feel then that I was lonely, that I had come out from the world

into a desolate place. I appreciated my loss of sympathy, but I put

it down to the general inanity of things. Re-entering my room

seemed like the recovery of reality. There were the things I knew

and loved. There stood the apparatus, the experiments arranged and

waiting. And now there was scarcely a difficulty left, beyond the

planning of details.

"I will tell you, Kemp, sooner or later, all the complicated

processes. We need not go into that now. For the most part, saving

certain gaps I chose to remember, they are written in cypher in

those books that tramp has hidden. We must hunt him down. We must

get those books again. But the essential phase was to place the

transparent object whose refractive index was to be lowered between

two radiating centres of a sort of ethereal vibration, of which I

will tell you more fully later. No, not those Roentgen vibrations--I

don't know that these others of mine have been described. Yet

they are obvious enough. I needed two little dynamos, and these I

worked with a cheap gas engine. My first experiment was with a bit

of white wool fabric. It was the strangest thing in the world to

see it in the flicker of the flashes soft and white, and then to

watch it fade like a wreath of smoke and vanish.

I could scarcely believe I had done it. I put my hand into the

emptiness, and there was the thing as solid as ever. I felt it

awkwardly, and threw it on the floor. I had a little trouble

153

The Invisible Man