AMAZING FEAT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 August 1938, Page 7

AMAZING FEAT

LONG IMMERSION IN WATER. SCIENTISTS PUZZLED. Frankly, I found Rahman Bey rather impressive, writes Stuart Fletcher in the “Daily Herald.” Consider what he did! This olive-complexioned Egyptian with trustful brown eyes, a beard like a small square of cocoanut matting affixed to his chin, and an amused expression, immersed himself for 57 minutes beneath the synthetically blue surface of a London swimming bath. There was no hokey-pokey. I saw him locked into a tank, and 42 bolts were screwed tightly into position. First of all, he had thrown himself into a trance—an alarming business. He shook like a pneumatic drill and then flung himself violently into unconsciousness. Then they bundled him into the tank, slid it down wooden planks into the water and piled weights on to it until it sank. And there he stayed for the next 57 minutes and 33 seconds. When Rahman Bey came safely out of his tank a doctor standing next to me said: “That man, according to all the laws of medical science, is dead. There was not sufficient air in the tank to keep him alive for more than 19 minutes. He has no right to be alive now.” Still, doctor or no doctor, he was alive, drinking milk, just a little tired, but prepared to spend the evening at the pictures. “My peculiar gift,” he told me, “was discovered by a Yogi priest—what you call holy man, you know—when I was a child.” He made a small fortune touring the world having swords plunged through his back, pins passed through his fingers, and being buried beneath sand and water. He retired to Australia, where he kept a farm with pigs and chickens and maize.

“I could,” he told me, “have stayed in the tank for six hours. It is just a question of hypnotising myself to ration the available air supply so that it lasts out while I am in the tank.”