By such light as came through the southeastern window he tidied himself, brushing off with his hands such cobwebs as he could. He did not draw back the curtains, deeming that if he took hold of a portion of one it would come away from the rest; nor did enough material remain to obstruct much of the light that came in through the trees. Then, being dressed already, he opened his door and descended the stairs of stone. Every narrow slit that lighted those dim stairs continued to show vast gathering of oaks that pressed close on the house, so close that Ramon Alonzo saw now, what he had faintly heard overnight and not understood, that here and there great branches had entered the tower and been shaped as steps amongst the steps of stone, making two or three hollower sounds amongst the tapping footsteps of such as used that stair. Upon stormy nights the wooden steps swayed slightly.
When Ramon Alonzo had descended those steps he came to passages amongst a darkness of rafters which were like such nooks as children find under old stairs, only larger and stranger and dimmer, running this way and that; and, guided by glimmers of light that shone faintly from a far window, he came at length to the hall, at whose other end was the old green door to the forest. And there in his black silk cloak in the midst of the hall the magician awaited him.
He was standing motionless, and as soon as the young man saw him the Master of the Art said: “I trust you slept in comfort.” For his studies allowed him leisure for courtesies such as these, but were too profound to permit of such intercourse with common material things as lifting the cobwebs to see the state of the bedclothes that had mouldered so long upon his visitor’s bed. As for the charwoman, she had sorrows enough watching the ages beating upon her frame to trouble what a mere thirty or forty years might do to the sheets and blankets.
“I slept admirably, señor,” Ramon Alonzo said, with a grace in his bow that is sometimes only learnt just as the joints and the muscles have grown too stiff to achieve it.
“I rejoice,” said the magician.
“Master,” said Ramon Alonzo, “would you deign to show me some unconsidered fragment of your wisdom, some saw having naught to do with the deeper mysteries, some trifle, some trick of learning, perhaps the mere making of gold out of other dross, that I may learn to study now, and so in time be wise.”
“For this,” said the magician, pointing the way with a gesture, “let us go to the room that is sacred to the Art. Its very dust is made of books I have studied, and is indeed more redolent of lore than any dust in this wood; and if echoes die not at all, as some have taught (though others urge finality for all things), the spiders in its corners, whose ears are attuned to sounds that are lost to ours, hear still the echoes of my earlier musings whereby I unravelled mysteries that are not for the ears of man. There we will speak upon the graver matters.”
He led, and the young man followed. And again he was amongst beams of age-darkened oak, and twisty corridors leading into the gloom, which the shape of the magician before him rendered unnaturally blacker. They came to a black door studded with wooden knobs, upon which the magician rapped, and the door opened. They entered, and Ramon Alonzo perceived at once that it was a magician’s workroom, not only by the ordinary appliances or instruments of magic, but by the several sheets of gloom that seemed to come down from the roof through the midst of the air, across the natural dimness of the room. The appliances of magic were there in abundance; stuffed crocodiles lying as thick as on lonely mud-banks in Africa, dried herbs resembling plants that blossom in wonted fields, yet wearing a look that never was on any flowers of ours, great twinkling jewels out of the heads of toads, huge folios written by masters that had followed the Art in China, small parchments with spells upon them in Persian, Indian, or Arabic, the horn of a unicorn that had slain its master; rare spices, condiments, and the philosopher’s stone.
These Ramon Alonzo saw first as he came through the doorway, though what their purposes were he scarcely wondered, and these were the things that always came to his memory whenever in after years he recalled that sinister room. As his eyes became accustomed to the dimness, more and more of the wares and tools of the magical art came looming out of the dusk, while the magician strode to a high-backed chair at a lectern, on which a great book lay open showing columns of Chinese manuscript. In the high-backed chair the magician seated himself before the Cathayan book, and taking up a pen from an unknown wing, he looked at Ramon Alonzo.
“Now,” he said, as though he came newly to the subject or brought to it new acumen from having sat in that chair, “what branch of the Art do you desire to follow?”
“The making of gold,” responded Ramon Alonzo.
“The formulae of all material things have been worked out,” said the magician, “and they have all been found to be vanity. Amongst the first whose formulae failed before these investigations,
