No fear of bullets or bayonets could ever equal mine.
It was the fear of ghosts. As a child, I think that at times
when shut up for punishment, in a dark cellar for instance, I
must have nearly gone out of my mind with this appalling
terror.
Once when we were lying just below Whampo, the captain took
nearly every officer and nearly the whole ship's crew on a
punitive expedition up the Canton river. They were away
about a week. I was left behind, dangerously ill with fever
and ague. In his absence, Sir Thomas had had me put into his
cabin, where I lay quite alone day and night, seeing hardly
anyone save the surgeon and the captain's steward, who was
himself a shadow, pretty nigh. Never shall I forget my
mental sufferings at night. In vain may one attempt to
describe what one then goes through; only the victims know
what that is. My ghost - the ghost of the Whampo Reach - the
ghost of those sultry and miasmal nights, had no shape, no
vaporous form; it was nothing but a presence, a vague
amorphous dread. It may have floated with the swollen and
putrid corpses which hourly came bobbing down the stream, but
it never appeared; for there was nothing to appear. Still it
might appear. I expected every instant through the night to
see it in some inconceivable form. I expected it to touch
me. It neither stalked upon the deck, nor hovered in the
dark, nor moved, nor rested anywhere. And yet it was there
about me, - where, I knew not. On every side I was
threatened. I feared it most behind the head of my cot,
because I could not see it if it were so.
This, it will be said, is the description of a nightmare.
Exactly so. My agony of fright was a nightmare; but a
nightmare when every sense was strained with wakefulness,
when all the powers of imagination were concentrated to
paralyse my shattered reason.
The experience here spoken of is so common in some form or
other that we may well pause to consider it. What is the
meaning of this fear of ghosts? - how do we come by it? It
may be thought that its cradle is our own, that we are
purposely frightened in early childhood to keep us calm and
quiet. But I do not believe that nurses' stories would
excite dread of the unknown if the unknown were not already
known. The susceptibility to this particular terror is there
before the terror is created. A little reflection will
convince us that we must look far deeper for the solution of
a mystery inseparable from another, which is of the last
importance to all of us.
CHAPTER VI
THE belief in phantoms, ghosts, or spirits, has frequently
been discussed in connection with speculations on the origin
of religion.
