
well for purification, and lay down to sleep in the portico. They often
dreamed, and in the interpretation of their dreams, which they told to
the priest next day, lay the indication of the cure. Or sometimes the
god healed more directly, and accompanied by the sacred snake walked
among the sleepers and by his touch made them whole. His temple was
hung with _ex-votos_, the gifts of those whom he had cured. And at
Epidaurus, where was another shrine of his, there were great mural
tablets recording the same....

Then the voice stopped, and as if to prove identity by another means,
the medium drew the pencil and paper to her, and in Greek characters,
unknown apparently to her, she traced the words “Machaon, son of
Asclepios....”

There was a pause, and I asked a direct question, which now had been
long simmering in my mind. “Have you come to help me about Parkes?” I asked. “Can you tell me what
will cure him?”

The pencil began to move again, tracing out characters in Greek. It
wrote [Greek: phengos x], and repeated it. I did not at once guess
what it meant, and asked for an explanation. There was no answer, and
presently the medium stirred, stretched herself and sighed, and came
out of trance. She took up the paper on which she had written. “Did that come through?” she asked. “And what does it mean? I don’t
even know the characters....”

Then suddenly the possible significance of [Greek: phengos x] flashed
on me, and I marvelled at my slowness. [Greek: phengos], a beam of
light, a ray, and the letter [Greek: x], the equivalent of the English
_x_.