"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 sees 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!"