IV
Cashmere and Cathay by Twilight
“You will never take it again, will you?”
“Oh no, I never expect to; I am satisfied with my one successful experiment.”
It was the fair lady of the crochet-needle who asked me the question as, a few days after my first practical acquaintance with hashish, I gave her the recital contained in the preceding pages. In my answer I spoke truly; I did suppose that I never should repeat my experiment. The glimpse which I had gained in that single night of revelation of hitherto unconceived modes and uncharted fields of spiritual being seemed enough to store the treasure-house of grand memories for a lifetime. Unutterably more, doubtless, still remained unveiled, but it contented me to say,
“In Nature’s infinite book of secrecy
A little I can read,”
when that little swept a view whose faintest lineament outshone all the characters upon the scroll of daily existence. No, I never should take it again.
I did not know myself; I did not know hashish. There are temperaments, no doubt, upon which this drug produces, as a reactory result, physical and mental depression. With me, this was never the case. Opium and liquors fix themselves as a habit by becoming necessary to supply that nervous waste which they in the first place occasioned. The lassitude which succeeds their exaltation demands a renewed indulgence, and accordingly every gratification of the appetite is parent to the next. But no such element entered into the causes which attached me to hashish. I speak confidently, yet without exaggeration, when I say that I have spent many an hour in torture such as was never known by Cranmer at the stake, or Gaudentio di Lucca in the Inquisition, yet out of the depths of such experience I have always come without a trace of its effect in diminished strength or buoyancy.
Had the first experiment been followed by depression, I had probably never repeated it. At any rate, unstrung muscles and an enervated mind could have been resisted much more effectually when they pleaded for renewed indulgence than the form which the fascination actually took. For days I was even unusually strong; all the forces of life were in a state of pleasurable activity, but the memory of the wondrous glories which I had beheld wooed me continually like an irresistible sorceress. I could not shut my eyes for midday musing without beholding in that world, half dark, half light, beneath the eyelids, a steady procession of delicious images which the severest will could not banish nor dim. Now through an immense and serene sky floated luxurious argosies of clouds, continually changing form and tint through an infinite cycle of mutations.
Now, suddenly emerging from some deep embowerment of woods, I stood upon the banks of a broad river that curved far off into dreamy distance, and glided noiselessly past its jutting headlands, reflecting a light which was not of the sun nor of the moon, but midway between them, and here and there thrilling with subdued prismatic rays. Temples and gardens, fountains and vistas stretched continually through my waking or sleeping imagination, and mingled themselves with all I heard, or read, or saw. On the pages of Gibbon the palaces and lawns of Nicomedia were illustrated with a hashish tint and a hashish reality; and journeying with old Dan Chaucer, I drank in a delicious landscape of revery along all the road to Canterbury. The music of my vision was still heard in echo; as the bells of Bow of old time called to Whittington, so did it call to me—“Turn again, turn again.” And I turned.
Censure me not harshly, ye who have never known what fascination there is in the ecstasy of beauty; there are baser attractions than those which invited me. Perhaps ye yourselves have turned from the first simple-mindedness of life to be led by the power of a more sordid wooing. The hope of being one day able to sleep lazily in a literally golden sun, the lazzaroni of fortune; of securing a patient hearing for some influential and patriotic whisper in the ear of the “mobilium turba Quiritium;” of draining any cup which drugs the soul and leaves the body to rifle it of its prerogative—each and all of these are lower fascinations than that to which I yielded.
And ye better, wiser, and therefore gentler ones, who decry not another’s weakness because it is not your own, who are free from all bondage, be it of the sordid or the beautiful, be kindly in your judgement. Wherein I was wrong I was invited as by a mother’s voice, and the blandishments which lulled me were full of such spiritual sweetness as we hear only twice in a lifetime—once at its opening, once at its close; the first time in the cradle-hymn that lulls innocence to slumber, the last in that music of attendant angels through which the soul begins to float upward in its euthanasia toward the restoration of primeval purity and peace. I yielded to no sensual gratification. The motives for the hashish-indulgence were of the most exalted ideal nature, for of this nature are all its ecstasies and its revelations—yes, and a thousandfold more terrible, for this very reason, its unutterable pangs. I yielded, moreover, without realizing to what. Within a circle of one hundred miles’ radius there was not a living soul who knew or could warn me of my danger. Finally, I yielded without knowing that I yielded, for I ascribed my next indulgence to a desire of research.
One day, about the hour of noon, a little more than a week after my first experiment, I rolled twenty grains of hashish into a pill and swallowed it, saying as I did so, “Here is the final test for the sake of science.” The afternoon lay before me unoccupied by any especial appointment, and, after dining, I threw myself down upon a lounge to await the result
