This review was originally published in the TLS of October 3, 1929

That Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his seventieth year “with nearly seventeen stone to carry” should have been prepared to undertake a tour through South Africa, North and South Rhodesia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika is evidence of vigour of which further indications are to be found in the thoroughness with which he adhered to his arduous programme and in the zest and scope of his comments. The main purpose of this—the fourth of the long journeys made by him and his family on the same errand—was “psychic research and exposition”; and it involved the giving of many lectures. We know his methods, and it was a foregone conclusion that they would be attended with success:—

"we have left a trail of more than 2,000 books and pamphlets behind us. South Africa can never be quite the same. I should think that in the present moment its average of psychic knowledge is the highest of any community in the world."

Those who do not share his beliefs will find that they can feel nothing but respect for the earnestness and conviction with which he proclaimed them; and they will find, too, that his very preoccupation with another world makes for observing this world without prejudice. He set about seeing all that there was to be seen of material things with the energy that characterized the adventurers of his own fiction; and he retains the pen that made those adventurers household words. Gold mines, diamond mines, agriculture, the relations between British and Dutch—Sir Arthur discusses them all with the grasp of an experienced observer with standards of comparison.

But such matters are from the common stock of all intelligent commentators on Africa. The region into which Sir Arthur takes us is larger than that continent and, as he sees it, more variously peopled. The peculiar interest in his book is that in it he culls upon the shadowy beings who wait on him to impose order on what appears accident and to make ceremony more impressive. He has it that these beings have the power and desire to avenge injury; and thus for him the tale that “a peculiar form of madness ending in death used to break out among the executioners of the Soviets” is easily acceptable. “None are so helpless that they may not have some means of revenge—even if it be nobler not to use it.” To his belief in their survival we owe a passage, none the less stirring that one should have thought that—if these beings know more than we do, as Sir Arthur appears to hold—the action it describes was superfluous: —

"At the end of the Japanese–Russian War Togo stood upon a hillock on the seashore and called his dead sailors round him, saying it was only their due that he, their Admiral, should announce to them the terms of peace for which they had fought."

Sir Arthur is less persuasive when his enthusiasm for establishing the abnormal leads him to develop a theory in which fairies are related to insects and accounted for in terms of evolution and vibration.

His book ends with an appendix in which a telepathic communication received from Rhodes at his grave in the Matoppos is set out word for word. Among other things Rhodes said: “Your own burial place will be in the souls and hearts of men. We shall meet anon, and what talks we shall have.” Elsewhere in his book Sir Arthur makes the effective point that in a communication from a spirit what is convincing is not a reference to matters of common knowledge, but some trifling detail that identifies the speaker. It would then be interesting to learn if Rhodes was ever heard to use the word “anon.” It is obvious that it comes from a vocabulary not that of “what talks we shall have.”

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