This reading is from the book of The One Thousand Nights and a Knight, as translated by Sir
 Richard Burton, published in 1885.
 The tales are told each evening by Scheherazade as a ploy to prevent her execution by her
 husband king.
 Burton's introduction creates the scene.
 This work, laborious as it may appear, has been to me a labor of love, an unfailing source
 of solace and satisfaction.
 During my long years of official banishment to the luxuriant and deadly deserts of Western
 Africa and to the dull and dreary half-clearings of South America, it proved itself a charm,
 a talisman against ennui and despondency.
 Impossible even to open the pages without a vision starting into view, without drawing
 a picture from the panacotech of the brain, without reviving a host of memories and reminiscences
 which are not the common property of travelers, however widely they may have traveled.
 From my dull and commonplace and respectable surroundings, the djinn bore me at once to
 the land of my predilection, Arabia, a region so familiar to my mind that even at first
 sight it seemed a reminiscence of some bygone metempsychic life in the distant past.
 Again I stood under the diaphanous skies, in air glorious as ether, whose every breath
 raises men's spirit like sparkling wine.
 Once more I saw the evening star hanging like a solitaire from the pure front of the Western
 firmament, and the afterglow transfiguring and transforming as if by magic the homely
 and rugged features of the scene into a fairyland lit with a light which never shines on other
 soils or seas.
 Then would appear the woollen tents, low and black, of the true Bedouin, mere dots in the
 boundless waste of lion-tawny clays and gazelle-brown gravels, and the campfire dotting like a glowworm
 the village center.
 Presently, sweetened by distance, would be heard the wild, weird songs of lads and lasses
 driving or rather pelting through the gloaming their sheep and goats, and the measured chant
 of the spearsmen gravelly stalking behind their charge the camels, mingled with the
 bleating of the flocks and the bellowing of the humpy herds, while the rearmouse flitted
 overhead with his tiny shriek and the rave of the jackal resounded through deepening
 glooms, and, most musical of music, the palm trees answered the whispers of the night breeze
 with the softest tones of falling water.
 The story of the 250th night and the notes that follow reveal some of the medicinal uses
 of cannabis and other herbs.
 Quoth King Sharyar, "O Shahar-ez-Zad, this is indeed a most wonderful tale."
 And she answered, "O King, it is not more wonderful than the tale of Ala al-Din Abu'l-Shammat."
 "What is that?" asked he.
 And she said, "It hath reached me that there lived, in times of yore and years and ages
 long gone before, a merchant of Cairo named Shams al-Din, who was of the best and truest
 spoken of the traders of the city.
 And he had eunuchs and servants and negro slaves and handmaids and mamalouks and great
 store of money.
 Moreover, he was consul of the merchants of Cairo, and owned a wife, whom he loved and
 who loved him, except that he had lived with her forty years, yet had not been blessed
 with a son or even a daughter.
 One day, as he sat in his shop, he noted that the merchants, each and every, had a son or
 two sons or more sitting in their shops like their sons.
 Now the day being Friday, he entered the Hamam bath and made the total ablution, after which
 he came out and took the barber's glass and looked in it, saying, "I testify that there
 is no god but Thee God, and I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God."
 Then he considered his beard, and seeing that the white hairs in it covered the black, he
 thought himself that hoariness is the harbinger of death.
 Now his wife knew the time of his coming home, and had washed and made herself ready for
 him.
 So when he came in to her, she said, "Good evening," but he replied, "I see no good."
 Then she called to the handmaid, "Spread the supper tray," and when this was done, quoth
 she to her husband, "Sup, O my lord?"
 "I will eat nothing," and pushing the tray away with his foot, turned his back upon her.
 She asked, "Why dost thou thus, and what hath vexed thee?"
 And he answered, "Thou art the cause of my vexation."
 And Scheherazade perceived the dawn of day, and ceased saying her permitted say.
 When it was the two hundred and fiftieth night, she said, "It hath reached me, O auspicious
 king, that Shams al-Din said to his wife, 'Thou art the cause of my vexation.'
 And she asked, 'Wherefore?'
 And he answered, 'When I opened my shop this morning, I saw that each and every of the
 merchants had with them a son, or two sons, or more, sitting in their shops like their
 fathers.'
 And I said to myself, 'He who took thy sire will not spare thee.
 Now the night I first visited thee, thou madest me swear that I would never take a second
 wife over thee, nor a concubine, Abyssinian or Greek, or handmaid of other race, nor would
 lie a single night away from thee.
