A COUNTRY IN THE CLOUDS
And yet when I woke in the morning and went about my duties at the
asylum, I confess the events of the night before seemed rather unreal.
I began to half fancy myself the victim of some sort of hoax. I did
not doubt that Croft had been up to some psychic experiment when his
old servant, Mrs. Goss, had become alarmed and brought me into the
situation. But--I felt inclined to believe that after I had waked
him from his self-induced trance he had deliberately turned the
conversation into a channel which would give me a mental jolt before he
had calmly gone back to sleep.
I knew something of the occult, of course, but I was hardly ready
to credit the rather lurid statement he had made. Before noon I was
smiling at myself, and determining to keep my appointment with him for
the afternoon, and show him from the start that I was not so complete a
fool as I had seemed.
Hence it was with a resolve not to be swept off my feet by any unusual
fabrication of his devising that I approached his house at about three
o'clock and turned in from the street to his porch.
He sat there, in a wicker chair, smoking an excellent cigar. No doubt
but he had recovered completely from the state in which I had beheld
him first. He rose as I mounted the steps and put out a hand. "Ah, Dr.
Murray," he greeted me with a smile. "I have been waiting your coming.
Let me offer you a chair and a smoke while we talk."
We shook hands, and then I sat down and lighted the mate of the cigar
Croft held between his strong, even teeth. Then, as I threw away the
match, I looked straight into his eyes. And, believe me or not, it was
as though the man read my thoughts.
He shook his head. "I really told you the truth, Murray, you know," he
said.
"About--Palos?" I smiled.
He nodded. "Yes, I was really there, and--I went back after we had our
talk."
"Rather quick work," I remarked, and puffed out some smoke. "Have you
figured out how long it takes even light to reach the earth from that
distant star, Mr. Croft?"
"Light?" He half-knit his brows, then suddenly laughed without sound.
"Oh, I see--you refer to the equation of time?"
"Well, yes. The distance is considerable, as you must admit."
He shook his head. "How long does it take you to think of Palos--of
Sirius?" he asked.
"Not long," I replied.
He leaned back in his seat. "Murray," he went on, staring straight
before him, "time is but the measure of consciousness. Outside
the atmospheric envelopes of the planets--outside the limit of,
well--say--human thought--time ceases to exist. And--if between the
planets there is no time beyond the depths of their surrounding
atmosphere--how long will it take to go from here to there?"
I stared. His statement was startling, at least.
"You mean that time is a mental conception?" I managed at last.
"Time is a mental measure of a span of eternity," he said slowly.
"Past planetary atmospheres, eternity alone exists. In eternity there
is no time. Hence, I cannot use what _is not_, either in going to
or returning from that planet I have named. You admit you can think
instantly of Palos. I allege that I can _think_ myself, carry my astral
consciousness instantly to Palos. Do you see?"
I saw what he meant, of course, and I indicated as much by a nod.
"But," I objected, "you told me you had to return to Palos. Now you
tell me you had projected your astral body to that star. What could you
do there in the astral state?"
He smiled. "Very little. I know. I have passed through that stage. As a
matter of fact, I have a body there now."
"You have what--" As I remember, I came half out of my chair, and then
sank back. The thing hit me as nothing else in my whole life had done
before. His calm avowal was unbelievable on its face--impossible--a man
with a double corporeal existence on two separate planets at one and
the same time.
"A body--a living, breathing body," he repeated his declaration. "Oh,
man, I know it overthrows all human conceptions of life, but--last
night you asked me a question concerning _this_ body of mine--and I
told you I knew what I was doing. And I know you must have studied some
of the teachings of the higher cult--the esoteric philosophies, if
you will. And therefore you must have read of the ability of a spirit
to dispossess a body of its original spiritual tenant and occupy its
place--"
"Obsession," I interrupted. "You are practicing that--up there?"
"No. I've gone farther than that. I took this body when its original
occupant was done with it," he said. "Murray--wait--let me explain. I'm
a physician like yourself."
"You?" I exclaimed, none too politely, I fear, in the face of this
additional surprise.
