The Wreck of the South Pole and Other Strange Tales — page 40: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Wreck of the South Pole. a4 both the eternal and the mortal in him. Could the spirit but secure control over the mortal it would be free. By long years of study, of culture and privation, men in your lands have secured this freedom from the body. We, in a sense, inherit it. Have you never heard of those wise men of all ages, who, at the present time, so far as your people know, are confined to the thoughtful Hindoo race?. Have you never heard of those inhabitants of India, who, after long study and privation, have been able to separate their souls from their bodies, and send them wheresoever they will?” | I had heard some such stories, although I never had be- lieved them, and I told him so. “What those few men can do,” Costa replied, “we do. You have come to a nation of men and women, adepts in all the intricacies of the occult sciences. We have gained such power over our bodies that we can leave them at any time and in our astral bodies fly in an instant of time to any quarter of the globe. Many of those adepts of India visit us and are visited by us inreturn. It is as easy, nay easier, than a journey in one of your ships which any storm may wreck. No storm ever wrecks the soul of the mahatma in its flight. “Are you not gaining any idea of the land to which you have come? It is a land of theosophists, a land in which each inhabitant possesses greater power than those few men we have spoken of. Why? Because we and our forefathers have been studying, learning, practicing for centuries, yea, for centuries before the present history of Connicloool S (CO)