The inanity of that he ignored.
“You have practised it ever since you became a reporter. A wad of paper and an ounce of ink you transform into banknotes. What is that but alchemy? The transformation of metals is only a trifle more elaborate. As for Ramsay, it is infantile of him to say that it can be accomplished. It has been, and without any of his tubes or rays, either.”
I was amused at this attitude, which, however, all specialists exhibit to a trespasser in their vineyard, and I asked if he had accomplished it.
He nodded.
“Practically. Though I have nothing yet to show for it, I shall have, as others have before me.”
With that he gestured. A moment before he had suggested a dentist; it was a seer that he resembled then. Upon his face there came an expression rapt and vatic. Visibly he was astride, careering on his hobby.
In common, no doubt, with many others, I had ignorantly supposed that the easiest way to make money is to earn it. I was promptly undeceived.
He told me that there is a way easier still, a process for extracting something out of nothing, a solvent which turns lead into bullion, a secret called the alkahest—concerning which, by the way, Balzac wrote a novel that I never could read. Ferrol said that over it—over the secret, I mean, not the novel—the world went mad.
The madness seemed to me very rational. According to Ferrol, behind the process was mystery, about it romance, and above a golden chimera. That was the witchery of it. If you could snare and choke the chimera, she stammered the secret.
He admitted that all this happened a long time ago, and I thought that probably it never happened at all. In any event, the chimera flew away, as chimeras will. The secret went with it. But, as Ferrol put it, its fading memories still haunted the minds of men. They hallucinated the Middle Ages. They enthralled the Renaissance. They fascinated even Bacon.
Here I was on surer ground. Bacon, I was aware, knew all that was going and a lot that was not. He knew, for instance, that the world in which he lived was passing poor. He also knew that there had been an epoch when the world was just the reverse. He knew that the Babylonian satraps built at will cities fairer than the uplands of dream, palaces more luminous than the signs of the zodiac.
But Bacon’s knowledge was not universal. He did not know that the value of the treasure piled on the pyre of one of these satraps equaled eighty-four thousand millions of our money, which is a sum not much inferior to the total wealth of the United States.
Bacon did not know that, for the excellent reason that no one else did, until it was demonstrated by excavated and attesting tablets of imperishable brick. None the less, Bacon wondered what magic had created the magnificence that had been, and concluded, perhaps sagely, that a thread had been dropped from the scheme of things, that something, somewhere, was missing.
The deduction seems logical. At the beginning of the present era the total amount of money in circulation was less than that which in earlier days a single satrap—or even a married one—squandered. Moreover, poverty continued and increased until Columbus put down an idea, borrowed a boat on it, and brought back a world.
Things then began to look up. But, as Ferrol pointed out, just prior to the eruptions of gold from Mexico and Peru Europe was peopled with alchemists. Everywhere crucibles, alembics, and aludels were at work. Everyone was chasing the chimera.
“Everyone” is perhaps an exaggeration; but at least so many were at it that if there be a word of truth in history—which, in moments of faithlessness, I sometimes doubt—the game was actually quarried, the chimera was caught, the secret wrung from her. Kings and emperors had a finger in the pie. In the seventeenth century, with gold alchemistically obtained, Ferdinand III struck, not oil, but medals, some of which, attesting the miracle, were on view in the Vienna mint before the war. In the next generation the alchemistic successes of Augustus of Saxony were so much to his taste that, lightly, he gave a lady a supper-party that cost six millions.
Whatever the value of history may be, these instances and others like them are recorded in it. So also are mysterious stories of mysterious persons who provided the solvent by which the gold was obtained—the solvent, but not the secret; the alkahest, but not the process by which it was achieved.
That was the patent of the Rosicrucians, a society of adepts who got it from the Cabalists, a sect that originated among the Chaldean magicians, who in turn received it from no less a light than Azrael, angel of mysteries, and who, with it, taught the Babylonian monarchs what’s what.
That, of course, may not be true. Ferrol himself was a bit skeptical about it. But from indications which he supplied I afterward found the legend repeated and confirmed by all the great necromancers, by Paracelsus, Nostradamus, Albertus Magnus—and who am I to question them?
Besides, even if the story is not true, that does not detract from its charm; on the contrary, it adds to it. To sensible people, fairy tales are the most interesting of all. And anyway, and however the subject be regarded, it seemed probable that there had been a secret which now, by hook or by crook, Ramsay had nailed.
I said as much to Ferrol, who Johnsonianly addressed me.
“Sir, to recover that secret men invoked the aid of the planets, they invoked Satan himself, when it would have been simpler—” He hesitated, waved at something, and continued: “But when they got it they turned lead into bullion as readily as you turn paper into copy, as readily as I shall presently produce gold