Croft's lips twitched. He seemed to understand and yet be slightly
amused. "Yes. That's why I was able to assure you I knew how long the
body I occupy now could endure a cataleptic condition last night. I am
a graduate of Rush, and I fancy, fully qualified to speak concerning
the body's needs. And--" He paused a moment, then resumed:
"Frankly, Murray, I find myself confronted by what I think I may call
the strangest position a man was ever called upon to face. Last night I
recognized in you one who had probably far from a minor understanding
of mental and spiritual forces. Your ability to force my return at a
time when I was otherwise engaged showed me your understanding. For
that very reason I asked you to return to me here today. I would like
to talk to you--a brother physician; to tell you a story--my story,
provided you would care to hear it. Most men would call me insane.
Something tells me you, who devote your time to the care of the insane,
will not."
He paused and sat once more staring across the sunlit landscape which,
after the storm of the night before, was glowing and fresh. After a
time he turned his eyes and looked into mine with something almost an
appeal, in his glance. In response, I nodded and settled myself in my
chair.
* * * * *
"I'm not going to deny a natural curiosity, Dr. Croft," I said, since,
to tell the absolute truth, I was anxious to get at the inward facts
underlying the entire peculiar affair.
"Then," he said in an almost eager fashion, "I shall tell you--the
whole thing, I think. Murray, when Shakespeare wrote into one of his
character's mouth the statement that there are more things in heaven
and earth than are dreamt of, he told the truth. Mankind in the main is
like a crowd storming the doors of a showhouse sold out to capacity and
unable to accommodate any one else. Mankind is the crowd in the lobby,
shut out from the real sights back of the veiling doors which bar their
perception of what goes on within. Mankind stands only on the fringe of
life, does not dream of the truth. Only here and there is there one who
_knows_. It was one such who first directed my mind toward the truth.
"Murray"--he paused and once more fastened me with his gaze--"I am
going to tell that truth to you.... But first--in order that you may
understand, and believe if you can, I shall tell you something of
myself."
That telling took a long time; hours, the rest of the afternoon, and
most of the following night. It was a strange tale, an unbelievably
strange story. And yet, in view of what happened inside that same week,
I am not sure, after all, but it was the truth, just as Croft alleged.
What, when all is said, do any of us know beyond the round of our own
human life? What do we know of those things which may lie outside the
scope of our mental vision? There must be things in heaven and earth
not dreamt of in the philosophy of _Horatio_. Here is the tale.
Jason Croft was born in New Jersey, but brought West at an early age
by his parents, who had become converts to a certain faith. Right
there, it seems to me, may have been laid the foundation of Croft's
interest in the occult in later life, since that faith contains
possibly a greater number of parallels to occult teachings than any of
the Occidental creeds. Of course, in all religions there is the germ of
truth. Were it not, they would be dead dogmas rather than living sects.
But in this church, which has grown strong in the Western States, I
think there is a closer approach to the Eastern theory of soul and
spiritual life.
Be that as it may, Croft grew to manhood in the very State and town
where I was now employed, and in the home on the porch of which we sat.
He elected medicine as a career. He went to Chicago and put in his
first three years. The second year his mother died, and a year later
his father. He returned on each occasion, and went back to his studies
after the obsequies were done. In his fourth year he met a man named
Gatua Kahaun, destined, as it seems, to change the entire course of his
life.
Gatua Kahaun was a Hindu, a member of an Eastern brotherhood, come to
the United States to study the religions of the West. One can see how
naturally he took up with Croft, who had been raised in one of those
religions.
The two became friends. From what Croft told me, the Hindu was a man of
marked attainments, well versed in the Oriental creeds. When Croft came
West after his graduation, Gatua Kahaun was his companion and stopped
at his home, which had been kept up by Mrs. Goss and her husband, then
still alive. The two lived there together for some weeks, and the Hindu
taught Croft the rudiments at least of the occult philosophy of life.
Then, with little warning, Croft was assigned on a mission to Australia
by his church. He got a letter from "Box B," as he told me, smiling,
knowing I would understand. The church of which he was a member has
a custom of sending their members about the world as missionaries of
their faith, to spread its doctrines and win converts to their ranks.
Croft went, though even then he had begun to see the similarity between
his own lifelong creed and the scheme of things held before him by
Gatua Kahaun.
For over two years he did not see the Hindu, though he kept up his
studies of the occult, to which he seemed inclined by a natural bent.
Then, just as he was nearly finished with his "mission," what should
happen but that, walking the streets of Melbourne, he bumped into Gatua
Kahaun.
The two men renewed their acquaintance at once. Gatua Kahaun taught
Croft Hindustani and the mysteries of the Sanskrit tongue. When Croft's
mission was finished he prevailed upon him to visit India before
returning home.
