The Equinox (Volume I, Number IV)

THE HASHEESH EATER cient for the action of a drama; the last left me in complete ignorance of any point far enough back in the past to date the commencement of the sentence. Its enunciation might have occupied years. I wasnot in the same life which had held me when I heard it begun. And now, with time, space expanded also. At my friend’s house one particular arm-chair was always reserved for me. I was sitting in it at a distance of hardly three feet from the centre table around which the members of the fantily were grouped. Rapidly that distance widened. The whole atmo- sphere seemed ductile, and spun endlessly out into great spaces surrounding me on every side. We were in a vast hall, of which my friends and I occupied opposite extremities. The ceiling and the walls ran upward witha gliding motion as if vivified by a sudden force of resistless growth. Oh! I could not bear it. I should soon be left alone in the midst of an infinity of space. And now more and more every moment increased the conviction that I was watched. I did not know then, as I learned afterward, that suspicion of all earthly things and persons was the characteristic of the hasheesh delirium. In the midst of my complicated hallucination, I could perceive that I had a dual existence. One portion of me was whirled unresistingly along the track of this tremendous experience, the other sat looking down from a height upon its double, observing, reasoning, and serenely weighing all the phenomena. This calmer being suffered with the other by sympathy, but did not lose its self-possession. The servant had not come. 247