I could not get her to say any more.
I realised the nervous excitement was too much for Johanna to bear. I talked to her to calm her down and, in spite of her resistance, put her to bed myself.
She slipped into sleep with my kisses on her lips, my hand in hers. Now she can rest in a deep sleep.
What will she be like when she wakes up?
The First Vision
My pen can hardly keep pace with all the experiences and apparitions that threaten to overwhelm me. I use the quiet hours of the night to record all that has happened to me.
When I had put Johanna – or should I write: Jane? – to bed, I returned to my study and, as has become my habit, completed my notes by recording the incident with Lipotin.
Then I took up John Dee’s Lapis sacer et praecipuus manifestationis and contemplated the stand and the inscription on it. Gradually my eye began to wander from the gold ornamentation to the oily surface of the coal itself. What then began to happen was similar – at least, so it seems to me in retrospect – to my experience when I looked into Lipotin’s Florentine mirror and dreamed I was standing at the station waiting for my friend Gärtner.
However that may be, after some time staring at the shining black surface of the crystal, I found I could no longer take my eyes off it. I saw – or rather, I did not so much see as feel I was in the middle of a herd of milk-white horses galloping wildly over a surface of green-black waves. At first I thought – and I might add that my thoughts were clear and rational –: aha, Johanna’s green sea! But after a short while I began to see the details more precisely and I realised that the riderless horses were rushing over night-dark woods and meadows like Woden’s wild hunt. At the same time I knew that these were the souls of the millions upon millions of men who are asleep in their beds whilst their souls, without rider, without master, are driven by some dark instinct to seek their far-off, unknown home – they do not know where it lies, they only sense they have lost it and cannot find it again.
I myself was a rider on a snow-white steed that seemed more real, more corporeal, than the milk-white horses.
The frenzied, snorting mustangs – they were like crests of foam on a stormy sea – crossed some wooded hills that disappeared below us in long waves. In the distance was the narrow silver ribbon of a meandering river.
A wide landscape opens out like an amphitheatre embroidered with ranges of low hills. The furious gallopade is heading for the river. In the distance the mass of a city begins to rise. The bounding shapes of the horses around me seem to dissolve into grey clouds of mist. – – Then, all of a sudden, I am riding through the bright sunshine of an August morning, across a stone bridge with tall statues of saints and kings on the parapet. On the river bank I am approaching modest dwellings huddled together in an ancient jumble with a few magnificent palaces towering above them and, so to speak, shouldering them to one side; but even these proud edifices are humbled by the immense bulk of a tree-covered hill crowned with ramparts pierced by the outlines of towers, roofs, battlements and spires. A voice within me cries: “HradcanyCastle!”.
I am in Prague, then!? – Who is in Prague? – Who am I? – What is going on all around me? I can see myself on horseback, scarcely attracting a second glance from the townsfolk and peasants who are likewise crossing the stone bridge over the Vltava, past the statue of Saint Nepomuk and on to the the Malá Strana, the ‘small side’ or lesser town. I know I have been commanded to appear before the Emperor Rudolf – Rudolf of Habsburg – in the Belvedere. Beside me, on a dapple-grey mare, rides my companion; in spite of the blue sky and scorching sun he is encased in a fur cloak of somewhat tarnished magnificence. The fur cloak is obviously the pièce de résistance of his wardrobe and he has donned it in order to make some kind of show before His Majesty. “A mountebank’s finery,” I think. It does not surprise me to find that I myself am wearing antiquated dress. How could it be otherwise! Is it not the Feast of St. Lawrence, the tenth day of August in the year of Our Lord, 1584. I have ridden back into the past, I tell myself, and find nothing odd about it.
The man with the mouse’s eyes, the low forehead and receding chin is Edward Kelley, whom I had difficulty in restraining from taking rooms in the inn at the sign of the Last Lantern, where the immensely rich magnates and Archdukes stay when they come to court. He it is who keeps our common purse, and he is as full of himself as a fairground quack. Completely shameless and correspondingly successful, he constantly manages to fill our coffers where a gentleman would rather cut off his hand or lay down in a ditch to die. I know – I am John Dee, my own ancestor; how else could the events of the journey since my flight from Mortlake be so fresh in my mind: I see our tiny ship tossed by a storm in the Channel, relive my wife’s mortal anguish as she clings to me and whimpers: “I will gladly die with you, John. Oh, how gladly will I die with you! Only do not let me drown alone, do not let me sink into the green depths whence there is no return!” – And then the miserable journey through Holland: lodgings and meals in the
