"
With something bordering upon intellectual consternation, White, who
was a decent self-respecting sceptic, read these last clamberings of
Benham's spirit. They were written in pencil; they were unfinished
when he died.
(Surely the man was not a Christian!)
"You may be heedless of death and suffering because you think you
cannot suffer and die, or you may be heedless of death and pain
because you have identified your life with the honour of mankind and
the insatiable adventurousness of man's imagination, so that the
possible death is negligible and the possible achievement altogether
outweighs it." . . .
White shook his head over these pencilled fragments.
He was a member of the Rationalist Press Association, and he had
always taken it for granted that Benham was an orthodox unbeliever.
But this was hopelessly unsound, heresy, perilous stuff; almost, it
seemed to him, a posthumous betrayal. . . .
11
One night when he was in India the spirit of adventure came upon
Benham. He had gone with Kepple, of the forestry department, into
the jungle country in the hills above the Tapti.
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