THE EQUINOX
“Shall I call her again?” “Why, you have this moment
called her.” Doctor,” I replied solemnly, and in language
that would have seemed bombastic enough to any one who did
not realise what I felt, “I will not believe you are deceiving
me, but to me it appears as if sufficient time has elapsed since
then for all the Pyramids to have crumbled back to dust.”
And now, in another life, I remembered that far back in
the cycles I had looked at my watch to measure the time
through which I passed. The impulse seized me to look
again. The minute-hand stood half-way between fifteen and
sixteen minutes past eleven. The watch must have stopped ;
T held it to my ear: no, it was still going. I had travelled
through all that immeasurable chain of dreams in thirty
seconds. “My God!” Icried, “I am in eternity.” In the
presence of that first sublime revelation of the soul’s own time,
and her capacity for an infinite life, I stood trembling with
breathless awe. Till I die, that moment of unveiling will
stand in clear relief from all the rest of my existence. I hold
it still in unimpaired remembrance as one of the unutterable
sanctities of my being. The years of all my earthly life to
come can never be as long as those thirty seconds.
Before entering on the record of this new vision I will
make a digression for the purpose of introducing two laws of
the hasheesh operation, which, as explicatory, deserve a place
here. First, after the completion of any one fantasia has
arrived, there almost invariably succeeds a shifting of the
action to some other stage entirely different in its surround-
ings. In this transition the general character of the emotion
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