 And behold, thou art barren, and having thee is like boring into rock.'
 He joined she, 'Allah is my witness that the fault lies with thee, for that thy seed is
 thin.'
 He asked, 'And what showeth the man whose semen is thin?'
 And she answered, 'He cannot get women with child, nor beget children.'
 Quoth he, 'What thickeneth the seed?
 Tell me, and I will buy it.
 Happily, it will thicken mine.'
 Quoth she, 'Enquire for it of the druggists.'
 So he slept with her that night, and arose on the morrow, repenting of having spoken
 angrily to her, and she also regretted her cross words.
 Then he went to the market, and finding a druggist, saluted him, and when his salutation
 was returned, said to him, 'Say, hast thou with thee a seed thickener?'
 He replied, 'I had it, but am out of it.
 Enquire thou of my neighbor.'
 Then Shams-al-Din made the round, till he had asked everyone, but they all laughed at
 him, and presently he returned to his shop and sat down, sorely troubled.
 Now there was in the bazaar a man who was deputy syndic of the brokers, and was given
 to the use of opium, and a lectuary, and green hashish.
 He was called Sheikh Mohammed Sam-Sam, and being poor, he used to wish Shams-al-Din good
 morrow every day.
 So he came to him, according to his custom, and saluted him.
 The merchant returned his salute, but in ill temper, and the other, seeing him vexed, said,
 'O my lord, what hath crossed thee?'
 Thereupon Shams-al-Din told him all that had occurred between himself and his wife, adding,
 'These forty years I have been married to her, yet hath she borne me neither son nor
 daughter, and they say the cause of thy failure to get her with child is the thinness of thy
 breast; so I have been seeking a something wherewith to thicken my seamen, but not found
 it.'
 'O my lord, I have a seed-thickener, but what wilt thou say to him who causeth thy
 wife to conceive by thee after these forty years have passed?'
 answered the merchant.
 'If thou do this, I will work thy will and reward thee.'
 'Then give me a dinar,' rejoined the broker, and Shams-al-Din said, 'Take these two dinars,
 and give me also yonder big bowl of porcelain.'
 He took them and said, 'Give me also yonder big bowl of porcelain.'
 So he gave it to him, and the broker betook himself to a hashish-seller, of whom he bought
 two ounces of concentrated rumi opium, and equal parts of Chinese cubebs, cinnamon, cloves,
 cardamoms, ginger, white pepper, and mountain skink, a lizard, and pounding them all together,
 boiled them in sweet olive oil, after which he added three ounces of male frankincense
 in fragments, and a couple of coriander seeds, and macerating the whole, made it into an
 electuary with rumi bee-honey.
 Then he put the confection in the bowl, and carried it to the merchant, to whom he delivered
 it, saying, 'Here is the seed-thickener, and the manner of using it is this.
 Take of my electuary with a spoon after supping, and wash it down with a sherbet made of rose
 conserve, but first sup off mutton and house pigeon, plentifully seasoned and hotly spiced.'
 So the merchant bought all this, and sent the meat and pigeons to his wife, saying,
 'Dress them dastly, and lay up the seed-thickener until I want it, and call for it.'
 She did his bidding, and when she served up the meats, he ate the evening meal, after
 which he called for the bowl, and ate of the electuary.
 It pleased him very well, so he ate the rest, and knew his wife.
 That very night she conceived by him, and after three months her courses ceased, no
 blood came, and she knew that she was with child.
 When the days of her pregnancy were accomplished, the pangs of labor took her, and they raised
 loud lull-a-luans and cries of joy.
 The midwife delivered her with difficulty, by pronouncing over the boy at his birth the
 names of Muhammad and Ali, and said, 'Allah is most great,' and she called in his ear
 the call to prayer.
 Then she wrapped him up and passed him to his mother, who took him and gave him the
 breast, and he sucked, and was full and slept.
 The midwife abode with them three days, till they had made the mothering-cakes of sugared
 bread and sweetmeats, and they distributed them on the seventh day.
 Then they sprinkled salt against the evil eye, and the merchant, going in to his wife,
 gave her joy of her safe delivery, and said, 'Where is Allah's deposit?'
 So they brought him a babe of surpassing beauty, the handiwork of the orderer, who is ever
 present; and though he was but seven days old, those who saw him would have deemed him
 a yearling child.