Croft went. Through Gatua's influence he was admitted to the man's
own brotherhood. He forgot his former objects and aims in life in
the new world of thought which opened up before his mental eyes.
He studied and thought. He learned the secrets of the magnetic or
enveloping body of the soul, and after a time he became convinced
that by constant application to the major purpose the spirit could
break the bonds of the material body without going through the change
which men call death. He came to believe that beyond the phenomenon of
astral projection--the sending of the conscious ego about the earthly
sphere--projections might be made beyond the planet, with only the
universe to limit the scope of the flight.
* * * * *
At times he lay staring at the starry vault of the heavens with a vague
longing within him to put the thing to the test. And always there was
one star which seemed to call him, to beckon to him, to draw his spirit
toward it as a magnet may draw a fleck of iron. That was the Dog Star,
Sirius, known to astronomers as the sun of another planetary system
like our own.
Meantime his studies went on. He learned that matter is the reflex of
spirit; that no blade of grass, no chemical atom exists save as the
envelope of an essence which cannot and does not die. He came to see
that nature is no more than a realm of force, comprising light, heat,
magnetism, chemical affinity, aura, essence, and all the imponderables
which go to produce the various forms of motion as expressions of the
ocean of force, so that motion comes to be no more than force refracted
through the various forms of existence, from the lowest to the highest,
as a ray of light is split into the seven primary colors by a prism,
each being different in itself, yet each but an integral part of the
original ray.
He came to comprehend that all stages of existence are but stages
and nothing more, and that mind, spirit, is the highest form of life
force--the true essence--manifesting through material means, yet
independent of them in itself. So only, he argued, was life after death
a possible thing. And so, he reasoned further, could the mystery be
solved, there was no real reason why the spirit could not be set free
to roam and return to the body at will. If that were true, it seemed to
him that the spirit could return from such excursions, bringing with it
a conscious recollection of the place where it had been.
Then once more he was called home by a thing which seems like no more
than a further step in the course of what mortals call fate. His
father's brother died. He was a bachelor. He left Croft sufficient
wealth to provide for his every need. Croft decided to pursue his
studies at home. He had gained all India could give him. Indeed, he
had rather startled even Gatua Kahaun by some of the theories he had
deduced.
He began work at once. He stocked the library where I had found him the
night before, with everything on the subject he could find. And the
more he studied, the more firmly did he become convinced that ordinary
astral projection was but the first step in developing the spirit's
power--that it was akin to the first step of an infant learning to
walk, and that, if confidence were forthcoming, if the will to dare the
experiment were sufficiently strong--then he could accomplish the thing
of which he dreamed.
He began to experiment, sending his astral consciousness here and
there. He centered on that one phase of his knowledge alone. He roamed
the earth at will. He perfected his ability to bring back from such
excursions a vivid recollection of all he had seen. So at last he was
ready for the great experiment. Yet in the end he made it on impulse
rather than at any pre-selected time.
He sat one evening on his porch. Over the eastern mountains which hem
in the valley the full moon was rising in a blaze of mellow glory. Its
rays caught the sleeping surface of a lake which lies near our little
city, touching each rippling wavelet until they seemed made of molten
silver. The lights of the town itself were like fireflies twinkling
amid the trees. The mountains hazed somewhat in a silvery mist,
compounded of the moonrays and distance, seemed to him no more than the
figments of a fairy tale or a dream.
Everything was quiet. Mrs. Goss, now a widow, had gone to bed, and
Croft had simply been enjoying the soft air and a cigar. Suddenly, as
the moon appeared to leap free of the mountains, it suggested a thought
of a spirit set free and rising above the material shell of existence
to his mind.
He sat watching the golden wheel radiant with reflected light, and
after a time he asked himself why he should not try the great adventure
without a longer delay. He was the last of his race. No one depended
upon him. Should he fail, they would merely find his body in the chair.
Should he succeed, he would have won his ambition and placed himself in
a position to learn of things which had heretofore baffled man.
He decided to try it there and then. Knocking the ash from his cigar,
he took one last, long, possibly farewell whiff, and laid it down on
the broad arm of his chair. Then summoning all the potent power of his
will, he fixed his whole mind upon his purpose and sank into cataleptic
sleep.
