The Equinox (Volume I, Number III)

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 248