I hesitate before breaking off the last, beautifully clear seal; it is such a pleasure to look at! But what is this?! That is not the burning lamp above the foot of the escutcheon! It’s a crystal! A regular dodecahedron surrounded by a sunburst of rays? No dull oil-lamp, then, but a radiant jewel!
And again I am gripped by a strange sensation: I feel as if some memory is trying to force its way up into consciousness, a memory that has been sleeping for ... centuries, yes, for centuries.
How did this precious stone come to be in the coat of arms? And look, a tiny inscription around it? I take my magnifying glass and read, “Lapis sacer sanctificatus et praecipuus manifestationis.”
With a shake of the head I examine this incomprehensible modification of the familiar coat of arms. That is a stamp that I have certainly never seen! Either my cousin, John Roger, had a second signet in his possession or – – now it’s clear: the sharp cut is unmistakably modern. John Roger must have had a new ring made in London. But, why? The oil-lamp! It suddenly seems so obvious it’s almost ridiculous. The oil-lamp was never anything other than a late, baroque corruption, the escutcheon was always meant to bear a shining rock crystal! But what can the inscription around mean? Curious how the crystal seems so well-known to me, inwardly familiar, so to speak. Rock crystal! I know there is an old tale of a lustrous jewel shining from above, but I have forgotten the tale.
Hesitantly I break the last seal and untie the parcel. Out tumble ancient letters, documents, deeds, excerpts, yellowing parchments covered with Rosicrucian cyphers, pictures with hermetic pandects, some half-decayed, a few volumes bound in pigskin with old copper engravings, all kinds of notebooks tied up together; then there are some ivory caskets full of marvellous antiques: coins, pieces of wood mounted like relics in silver and gold leaf, pieces of bone and specimens of the best Devon coal, iridescent and cut into facets like a gem-stone, and more of the like. On top, a note in the stiff, angular handwriting of John Roger:
Read or read not! Burn or preserve! Ashes to ashes and dust to dust! We of the line of Hywel Dda, Princes of Wales, are dead. – – Mascee.
Are these words intended for me? They must be! They make no sense to me, but neither do I feel the urge to brood over them. Like a child, I think: why should I bother with that now, it’ll all become clear in time! What does the word “Mascee” mean? That does intrigue me. I look it up in the dictionary: “Mascee = an Anglo-Chinese expression meaning something like ‘What does it matter!”’ It is the equivalent of the Russian “Nitchevo”.
I spent many hours yesterday musing on the fate of my cousin John Roger and on the transience of human hopes and of things material. It was well on into the night when I rose from my desk; I decided to leave a detailed inventory of the legacy until the next day. I went to bed and was soon asleep.
The thought of the crystal must have pursued me into my sleep; I cannot recall ever having had such a strange dream as visited me that night.
The crystal was hovering somewhere in the darkness above me. A dull ray emanating from it struck my forehead and I had a clear sensation that this established some significant relationship between my head and the stone. I felt afraid, and tried to withdraw by turning my head from side to side, but I could not escape the ray of light. And as I twisted and turned my head I had a disconcerting sensation: it seemed to me that the ray from the crystal was playing on my forehead even when I buried my face in the pillows. And I clearly felt the back of my head take on the form of the front – a second face was growing out of the crown of my head. – I felt no terror; it was merely a nuisance because it meant I could not avoid the ray of light any more.
The head of Janus, I thought. Even in my dream I knew that was merely a half-remembered scrap of knowledge from the Latin classes at school, yet I hoped that would be the end of it. But it would not leave me in peace. Janus? Nonsense, it wasn’t Janus. But what was it, then? With irritating obstinacy that “What then?” kept running through my dream, even though I could not seem to remember who I was. Instead, something else happened: slowly, slowly the crystal floated down from the heights above me and came close to the top of my head. And I had the feeling that the stone was something alien to me, so utterly alien that I could not put it into words. Some object from a distant galaxy could not have been more alien. – I don’t know why, when I think of the dream now, I think of the dove that descended from heaven when Jesus was baptised by John.
– – The nearer the crystal came, the more it shone directly down onto my head; that is: onto the line where my two heads met. And gradually I started to feel an icy burning there. And this feeling – which was not even unpleasant – woke me up. – – –
I spent the whole of the following morning pondering over the dream.
Hesitantly and with great difficulty I prised a fragment of memory loose from the rock face of the past: a recollection of a conversation, of a story, of something I had thought up or read – or whatever – in which a crystal occurred and a face – but it was not called “Janus”. A half faded vision rose before my