 So the merchant looked on his face, and seeing it like a shining full moon, with moles on
 either cheek, said he to his wife, 'What hast thou named him?'
 Answered she, 'If it were a girl, I had named her; but this is a boy, so none shall name
 him but thou.'
 Now the people of that time used to name their children by omens; and whilst the merchant
 and his wife were taking counsel of the name, behold, one said to his friend, 'Ho, my lord,
 he is Aladdin!'
 So the merchant said, 'We will call him Aladdin Abu al-Shammat.'
 Some other recipes Burton refers to follow.
 In India, hashish is called majoon, a lectuary generally.
 It is made of ganja, or young leaves, buds, capsules, and florets of hemp, poppy seed,
 and flowers of the thorn apple, or datura, with milk and sugar candy, nutmegs, cloves,
 mace, and saffron, all boiled to the consistency of treacle, which hardens when cold.
 Several recipes are given by haircloths.
 These lectuaries are usually prepared with charas, or gum of hemp, collected by hand
 or by passing a blanket over the plant in early morning, and it is highly intoxicating.
 Another intoxicant is sabzi, dried hemp leaves, poppy seed, cucumber seed, black pepper, and
 cardamoms rubbed down in a mortar with a wooden pestle, made drinkable by adding milk, ice
 cream, etc.
 The hashish of Arabia is the Hindustani bang, usually drunk and made as follows.
 Take of hemp leaves, well washed, three drams, black pepper, forty-five grains, and of cloves,
 nutmeg, and mace, which add to the intoxication, each twelve grains.
 Steep in eight ounces of water, or the juice of watermelon or cucumber, strain and drink.
 The Egyptian zabiba is a preparation of hemp florets, opium, and honey, much affected by
 the lower orders, whence the proverb, "Temper thy sorrow with zabiba."
 In all hijaz, it is mixed with raisins and smoked in the water pipe.
 Besides these are, one, post-poppy seeds, prepared in various ways but especially in
 sugared sherbets; two, the touristramonium seed, the produce of the thorn apple, bleached
 and put into sweetmeats by dishonest confectioners.
 It is a dangerous intoxicant, producing spectral visions, delirium tremens, etc.
 And three, various preparations of opium, especially the madad, pills made up with toasted
 beetle leaf and smoked.
 The Victorian fascination with the archetypal garden, which embraced the Arabic garden tradition,
 is reflected in this descriptive passage, "A Cannabis Dream Come True."
 This is Baghdad, and 'tis the city where security is to be had.
 Winter with his frosts hath turned away, and prime hath come his roses to display.
 And the flowers are glowing, and the trees are blowing, and the streams are flowing.
 So Nur al-Din landed, he and his handmaid, and giving the captain five dinars, walked
 on a little way till the decrees of destiny brought them among the gardens.
 And they came to a place swept and sprinkled, with benches along the walls, and hanging
 jars filled with water.
 Overhead was a trellis of reedwork and canes shading the whole length of the avenue, and
 at the upper end was a garden gate, but this was locked.
 By Allah, quoth Nur al-Din to the damsel, right pleasant is this place.
 And she replied, O my lord, sit with me a while on this bench, and let us take our ease.
 So they mounted, and sat themselves down on the bench, after which they washed their faces
 and hands, and the breeze blew cool on them, and they fell asleep.
 And glory be to him who never sleepeth.
 Now this garden was named the Garden of Gladness, and therein stood the Palace of Pleasure,
 and the Pavilion of Pictures, the whole belonging to the caliph Harun al-Rashid, who was want,
 when his breast was straightened with care, to frequent garden and palace, and there to
 sit.
 The palace had eighty latticed windows, and four score lamps, hanging round a great candelabrum
 of gold, furnished with wax candles.
 And when the caliph used to enter, he would order the handmaids to throw open the lattices
 and light up the rooms, and he would bid Ishaq bin Ibrahim, the cup companion, and the slave
 girls to sing till his breast was broadened and his ailments were allayed.
 Now the keeper of the garden, Sheikh Ibrahim, was a very old man, and he had found from
 time to time, when he went out on any business, people pleasuring about the garden gate with
 their bona robus, at which he was angered with exceeding anger.
 But he took patience till one day when the caliph came to his garden, and he complained
 of this to Harun al-Rashid, who said, Whomsoever thou surprisest about the door of the garden,
 deal with him as thou wilt.
