So here was my predicament: I knew that within myself was a Golconda of memories of other lives, yet I was unable to do more than flit like a madman through those memories.

I had my Golconda but could not mine it.
I remembered the case of Stainton Moses, the clergyman who had been possessed by the personalities of St.Hippolytus, Plotinus, Athenodorus, and of that friend of Erasmus named Grocyn.

And when I considered the experiments of Colonel de Rochas, which I had read in tyro fashion in other and busier days, I was convinced that Stainton Moses had, in previous lives, been those personalities that on occasion seemed to possess him.

In truth, they were he, they were the links of the chain of recurrence.
But more especially did I dwell upon the experiments of Colonel de Rochas.

By means of suitable hypnotic subjects he claimed that he had penetrated backwards through time to the ancestors of his subjects.