It was in Cracow that he heard a Rosicrucian speak of the transcendental elements—among them, of magnetic air, which runs in the veins of sylphs, and gives them their buoyancy and immortality. Adam listened as though the echo under the bridges had suddenly become articulate, reiterating the sentence which had struck him during Jimmie Guthrie’s funeral: ‘For as in Adam all die’. He had been too hasty in putting by his first interpretation of those words. In a deeper sense, it was true: all his journeys and learnings and languages and dodges, his nights under the stars and with very large women, had accumulated and died in him. He was a compendium of deaths. Death, then, must be his proper study. To understand death, he must approach it through its opposite: the incapacity to die. He must catch a fairy, draw blood from it, identify that special element of magnetic air.

Having bought a fleam44 and practiced phlebotomy45, he spent the next thirty years haunting dells, fountains, forests, fairy rings on lawns and in pastures, caves, tumuli—every place where fairies were said to resort. Yearly, as Midsummer Eve drew on, he was in a fever of anticipation. Nothing came of it, except that he was forty years more travelled and forty years uglier. Otherwise, he felt no older. He was active and limber as ever he had been, and, for all the nights he had spent in dells and damp pastures, without a trace of rheumatism: it was almost as though magnetic air ran in his own veins. He decided to lower his ambition and pursue Brownies46; they, too, were of the fairy kind, though vulgarized and more like Lars47. Brownies were common in Scotland, so to Scotland he went, and lodged in a wayside inn near Dumfries. A noisy brook ran beside it. Wakened during his first night by shouts and mutterings, he thought he was hearing a Kelpie.48 Kelpies are fierce immortals; Brownies would be easier to deal with; yet a Kelpie within a stone’s throw ought not to be neglected. While he was debating this, he came to distinguish between the noise outside the house, which was the brook contesting with its rocky bed, and the noise within it, the voice of someone raving in a high fever, so near at hand that he could hear the bedstead creak as the sick man tossed and turned. In the morning he complained of this disturbance to the woman of the inn.

‘I don’t suppose you’ll be troubled with him much longer,’ said she. ‘But if you like, I’ll move him to the out-house. I only took him in for pity’s sake. One doesn’t want the scandal of a tramp dying on one’s doorstep. He’s a big man, though, and his fever makes him as awkward as a ram. Perhaps you’d lend a hand with him?’

‘Willingly,’ said Adam.