 Now on this day the gardener chanced to be abroad on some occasion, and returning found
 these two sleeping at the gate, covered with a single mantia.
 Whereupon he said, By Allah, good, these twain know not that the caliph hath given me leave
 to slay any one I may catch at the door, but I will give this couple a shrewd whipping,
 that none may come near the gate in the future.
 So he cut a green palm frond and went up to them, and raising his arm till the white of
 his armpit appeared, was about to strike them, when he bethought himself and said, O Ibrahim,
 wilt thou beat them unknowing their case?
 Hathly they are strangers, or sons of the road, and the decrees of destiny have thrown
 them here.
 I will uncover their faces and look at them.
 So he lifted up the mantia from their heads and said, They are a handsome couple.
 It were not fitting that I should beat them.
 Then he covered their faces again, and going to Nur al-Din's feet, began to rub and shampoo
 them, whereupon the youth opened his eyes, and seeing an old man of grave and reverent
 aspect rubbing his feet, he was ashamed, and drawing them in, sat up.
 Then he took Sheik Ibrahim's hand and kissed it.
 Quoth the old man, O my son, whence art thou?
 And quoth he, O my lord, we are two strangers, and the tears started from his eyes.
 O my son, said Sheik Ibrahim, know that the Prophet, whom Allah bless and preserve, hath
 enjoined honor to the stranger, and added, Wilt thou not arise, O my son, and pass into
 the garden, and solace thyself by looking at it, and gladden thy heart?
 O my lord, said Nur al-Din, to whom doth this garden belong?
 And the other replied, O my son, I have inherited it from my folk.
 Now his object in saying this was to set them at their ease, and induce them to enter the
 garden.
 So Nur al-Din thanked him, and rose, he and the damsel, and followed him into the garden.
 And lo, it was a garden, and what a garden!
 The gate was arched like a great hall, and over walls and roof ramped vines with grapes
 of many colors, the red like rubies, and the black like ebonies, and beyond it lay a bower
 of trellised boughs growing fruit single and composite, and small birds on branches sang
 with melodious recite.
 And the thousand-noted nightingale shrilled with her varied shrite, and the turtle with
 her cooing filled the sight.
 The blackbird whistled like a magical white, and the ring-dove moaned like a drinker in
 grievous plight.
 The trees grew in perfection all edible growths, and fruited all manner fruits which in pairs
 were bipartite, with the camphor apricot, the almond apricot, and the apricot corisoning
 height, the plum like the face of beauty, smooth and bright, the cherry that makes teeth
 shine clear by her slight, and the fig of three colors, green, purple, and white.
 There also blossomed the violet as it were sulfur on fire by night, the orange with buds
 like pink coral and marguerite, the rose whose redness scars the loveliest cheeks, blushed
 with despise, and myrtle and guilliflower and lavender with the red blood anemone from
 Newmont height.
 The leaves were all gemmed with tears the clouds had died, the chamomile smiled showing
 teeth that bite, and Narcissus with his negro eyes fixed on rose his sight.
 The citrons shone with fruits embellished, and the lemons like balls of gold.
 The earth was carpeted with flowers tinctured infinite, for spring has come brightening
 the place with joy and delight, and the streams ran ringing to the birds gay singing, while
 the rustling breeze up springing a-tempered the air to temperance exquisite.
 Sheik Ibrahim carried them up into the pavilion, and they gazed on its beauty, and on the lamps
 aforementioned in the latticed windows, and Nur al-Din, remembering his entertainments
 of time past, cried, "By Allah, this is a pleasant place.
 It hath quenched in me anguish which burned as a fire of Gazalwood."
 This reading is from The Hashish Eater, or Passages from the Life of a Pythagorean, by
 Fitzhugh Ludlow, published in 1857 by Harper and Brothers, New York.
 This was the first of the American hashish exposes, and many feel the best.
 And what I'm going to read this morning, out of a very rich potential group of readings,
 is Fitzhugh Ludlow's description of his first encounter with the power of cannabis.
 So I begin the reading partway through the chapter called The Night Entrance.
 One morning in the spring of 1850-something, I dropped in upon the doctor for my accustomed
 lounge.
 "Have you seen," said he, "my new acquisitions?"
 I looked toward the shelves in the direction of which he pointed, and saw, added since
 my last visit, a row of comely pasteboard cylinders enclosing vials of the various extracts
 prepared by Tilden and Company.