The moon is dead. In so much science is right. It is lifeless, without
moisture, without an atmosphere. Croft won his great experiment, or its
first step at least. His body sank to sleep, but his ego leaped into a
fuller, wider life.
There was a sensation of airy lightness, as though his sublimated
consciousness had dropped material weight. His body sat beneath him in
the chair. He could see it. He could see the city and the lake and the
mountains and the yellow disk of the moon. He knew he was rising toward
the latter swiftly. Then--space was annihilated in an instant, and he
seemed to himself to be standing on the topmost edge of a mighty crater
in the full, unobstructed glare of a blinding light.
He sensed that as the sun, which hung like a ball of fire halfway up
from the horizon, flinging its rays in a dazzling brilliance against
the dead satellite's surface, unprotected by an atmospheric screen. His
first sensation was an amazing realization of his own success. Then he
gazed about.
* * * * *
To one side was the vast ring of the crater itself, a well of
unutterable darkness and unplumbed depth, as yet not opened up to the
burning light of the sun. To the other was the downward sweep of the
crater's flank, dun, dead, wrinkled, seamed and seared by the stabbing
rays which bathed it in pitiless light. And beyond the foot of the
crater was a vast irregular plain, lower in the center as though eons
past it might have been the bed of some vanished sea. About the plain
were the crests of barren mountains, crags, pinnacles, misshapen and
weird beyond thought.
Yes, the moon is dead--now. But--there was life upon it once. Croft
willed himself down from the lip of the crater to the plain. He moved
about it. Indeed it had been a sea. There in the airless blaze, still
etched in the lifeless formations, he found an ancient water-line, the
mark of the fingers of vanished waters--like a mockery of what had
been. And skirting the outline of that long-lost sea, he came to the
ruin of a city which had stood upon the shores a myriad years ago. It
stood there still--a thing of paved streets, and dead walls, safe in
that moistureless world from decay.
Through those dead streets and houses, some of them thrown down by
terrific earthquakes which he judged had accompanied the final cooling
stages and death of the moon, Croft took his way, pausing now and then
to examine some ancient inscriptions cut into the blocks of stone from
which the buildings had been reared. In a way they impressed him as
similar in many respects to the Asiatic structures of today, most of
them being windowless on the first story, but built about an inner
court, gardens of beauty in the time when the moon supported life.
So far as he could judge from the buildings themselves and frescoes
on the walls, done in pigments which still prevailed, the lunarians
had been a tiny people, probably not above an average of four feet
in height, but extremely intelligent past any doubt, as shown by the
remains of their homes. They had possessed rather large heads in
proportion to their slender bodies, as the paintings done on the inside
walls led Croft to believe.
From the same source he became convinced that their social life had
been highly developed, and that they had been well versed in the arts
of manufacture and commerce, and had at the time when lunar seas
persisted maintained a merchant marine.
Through the hours of the lunar day he explored. Not, in fact, until
the sun was dropping swiftly below the rim of the mountains beyond the
old sea-bed, did he desist. Then lifting his eyes he beheld a luminous
crescent, many times larger than the moon appears to us, emitting a
soft, green light. He stood and gazed upon it for some moment before he
realized fully that he looked upon a sun-rise on the earth--that the
monster crescent was the earth indeed as seen from her satellite.
Then as realization came upon him he remembered his body--left on the
porch of his home in the chair. Suddenly he felt a longing to return,
to forsake the forsaken relics of a life which had passed and go back
to the full, pulsing tide of life which still flowed on.
Here, then, he was faced by the second step of his experiment. He had
consciously reached the moon. Could he return again to the earth? If
so, he had proved his theory beyond any further doubt. Fastening his
full power upon the endeavor, he willed himself back, and--
He opened his eyes--his physical eyes--and gazed into the early sun of
a new day rising over the mountains and turning the world to emerald
and gold.
The sound of a caught-in breath fell on his ears. He turned his glance.
Mrs. Goss stood beside him.
"Laws, sir, but you was sound asleep!" she exclaimed. "I come to call
you to breakfast an' you wasn't in your room, an' when I found you
you was sleepin' like th' dead. You must have got up awful early, Mr.
Jason."
"I was here before you were moving," Croft said as he rose. He smiled
as he spoke. Indeed, he wanted to laugh, to shout. He had done what no
mortal had ever accomplished before. The wonders of the universe were
his to explore at will. Yet even so he did not dream of what the future
held.