Thereis, in one final piece of business, the matter of a short length of moving-picture film. The camera negative was returned, in due course, to Florence Bell’s family, who could bear neither to view it nor to throw it away. It was kept in an attic where the nitrate stock began to deteriorate, as nitrate stock will. When the film can was rediscovered and finally opened, some decades later, the core was a solid lump and the outer layers were crumbling. All else within the can was dust, rust, and vinegar.
The print that Sebastian Becker turned over to the Crown Prosecutor’s office went into a government archive. The archive was thinned and most of its silver was reclaimed for the war effort in 1915.
No clear understanding of the brief sequence’s content was ever agreed upon.