 Arranged in order according to their size, they confronted me, as pretty a rank of medicinal
 sharpshooters as could gratify the eye of an amateur.
 I approached the shelves that I might take them in review.
 A rapid glance showed most of them to be old acquaintances.
 Conium taraxacum rhubarb.
 "Ha!
 What is this?
 Cannabis indica?"
 "That," answered the doctor, looking with a parental fondness upon his new treasures,
 "is a preparation of the East Indian hemp, a powerful agent in cases of lockjaw."
 On the strength of this introduction I took down the little archer, and, removing his
 outer verdant coat, began the further prosecution of his acquaintance.
 To pull out a broad and shallow cork was the work of an instant, and it revealed to me
 an olive-brown extract of the consistency of pitch and a decided aromatic odor.
 Drawing out a small portion upon the point of my penknife, I was just going to put it
 to my tongue when "Hold on!" cried the doctor.
 "Do you want to kill yourself?
 That stuff is deadly poison."
 "Indeed," I replied.
 "No, I cannot say that I have any settled determination of that kind."
 And with that I replaced the cork and restored the extract with all its appurtenances to
 the shelf.
 The remainder of my morning's visit in the sanctum was spent consulting the dispensatory
 under the title "Cannabis indica."
 The sum of my discoveries there may be found, with much additional information, in that
 invaluable popular work Johnston's Chemistry of Common Life.
 This being universally accessible, I will allude no further to the result of that morning's
 researches than to mention the three following conclusions to which I came.
 First, the doctor was both right and wrong.
 Right, inasmuch as a sufficiently large dose of the drug, if it could be retained in the
 stomach, would produce death, like any other narcotic, and the ultimate effect of its habitual
 use had always proved highly injurious to mind and body.
 Wrong, since moderate doses of it were never immediately deadly, and many millions of people
 daily employed it as an indulgence similarly to opium.
 Second, it was the hashish referred to by Eastern travelers and the subject of a most
 graphic chapter from the pen of Bayard Taylor, which months before had moved me powerfully
 to curiosity and admiration.
 Third, I would add it to the list of my former experiences.
 In pursuance of this last determination, I waited till my friend was out of sight, that
 I might not terrify him by that which he considered a suicidal venture, and then, quickly uncapping
 my little archer a second time, removed from his store of offensive armor a pill sufficient
 to balance the ten-grain weight of the sanctorial scales.
 This, upon the authority of Pereira and the dispensatory, I swallowed without a tremor
 as to the danger of the result.
 Making all due allowance for the fact that I had not taken my hashish bolus fasting,
 I ought to experience its effects within the next four hours.
 That time elapsed without bringing the shadow of a phenomenon.
 It was plain that my dose had been insufficient.
 For the sake of observing the most conservative prudence, I suffered several days to go by
 without a repetition of the experiment, and then, keeping the matter equally secret, I
 administered to myself a pill of fifteen grains.
 This second was equally ineffectual with the first.
 But gradually, by five grains at a time, I increased the dose to thirty grains, which
 I took one evening half an hour after tea.
 I had now almost come to the conclusion that I was absolutely unsusceptible of the hashish
 influence, without any expectation that this last experiment would be more successful than
 the former ones, and indeed with no realization of the manner in which the drug affected those
 who did make the experiment successfully, I went to pass the evening at the house of
 an intimate friend.
 In music and conversation the time passed pleasantly.
 The clock struck ten, reminding me that three hours had elapsed since the dose was taken,
 and as yet not an unusual symptom had appeared.
 I was provoked to think that this trial was as fruitless as its predecessors.
 Ah!
 What means this sudden thrill?
 A shock, as if some unimagined vital force shoots without warning through my entire frame,
 leaping to my fingers' ends, piercing my brain, startling me till I almost spring from
 my chair.
 I could not doubt it.
 I was in the power of the hashish influence.
 My first emotion was one of uncontrollable terror, a sense of getting something which
 I had not bargained for.
 That moment I would have given all I had or hoped to have to be as I was three hours before.
 No pain anywhere, not a twinge in any fiber, yet a cloud of unutterable strangeness was
 settling upon me and wrapping me impenetrably in from all that was natural or familiar.
 The endeared faces well known to me of old surrounded me, and yet they were not with
 me in my loneliness.
 I had entered upon a tremendous life which they could not share.
 If the disembodied ever returned to hover over the hearthstone which once had a seat
 for them, they look upon their friends as I then looked upon mine.
