The Equinox (Volume I, Number IV)

THE EQUINOX I rose that I might test my reinstated powers, and see if the restoration was complete. Yes, I felt not one trace of bodily weariness nor mental depression. Every function had re- turned to its normal state, with the one exception mentioned; memery could not efface the traces of my having passed through a great mystery. No. I never should take it again. I did not know myself; I did not know hasheesh. 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 them- selves 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 hasheesh. 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 / have always come without a trace of its effect in diminished strength or buoyancy. Had the first experiment been followed by depression, [ 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 250