Page:Rowland--The Mountain of Fears.djvu/39

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THE MOUNTAIN OF FEARS

sit passively and watch for the symptom which states the case.

"Vinckers observed this thing," continued Leyden. "Vinckers was an unimaginative man, and consequently the impression on him was as it would have been upon a dry plate, or the tracings of a seismograph, or any other machine which records automatically without contributing anything of its own. Vinckers was rather low in the animal scale—by low I mean primitive; as a man he was a splendid specimen, but he was animal enough to get rather more from his instincts than from his reasoning—like most women. He watched this thing, this yellow light coming through the mist and touching with its sickly yellow tinge all of the fantastic objects in the picture that belonged to the imaginative school of painting. He looked quite steadily at the dream-trees, too symmetrical to be real; the fantastic rock shapes, too fancifully grotesque to be the work of nature; he observed the yellow light upon the sluggish stream,

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