 A nearness of place with an infinite distance of state, a connection which had no possible
 sympathies for the wants of that hour of revelation, an isolation nonetheless perfect for seeming
 companionship.
 Still, I spoke.
 A question was put to me and I answered it.
 I even laughed at it all, yet it was not my voice which spoke, perhaps one which I once
 had far away in another time and another place.
 For a while I knew nothing that was going on externally, and then the remembrance of
 the last remark which had been made returned slowly and indistinctly as some trait of a
 dream will return after many days, puzzling us to say where we have been conscious of
 it before.
 A fitful wind all the evening had been sighing down the chimney.
 Now it grew into the steady hum of a vast wheel in accelerating motion.
 For a while this hum seemed to resound through all space.
 I was stunned by it.
 I was absorbed in it.
 Slowly the revolution of the wheel came to a stop and its monotonous din was changed
 for the reverberating peal of a grand cathedral organ.
 The ebb and flow of its inconceivably solemn tone filled me with a grief that was more
 than human.
 I sympathized with the dirge-like cadence as spirit sympathizes with spirit, and then,
 in the full conviction that all I heard and felt was real, I looked out of my isolation
 to see the effect of the music on my friends.
 Ah, we were in separate worlds indeed, not a trace of appreciation on any face.
 Perhaps I was acting strangely.
 Only a pair of busy hands, which had been running neck and neck all the evening with
 a nimble little crochet needle over a race ground of pink and blue silk, stopped at their
 goal and their owner looked at me steadfastly.
 Ah, I was found out.
 I had betrayed myself.
 In terror I waited, expecting every instant to hear the word "Hashish."
 No, the lady only asked me some question connected with the previous conversation.
 As mechanically as an automaton, I began to reply.
 As I heard once more the alien and unreal tones of my own voice, I became convinced
 that it was someone else who spoke, and in another world.
 I sat and listened.
 Still the voice kept speaking.
 Now, for the first time I experienced the vast change which Hashish makes in all measurements
 of time.
 The first word of the reply occupied a period sufficient for the action of a drama.
 The last left me in complete ignorance of any point far enough back in the past to date
 the commencement of the sentence.
 Its enunciation might have occupied years.
 I was not in the same life which had held me when I heard it begun.
 And now, with time, space expanded also.
 At my friend's house, one particular armchair was always reserved for me.
 I was sitting in it at a distance of hardly three feet from the center table around which
 the members of the family were grouped.
 Rapidly that distance widened.
 The whole atmosphere seemed ductile and spun endlessly out into great spaces surrounding
 me on every side.
 We were in a vast hall of which my friends and I occupied opposite extremities.
 The ceiling and the walls ran upward with a gliding motion as if vivified by a sudden
 force of resistless growth.
 Oh, I could not bear it.
 I should soon be left alone in the midst of an infinity of space.
 And now, more and more, every moment increased the conviction that I was watched.
 I did not know then, as I learned afterwards, that suspicion of all earthly things and persons
 was the characteristic of the hashish delirium.
 In the midst of my complicated hallucination, I could perceive that I had a dual existence.
 One portion of me was whirled unresistingly along the track of this tremendous experience.
 The other sat looking down from a height upon its double, observing, reasoning, and serenely
 weighing all the phenomena.
 This calmer being suffered with the other by sympathy, but did not lose its self-possession.
 Presently it warned me that I must go home, lest the growing effect of the hashish should
 incite me to some act which might frighten my friends.
 I acknowledged the force of this remark very much as if it had been made by another person,
 and rose to take my leave.
 I advanced toward the center table.
 With every step its distance increased, I nerved myself as for a long pedestrian journey.
 Still, the lights, the faces, the furniture receded.
 At last, almost unconsciously, I reached them.
 It would be tedious to attempt to convey the idea of the time which my leave-taking consumed,
 and the attempt, at least with all minds that have not passed through the same experience,
 it would be as impossible as tedious.
 At last, however, I was in the street.
 Beyond me the view stretched endlessly away.
 It was an unconverging vista whose nearest lamps seemed separated from me by leagues.
 I was doomed to pass through a merciless stretch of space.
 A soul just disenthralled setting out for his flight beyond the furthest visible star
 could not be more overwhelmed with his newly acquired conception of the sublimity of distance
 than I was at that moment.
 Sublimely, I began my infinite journey.
 Before long I walked in entire unconsciousness of all around me.
