He peers through a huge camera suspended in a square frame across a rock pool. Another image shows him in black coat, pale trousers, stiff white collar, and hat. He sits on a stool in front of his grass hut, surrounded by specimen trays and parts of his camera. To Miss Lovell and her Australian scientific correspondents, the world about them was yielding wonders daily. Is it some kind of perceptual contagion perhaps The term describes the situation where first one person sees something, then another falls victim to suggestion, then another.
Expectation is created and the image is already in the mind.
He provides a sketch of a creature with the head of an elephant, a fishlike body with a camel hump, four legs like a lion, and a forked tail like a fish. Just as well Miss Lovell was long dead and didn't get to read this version of her story. The testimony of old maids joins the testimony of blacks as unreliable. There are impor- tant race and gentler issues in sea serpent spotting. Nor floes Heuvelmans record how Miss Lovell might have got hold of his sketch of a makara at Sanely Bay in order to have her imagination overstimulated by it.