It may be supposed that he was master of an intricate and delicate system
whereby ideas were conveyed through signs of various sorts. On the
contrary. He employed signs more or less, but they were in every case
extraordinarily simple. The secret of his means of complete and
unutterable communication lay in that very essence which I have only
defined as an IS; ended and began with an innate and unlearnable control
over all which one can only describe as the homogeneously tactile. The
Zulu, for example communicated the following facts in a very few minutes,
with unspeakable ease, one day shortly after his arrival:
He had been formerly a Polish farmer, with a wife and four children. He
had left Poland to come to France, where one earned more money. His
friend (The Young Pole) accompanied him. They were enjoying life placidly
in, it may have been, Brest--I forget--when one night the _gendarmes_
suddenly broke into their room, raided it, turned it bottomside up,
handcuffed the two arch-criminals wrist to wrist, and said "Come with
us." Neither The Zulu nor The Young Pole had the ghost of an idea what
all this meant or where they were going. They had no choice but to obey,
and obey they did. Everyone boarded a train.
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