“Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate!”
The first of these exits is insanity, the second death, the third abandonment. The first is doubtless oftenest trodden, yet it may be long ere it reaches the final escape in oblivion, and it is as frightful as the domain it leaves behind. The second but rarely opens to the wretch unless he pries it open with his knife; ordinarily its hinges turn lingeringly. Toward the last let him struggle, though a nightmare torpor petrify his limbs—though on either side of the road be a phalanx of monstrous Afreets with drawn swords of flame—though demon cries peal before him, and unimaginable houris beckon him back—over thorns, through furnaces, but into—Life!
XVI
An Oath in the Forum of Madness
Having been threatened many times with an utter isolation from human kind, it now became my practice, the moment that I began to feel the hashish change come over me, to run for sympathy to some congenial friend, and thus assure myself that the sentence had not yet been carried out. I entered his room. I told him of my state; and, before increasing delirium had any power to pervert my thoughts, pledged him to care for me, never to leave me, always to interest himself in my welfare to the end. Frequently this step prevented any undercurrent of horror from breaking up through my delightful tides of vision. Frequently, when I beheld the fearful Afreet invade the sanctity of my rejoicing with drawn cimeter, was that remembered pledge to me as the ring of Abdaldar, and straightway
“There ceased his power; his lifted arm,
Suspended by the spell,
Hung impotent to strike.”
The penal renunciation of me by God and man was the grand prevailing shadow which now lowered about the horizon of my visions, and thrice happy was I when, in this way, I could keep it from blackening the whole sky. I mean more by this word “blackening” than mere metaphor, for, fully awake and at unclouded noonday, I have seen both heavens and air grow sable suddenly with a supernatural eclipse, and I walked by no beacon save that of fiery eyes which “glared upon me through the darkness.”
Yet the spell was not always powerful. There occurred seasons when I was beyond the power of man, and, as I thought, also an outcast from man’s league with God. Man could not, God would not, keep faith with me.
In the ecstasy of a serene uplifting I came one afternoon to the room of an acquaintance who had often expressed a wish to witness the hashish state in some walk with me while I was under the influence of the drug. By the pledge of sympathy I bound him, and felt assured—doubly assured; for, as he prepared to accompany me out, without premonition there flashed into my mind that grand line of Festus,
“ ’Tis not my will that evil be immortal.”
Not only did this line suggest to me a great future of good and happiness throughout my hashish eternity, but I saw the triumphant reign of right established forever among men. A sublime emancipation from the thraldom of the ages had been declared to earth, and in visible and audible joy Creation leaped and sang. Should I not, then, be happy, since God had pronounced it? I had no fears. Taking the arm of my friend, I passed into the open air.
We had hardly gone fifty feet when I heard the dreadful voice distinctly speak to me: “This is an imaginative man; if you are happy, he will powerfully sympathize with you; he will be fascinated, he will become like yourself a hashish-eater. To save him from this, it is necessary that you should become an exemplar of agony. Are you content?” Knowing well what should ensue, aware of the tortures that lay prepared in the intimate abyss of the hashish hell, could I, as aught less than a God, say “Yes?” Unable to bring myself to this height of superhuman heroism, I only forced my lips to murmur, “The will of God be done.”
Then the voice answered, “Horribly shalt thou suffer, suffer, suffer, more than tongue can tell, more than thou hast dreamed.”
I clenched my fists, I shut my teeth, I nerved my whole being for the flood of agony which was about to pour upward on me from the depths. I felt within me the prophecy of such pangs as would bring me to the very portals of nothingness.
The sentence began to be fulfilled. From the fence beside which we walked came hot blasts, as from a furnace, and, looking at its base, I saw fiery rifts in the ground whence the tornado issued. I withered to a parchment sack, which bound in my heart as the sensitive fuel for more torments.
And now through that heart glided a delicate saw, of innumerable blades, each sharpened to the ultimate thinness of steel, and each glowing with a red heat. Slowly as a marble-saw the dreadful engine passed back and forth, hissing through the writhing muscle, and, as I pressed my hand upon my breast, it was scorched by the intense heat of the laminae. From the walls of houses, black talons darted forth to clutch my skirts; they left a scar like the touch of moxa. And still I burned unquenchably.
For a while I kept silence, shutting my mouth with Promethean self-control. Not only did my acquired habit of suffering speechlessly restrain me, but my pride could not endure the thought of acknowledging to him who walked by my side the vengeful infliction which had fallen upon me, in place of the mantle of rapture which my promise had prepared him to see.
The voice then said, “Confess! confess!” In desperation, I set my lips like a vice, and in my soul replied, “No! I will
