Chapter IX: MAPS AND PHOTOGRAPHS
This somewhat disheartened me as I felt that I had gone hopelessly wrong from the very beginning. However, my pendulum was so persistent that the Padre was on his way South I decided to carry on. Some time later my pendulum passed from oscillation to gyration over a spot in the hills some 6 or 7 miles North of Salerno and continued to do so, whenever I applied my pendulum, for a matter of an hour and a half, when, quite suddenly, it began to swing again leading me into Salerno, where I lost all trace of the Padre. I tried several times during the afternoon but without success.
Thinking that my experiment had been a failure I decided to say nothing about it, but when I heard the Padre extolling the quality of the lunch he had had at the Officers’ Club in Salerno I immediately asked him what had made him “tarry by the wayside” for an hour and a half. “Oh, I had engine trouble,” was his reply, “but how do you know?” When I told him, I do not think he believed me; in fact, he suggested that I had got the information from his driver. Although my first serious attempt had only been about 50 per cent, right it was better than nothing.
My next success, after, I may say, so many utter failures that I was becoming despondent, was a similar case. One of our detachment officers came in to see me about something and after he had left I found his pocket book on my table. Using this as a sample I was able to follow him as far as the Central Station in Naples. Thinking that his detachment was still on the main airfield I was surprised when my pendulum made him turn off on the main Avellino Road and then some 6 or 7 miles along it when it changed to gyrations, over the airfield known as Pomigliano D’Arco. I found out later in the day that his detachment had been moved the previous evening to the second airfield.
The two cases I have quoted are the only ones which I can claim as having been of any material use, although they fell far short of the 100 per cent, mark; but it must be remembered that I was a comparative novice at that time and I have had few opportunities since.
There seems little doubt that dowsers are frequently called in by the police to trace the bodies of missing people and in most cases they are successful, using as a sample some article of clothing recently worn or used by the missing person.
W. H. Trinder in his “Dowsing” gives us a very interesting case which appeared in the Journal of the British Society of Dowsers regarding a Mr. Clarke who, realising that a dead body had no future, turned his attention to tracing living persons. His technique was similar to that used by others, that is to say, a sample of some kind, such as a handkerchief, his pendulum and, I presume, a map, used in exactly the same way as when he was locating dead bodies. It is interesting to note that the radiations from a person enter anything which is in close contact with them. These are constantly being given off and are exclusive to the person from whom they originally emanated, alive or dead. The same Mr. Clarke had been carrying out a series of successful experiments for the benefit of a sceptical friend, who finally suggested a further experiment, and I will give Mr. Clarke’s own words as they appeared in the above-mentioned Journal.
“This time he brought a police sergeant with him. He asked the sergeant to write down a route for him to take in his car, to hand this to him without saying a word, so that I could have no idea of the direction given, while the sergeant stayed with me to watch the result.
“The pendulum showed, almost yard for yard, the route taken and, just as I was remarking that he should be back again, we heard his car at the door.” This case is very similar to my own in Italy, but I can quite imagine the sceptic putting it down to some form of telepathy between the sergeant and Mr. Clarke.
So far the cases I have given can be explained, to some extent, by the fact that there have been samples, although there is no mention of one in the last case, but I have no doubt that Mr. Clarke’s sceptical friend left something that could be used as such.
We now come to what I call borderline cases, by which I mean those in which no sample is used but the necessary information is obtained from a map only. This may at first sound fantastic and inexplicable but the fact remains that, with some people, it works, which is all that really matters even though it should be inexplicable.
Not being one of the lucky people who can get satisfactory results from this form of Radiesthesia, I am unable to give any personal experiences, but there are reliable records of a great many, some of which I propose to give as illustration of the immense and far-reaching possibilities of this science, particularly in the hands of a highly-developed operator.
Henry de France tells of an interesting case. He received a plan of an area in France, in which a large lake is situated, from a geologist friend asking him to mark, on the plan, the underground streams flowing into the like. His friend was apparently somewhat sceptical because he added that he was well acquainted with the position of the streams. Henry de France sent the plan to a well-known radiesthetist but they were returned as he was too busy to deal with them, so he decided to run over the plans, with his pendulum, himself. Having marked the water courses, a matter of five minutes work, he says, he returned the plan to his geologist friend. He received an enthusiastic letter telling him that the lines were quite correct and enclosing a second plan to be similarly dealt with. Henry de France took considerable trouble with the second plan but with pitiful results. He assumes that his mental attitude had changed; in the first case he had taken little trouble, in the second perhaps too much.