The Vision and the Voice

THE VISION AND THE VOICE (Note.—You do not come back in any way dazed; it is like going from one room into another. Regained normal con- sciousness completely and immediately.) Tue Cry OF THE 21ST AETHYR, WHICH IS CALLED ASP A mighty wind rolls through all the Aethyr; there is a sense of absolute emptiness; no colour, no form, no substance. Only now and then there seem, as it were, the shadows of great angels, swept along. No sound; there is something very remorseless about the wind, passionless, that is very terrible. In a way, it is nerve-shaking. It seems as if some- thing kept on trying to open behind the wind, and just as it is about to open, the effort is exhausted. The wind is not cold or hot; there is no sense of any kind connected with it. One does not even feel it, for one is standing in front of it. Now, the thing opens behind, just for a second, and I catch a glimpse of an avenue of pillars, and at the end a throne, supported by sphinxes. All this is black marble. Now I seem to have gone through the wind, and to be standing before the throne; but he that sitteth thereon is invisible. Yet it is from him that all this desolation proceeds. He is trying to make me understand by putting tastes in my mouth, very rapidly one after the other. Salt, honey, sugar, assafoetida, bitumen, honey again, some taste that I don’t know at all; garlic, something very bitter like nux vomica, another taste, still more bitter; lemon, cloves, rose- leaves, honey again; the juice of some plant, like a dandelion, I think; honey again, salt, a taste something like phosphorus, honey, laurel, a very unpleasant taste which I don’t know, 37