“So,” said Margrave, turning to me, “under the soil that spreads around us lies the gold which to you and to me is at this moment of no value, except as a guide to its twin-born,--the regenerator of life!”
“You have not yet described to me the nature of the substance which we
are to explore, nor of the process by which the virtues you impute to it
are to be extracted.”
“Let us first find the gold, and instead of describing the life-amber,
so let me call it, I will point it out to your own eyes. As to the
process, your share in it is so simple, that you will ask me why I seek
aid from a chemist. The life-amber, when found, has but to be subjected
to heat and fermentation for six hours; it will be placed, in a small
caldron which that coffer contains, over the fire which that fuel
will feed. To give effect to the process, certain alkalies and other
ingredients are required; but these are prepared, and mine is the task
to commingle them. From your science as chemist I need and ask nought.
In you I have sought only the aid of a man.”
“If that be so, why, indeed, seek me at all? Why not confide in those
swarthy attendants, who doubtless are slaves to your orders?”
“Confide in slaves! when the first task enjoined to them would be to
discover, and refrain from purloining gold! Seven such unscrupulous
knaves, or even one such, and I, thus defenceless and feeble! Such is
not the work that wise masters confide to fierce slaves. But that is
the least of the reasons which exclude them from my choice, and fix my
choice of assistant on you. Do you forget what I told you of the danger
which the Dervish declared no bribe I could offer could tempt him a
second time to brave?”
“I remember now; those words had passed away from my mind.”
“And because they had passed away from your mind, I chose you for my
comrade. I need a man by whom danger is scorned.”
“But in the process of which you tell me I see no possible danger unless
the ingredients you mix in your caldron have poisonous fumes.”
“It is not that. The ingredients I use are not poisons.”
“What other danger, except you dread your own Eastern slaves? But, if
so, why lead them to these solitudes; and, if so, why not bid me be
armed?”
“The Eastern slaves, fulfilling my commands, wait for my summons where
their eyes cannot see what we do. The danger is of a kind in which
the boldest son of the East would be more craven, perhaps, than the
daintiest Sybarite of Europe, who would shrink from a panther and laugh
at a ghost. In the creed of the Dervish, and of all who adventure into
that realm of nature which is closed to philosophy and open to magic,
there are races in the magnitude of space unseen as animalcules in the
world of a drop. For the tribes of the drop, science has its microscope.
Of the host of yon azure Infinite magic gains sight, and through them
gains command over fluid conductors that link all the parts of creation.
Of these races, some are wholly indifferent to man, some benign to him,
and some dreadly hostile. In all the regular and prescribed conditions
of mortal being, this magic realm seems as blank and tenantless as yon
vacant air. But when a seeker of powers beyond the rude functions by
which man plies the clockwork that measures his hours, and stops when
its chain reaches the end of its coil, strives to pass over those
boundaries at which philosophy says, ‘Knowledge ends,’--then he is like
all other travellers in regions unknown; he must propitiate or brave the
tribes that are hostile,--must depend for his life on the tribes that
are friendly. Though your science discredits the alchemist’s dogmas,
your learning informs you that all alchemists were not ignorant
impostors; yet those whose discoveries prove them to have been the
nearest allies to your practical knowledge, ever hint in their mystical
works at the reality of that realm which is open to magic,--ever hint
that some means less familiar than furnace and bellows are essential
to him who explores the elixir of life. He who once quaffs that elixir,
obtains in his very veins the bright fluid by which he transmits the
force of his will to agencies dormant in nature, to giants unseen in the
space. And here, as he passes the boundary which divides his allotted
and normal mortality from the regions and races that magic alone can
explore, so, here, he breaks down the safeguard between himself and the
tribes that are hostile. Is it not ever thus between man and man? Let a
race the most gentle and timid and civilized dwell on one side a river
or mountain, and another have home in the region beyond, each, if it
pass not the intervening barrier, may with each live in peace. But
if ambitious adventurers scale the mountain, or cross the river, with
design to subdue and enslave the population they boldly invade, then
all the invaded arise in wrath and defiance,--the neighbours are changed
into foes. And therefore this process--by which a simple though rare
material of nature is made to yield to a mortal the boon of a life which
brings, with its glorious resistance to Time, desires and faculties to
subject to its service beings that dwell in the earth and the air and
the deep--has ever been one of the same peril which an invader must
brave when he crosses the bounds of his nation. By this key alone you
unlock all the cells of the alchemist’s lore; by this alone understand
how a labour, which a chemist’s crudest apprentice could perform, has
baffled the giant fathers of all your dwarfed children of science.
Nature, that stores this priceless boon, seems to shrink from conceding
it to man; the invisible tribes that abhor him, oppose themselves to
the gain that might give them a master. The duller of those who were
the life-seekers of old would have told you how some chance,
trivial, unlooked-for, foiled their grand hope at the very point of
fruition,--some doltish mistake, some improvident oversight, a defect
in the sulphur, a wild overflow in the quicksilver, or a flaw in the
bellows, or a pupil who failed to replenish the fuel, by falling asleep
by the furnace. The invisible foes seldom vouchsafe to make themselves
visible where they can frustrate the bungler, as they mock at his toils
from their ambush. But the mightier adventurers, equally foiled in
despite of their patience and skill, would have said, ‘Not with us rests
the fault; we neglected no caution, we failed from no oversight. But out
from the caldron dread faces arose, and the spectres or demons dismayed
and baffled us.’ Such, then, is the danger which seems so appalling to
a son of the East, as it seemed to a seer in the dark age of Europe. But
we can deride all its threats, you and I. For myself, I own frankly I
take all the safety that the charms and resources of magic bestow. You,
for your safety, have the cultured and disciplined reason which reduces
all fantasies to nervous impressions; and I rely on the courage of one
who has questioned, unquailing, the Luminous Shadow, and wrested from
the hand of the magician himself the wand which concentred the wonders
of will!”
To this strange and long discourse I listened without interruption, and
now quietly answered,--
“I do not merit the trust you affect in my courage; but I am now on my
guard against the cheats of the fancy, and the fumes of a vapour can
scarcely bewilder the brain in the open air of this mountain-land. I
believe in no races like those which you tell me lie viewless in space,
as do gases. I believe not in magic; I ask not its aids, and I dread not
its terrors. For the rest, I am confident of one mournful courage,--the
courage that comes from despair. I submit to your guidance, whatever it
be, as a sufferer whom colleges doom to the grave submits to the quack
who says, ‘Take my specific and live!’ My life is nought in itself; my
life lives in another. You and I are both brave from despair; you would
turn death from yourself, I would turn death from one I love more than
myself. Both know how little aid we can win from the colleges, and both,
therefore, turn to the promises most audaciously cheering. Dervish or
magician, alchemist or phantom, what care you and I? And if they fail
us, what then? They cannot fail us more than the colleges do!”