Thankfully Charles was too engrossed in his storytelling to notice the look of astonishment my face must have betrayed at this revelation, despite my prodigious capacity to mask my feelings. I said nothing, but never have I listened with such close attention to anything anyone has ever told me as I did to the remainder of his tale.

“At first we continued into the hills in near silence, my companion puffing on the sweet-smelling tobacco in the bowl of his pipe, which he told me was mixed with hashish. Eventually he asked me how it was I had been stranded on this island, and I told him my tale: I was nineteen years old and bound reluctantly for the French East Indies. I then asked Roblet how he had come to live on this tropical island.

“‘My friend,’ he said, ‘my tale is scarcely believable and, if you allow me to tell it, you will no doubt consider me to have taken leave of my senses.’ I denied this, promising him I was a most sympathetic audience. The old man paused and looked at me out of the corner of his eye for a moment, as if taking stock of me. Finally, as the donkey pulled the cart that carried us on the narrow and bumpy path into the mountains, he launched into his chronicle. ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘you who seem so well read, so cultured, so thirsty for knowledge, you are perhaps familiar with the notion of metempsychosis?’ I told him I believed it referred to the Oriental belief of the rebirth of the soul after death. He paused and looked somewhere in front of him, although nowhere in particular, as if in a profound meditation. ‘Yes,’ he said finally, ‘that is the Oriental point of view. But it would appear there is another kind of metempsychosis that is not described by the Oriental sages. It is the metempsychosis of the living. I have come across it only once, and according to what you have just told me I now know it to be exactly fifty years ago. I am a surgeon by training, and in my youth I plied my trade in the merchant navy. The incident I am about to relate occurred while sailing the ocean the mapmakers call the Pacific, although it is anything but that. Our ship, the Solide, discovered a previously unknown island. The natives of this isle called it Oaeetee. They practiced a strange kind of metempsychosis of the living, if you will, which they called crossing. It is done simply enough, requiring only that two people gaze into each other’s eyes for several minutes. While on this island, I looked into the eyes of a boy scarcely younger than you in an effort to discover this rare phenomenon for myself. Afterward, I had no memory of it, other than in my dreams—but what dreams! I should rather call them nightmares. Such were my terrors that I became a pariah on board any ship I sailed. But I was too far changed to return to France, so I decided instead to settle here and dedicate myself to the welfare of the natives and Creoles.’