He based his experiment on one of Faraday’s. When a piece of copper is dropped between the two poles of a powerful electromagnet, being of nonmagnetic metal it cannot be influenced; nevertheless it will not fall through. It will float down slowly as though a viscous liquid occupied the space between the magnetic poles. Now, if one is brave enough to place one’s head in this spot – and Faraday, as we know, did carry out this experiment – absolutely nothing can be felt. What is remarkable is precisely that absolutely nothing is felt, but the terrible thing is that nothing, in scientific parlance, has never meant anything else than “the unknown,” the unexpected force, x, perhaps death itself.

Another known fact on which the device was based is that in America criminals are generally electrocuted by a current of twenty-two hundred volts. Death is instantaneous, the body fries, and the convulsive paroxysms are frightful to the point of making it seem as though the device that has killed it is falling upon the corpse in an effort to revive it. Now, if a person be subjected to a current more than four times as strong – let’s say ten thousand volts – nothing happens.

To elucidate what follows, let us note that the water running through the Lurance moat provided power for an eleven-thousand-volt dynamo.

André Marcueil, still plunged in a stupor, was tied to an armchair by his own servants – since servants will always obey a doctor if he diagnoses that their master is either ill or mad. His arms and legs were held spread-eagled by leather straps, and a strange object was placed on his skull, a sort of crenellated platinum crown with its teeth pointing downward. In the front and back it had a sort of tubular diamond. The crown was made in two sections, each provided with a red earpiece lined with a damp sponge to ensure contact with his temples on either side. The two metal semicircles were insulated from each other by a thick sheet of glass that projected over his forehead and occiput, and sparkled like rhinestones. Marcueil did not wake up when the springs of the sideplates were pressed hard against his temples, but it was at that instant that he dreamed of scalps and hair.

The doctor, Arthur Gough, and William Elson were observing, unseen, from the neighboring room, and the patient with his crown, still undressed, and with his make-up peeling off in places, as the gilding wears off a statue, presented so inhuman a spectacle that the two Americans, who “knew their Gospels,” needed a few moments to compose themselves and call on their common sense to shake off the pitiful and supernatural image of the King of the Jews diademed with thorns and nailed on a cross.

Could they be on the track of a force that was capable of regenerating the world, or destroying it?