| ETERNAL- UNCHANGING |
| ABSOLUTE |
Fig. 58
with matter in this state on the earth's surface. This square comes into contact with the Absolute. You remember we spoke before about 'Holy the Firm.' This is 'Holy the Firm.''
At the bottom of the last square he placed a small triangle with its apex below.
'Now, on the other side of man is square 3, 12, 48. This is a class of creatures which we do not know. Let us call them 'angels.' The next square—1, 6, 24; let us call these beings 'archangels.''
In the following square he put figures 3 and 12 and two circles, each with a point at their centers, and called it the 'Eternal Unchanging,' and in the next square he put the figures 1 and 6; he put a circle in the middle and in this circle a triangle containing another circle with a point at its center and called it the 'Absolute.'
'This diagram will not be very comprehensible to you at first,' he said. 'But gradually you will learn to make it out. Only for a long time you will have to take it separately from all the rest.'
This was in fact all I heard from G. about this strange diagram which actually appeared to upset a great deal of what had been said before.
In our conversations about this diagram we very soon agreed to take 'angels' as planets and 'archangels' as suns. Many other things gradually became clear to us. But what used to confuse us a great deal was the appearance of 'hydrogen' 6144 which was absent altogether in the previous scale of 'hydrogens' in the third scale which ended with 'hydrogen' 3072. At the same time, G. insisted that the enumeration of 'hydrogens' had been taken according to the third scale.
A long time afterwards I asked him what this meant.
'It is an incomplete 'hydrogen,'' he said. 'A 'hydrogen' without the Holy Ghost. It belongs to the same, that is to the third, scale, but it is unfinished.
'Each complete 'hydrogen' is composed of 'carbon,' 'oxygen,' and 'nitrogen.' Now take the last 'hydrogen' of the third scale, 'hydrogen' 3072. This 'hydrogen' is composed of 'carbon' 512, 'oxygen' 1536, and 'nitrogen' 1024.
'Now further: 'Nitrogen' becomes 'carbon' for the next triad, but there is no 'oxygen' for it and no 'nitrogen.' Therefore by condensation it becomes itself 'hydrogen' 6144, but it is a
This was G.'s last visit to Petersburg. I tried to speak to him about impending events. But he said nothing definite on which I could base my own actions.
A very interesting event took place in connection with his departure. This happened at the railway station. We were all seeing him off at the Nikolaievsky Station. G. was standing talking to us on the platform by the carriage. He was the usual G. we had always known. After the second bell he went into the carriage—his compartment was next to the door— and came to the window.
He was different! In the window we saw another man, not the one who had gone into the train. He had changed during those few seconds. It is very difficult to describe what the difference was, but on the platform he had been an ordinary man like anyone else, and from the carriage a man of quite a different order was looking at us, with a quite exceptional importance and dignity in every look and movement, as though he had sud-denly become a ruling prince or a statesman of some unknown kingdom to which he was traveling and to which we were seeing him off.
Some of our party could not at the time clearly realize what was happening but they felt and experienced in an emotional way something that was outside the ordinary run of phenomena. All this lasted only a few seconds. The third bell followed the second bell almost immediately, and the train moved out.
I do not remember who was the first to speak of this 'transfiguration' of G. when we were left alone, and then it appeared that we had all seen it, though we had not all equally realized what it was while it was taking place. But all, without exception, had felt something out of the ordinary.
G. had explained to us earlier that if one mastered the art of plastics one could completely alter one's appearance. He had said that one could become beautiful or hideous, one could compel people to notice one or one could become
What was this? Perhaps it was a case of 'plastics.'
But the story is not yet over. In the carriage with G. there traveled A. (a well-known journalist) who was at that time being sent away from Petersburg (this was just before the revolution). We who were seeing G.
I did not know A. personally, but among the people seeing him off were several acquaintances of mine and even a few friends; two or three of them had been at our meetings and these were going from one group to the other.
A few days later the paper to which A. was contributing contained an article 'On the Road' in which A. described the thoughts and impressions he had on the way from Petersburg to Moscow. A strange Oriental had traveled in the same carriage with him, who, among the bustling crowd of speculators who filled the carriage, had struck him by his extraordinary dignity and calm, exactly as though these people were for him like small flies upon whom he was looking from inaccessible heights. A. judged him to be an 'oil king' from Baku, and in conversation with him several enigmatic phrases that he received still further strengthened him in his conviction that here was a man whose millions grew while he slept and who looked down from on high at bustling people who were striving to earn a living and to make money.
My fellow traveler kept to himself also; he was a Persian or Tartar, a silent man in a valuable astrakhan cap; he had a French novel under his arm. He was drinking tea, carefully placing the glass to cool on the small window- sill table; he occasionally looked with the utmost contempt at the bustle and noise of those extraordinary, gesticulating people. And they on their part glanced at him, so it seemed to me, with great attention, if not with respectful awe. What interested me most was that he seemed to be of the same southern Oriental type as the rest of the group of speculators, a flock of vultures flying somewhere into Agrionian space in order to tear some carrion or other—he was swarthy, with jet-black eyes, and a mustache like ZeIim-Khan. . . . Why does he so avoid and despise his own flesh and blood? But to my good fortune he began to speak to me.
'They worry themselves a great deal,' he said, his face motionless and sallow, in which the black eyes, polite as in the Oriental, were faintly smiling.
He was silent and then continued:
'Yes, in Russia at present there is a great deal of business out of which a clever man could make a lot of money.' And after another silence he explained:
'After all it is the war. Everyone wants to be a millionaire.'
In his tone, which was cold and calm, I seemed to detect a kind of fatalistic and ruthless boasting which verged on cynicism, and I asked him somewhat bluntly:
'And you?'
'What?' he asked me back.
'Do not you also want this?'
He answered with an indefinite and slightly ironical gesture.
It seemed to me that he had not heard or had not understood and I repeated:
'Don't you make profits too?'
He smiled particularly quietly and said with gravity:
'We always make a profit. It does not refer to us. War or no war it is all the same to us. We always make a profit.'
