I said “the last of the dreams.” For the next year we travelled, and
tried various treatments. My powers remained excellent, but I received
none of the subconscious horrors. With few fluctuations, he grew
steadily worse; daily he became more listless, more indifferent, more
depressed. Our experiments were necessarily curtailed. Only one problem
exercised him, the problem of his personality. He began to wonder who
he was. I do not mean that he suffered from delusions, I mean that
the problem of the true Ego took hold of his imagination. One perfect
summer night at Contrexéville he was feeling much better; the symptoms
had (temporarily) disappeared almost entirely under the treatment of
a very skilful doctor at that Spa, a Dr. Barbézieux, a most kind and
thoughtful man.
“I am going to try,” said Arthur, “to penetrate myself. Am I an animal,
and is the world without a purpose? Or am I a soul in a body? Or am I,
one and indivisible in some incredible sense, a spark of the infinite
light of God? I am going to think inwards; I shall possibly go into
some form of trance, unintelligible to myself. You may be able to
interpret it.”
The experiment had lasted about half-an-hour when he sat up gasping
with effort.
“I have seen nothing, heard nothing,” I said. “Not one thought has
passed from you to me.”
But at that very moment what had been in his mind flashed into mine.
“It is a blind abyss,” I told him, “and there hangs in it a vulture
vaster than the whole starry system.”
“Yes,” he said, “that was it. But that was not all. I could not get
beyond it. I shall try again.”
He tried. Again I was cut off from his thought, although his face was
twitching so that one might have said that any one might read his mind.
“I have been looking in the wrong place,” said he suddenly, but very
quietly and without moving. “The thing I want lies at the base of the
spine.”
This time I saw. In a blue heaven was coiled an infinite snake of gold
and green, with four eyes of fire, black fire and red, that darted
rays in every direction; held within its coils was a great multitude
of laughing children. And even as I looked, all this was blotted out.
Crawling rivers of blood spread over the heaven, of blood purulent
with nameless forms--mangy dogs with their bowels dragging behind
them; creatures half elephant, half beetle; things that were but a
ghastly bloodshot eye, set about with leathery tentacles; women whose
skins heaved and bubbled like boiling sulphur, giving off clouds that
condensed into a thousand other shapes, more hideous than their mother;
these were the least of the denizens of these hateful rivers. The most
were things impossible to name or to describe.
I was brought back from the vision by the stertorous and strangling
breath of Arthur, who had been seized with a convulsion.
From this he never really rallied. The dim sight grew dimmer, the
speech slower and thicker, the headaches more persistent and acute.
Torpor succeeded to his old splendid energy and activity; his days
became continual lethargy ever deepening towards coma. Convulsions now
and then alarmed me for his immediate danger.
Sometimes his breath came hard and hissing like a snake in anger;
towards the end it assumed the Cheyne-Stokes type in bursts of ever
increasing duration and severity.
In all this, however, he was still himself; the horror that was and yet
was not himself did not peer from behind the veil.
“So long as I am consciously myself,” he said in one of his rare
fits of brightness, “I can communicate to you what I am consciously
thinking; as soon as this conscious ego is absorbed, you get the
subconscious thought which I fear--oh how I fear!--is the greater and
truer part of me. You have brought unguessed explanations from the
world of sleep; you are the one woman in the world--perhaps there may
never be another--who has such an opportunity to study the phenomena
of death.”
He charged me earnestly to suppress my grief, to concentrate wholly
on the thoughts that passed through his mind when he could no longer
express them, and also on those of his subconsciousness when coma
inhibited consciousness.
It is this experiment that I now force myself to narrate. The prologue
has been long; it has been necessary to put the facts before mankind in
a simple way so that they may seize the opportunity of the proper kind
of suicide. I beg my readers most earnestly not to doubt my statements;
the notes, of our experiments, left in my will to the greatest thinker
now living, Professor von Buehle, will make clear the truth of my
relation, and the great and terrible necessity of immediate, drastic
action.