 I dwelt in a marvelous inner world.
 I existed by turns in different places and various states of being.
 Now I swept my gondola through the moonlit lagoons of Venice.
 Now alp on alp towered above my view, and the glory of the coming sun flashed purple
 light upon the topmost icy pinnacle.
 Now in the primeval silence of some unexplored tropical forest I spread my feathery leaves,
 a giant fern, and swayed and nodded in the spice gales over a river whose waves at once
 set into clouds of music and perfume.
 My soul changed to a vegetable essence, thrilled with a strange and unimaginable ecstasy.
 The palace of Al-Harun could not have brought me back to humanity.
 I will not detail all the transmutations of that walk.
 Ever and anon I returned from my dreams into consciousness as some well-known house seemed
 to leap out into my path, awakening me with a shock.
 The whole way homeward was a series of such awakenings and relapses into abstraction and
 delirium until I reached the corner of the street in which I lived.
 Here a new phenomenon manifested itself.
 I had just awakened for perhaps the twentieth time and my eyes were wide open.
 I recognized all surrounding objects and began calculating the distance home.
 Suddenly out of a blank wall at my side a muffled figure stepped into the path before
 me, his hair white as snow, hung in tangled elf-locks on his shoulders, where he carried
 also a heavy burden, like unto the well-filled sack of sins which Bunyan places on the back
 of his pilgrim.
 Not liking his manner, I stepped aside, intending to pass around him and go on my way.
 This change of our relative position allowed the blaze of a neighboring streetlight to
 fall full on his face, which had hitherto been totally obscured.
 Horror unspeakable!
 I shall never, till the day I die, forget that face.
 Every liniment was stamped with the records of a life black with damning crime.
 It glared upon me with a ferocious wickedness and a stony despair which only he may feel
 who is entering on the retribution of the unpardonable sin.
 He might have sat to a demon painter as the ideal of Shelley's Senchi.
 I seemed to grow blasphemous in looking at him and, in an agony of fear, began to run
 away.
 He detained me with a bony hand which pierced my wrist like talons, and slowly, taking
 down the burden from his own shoulders, laid it upon mine.
 I threw it off and pushed him away.
 Silently he returned and restored the weight.
 Again I repulsed him, this time crying out, "Man, what do you mean?"
 In a voice which impressed me with the sense of wickedness as his face had done, he replied,
 "You shall bear my burden with me," and a third time laid it on my shoulders.
 For the last time I hurled it aside and, with all my force, dashed him from me.
 He reeled backward and fell, and before he could recover his disadvantage I had put a
 long distance between us.
 Through the excitement of my struggle with this phantasm the effects of the hashish had
 increased mightily.
 I was bursting with an uncontrollable life.
 I strode with the fuse of a giant.
 Hotter and faster came my breath.
 I seemed to pant like some tremendous engine.
 An electric energy whirled me resistlessly onward.
 I feared for myself, least it should burst its fleshy walls and, glance on, leave a wreck
 of framework behind it.
 At last I entered my own house.
 During my absence a family connection had arrived from abroad and stood ready to receive
 my greeting.
 Partly restored to consciousness by the naturalness of home faces and the powerful light of a
 chandelier which shed its blaze through the room, I saw the necessity of vigilance against
 betraying my condition, and, with an intense effort suppressing all I felt, I approached
 my friend and said all that is usual on such occasions.
 Yet recent as I was from my conflict with the supernatural, I cast a stealthy look about
 me that I might learn from the faces of others if, after all, I was shaking hands with a
 phantom and making inquiries about the health of a family of hallucinations.
 Growing assured as I perceived no symptoms of astonishment, I finished the salutation
 and sat down.
 It soon required all my resolution to keep the secret which I had determined to hold
 inviolable.
 My sensations began to be terrific, not from any pain that I felt, but from the tremendous
 mystery of all around me and within me.
 By an appalling introversion, all the operations of vitality which in our ordinary state go
 on unconsciously came vividly into my experience.
 Through every thinnest corporeal tissue and minutest vein I could see the circulation
 of the blood along each inch of its progress.
 I knew when every valve opened and when it shut.
 Every sense was pretty naturally awakened.
 The room was full of a great glory.
 The beating of my heart was so clearly audible that I wondered to find it unnoticed by those
 who were sitting by my side.
 Low now the heart became a great fountain whose jet played upward with loud vibrations
 and a striking upon the roof of my skull as on a gigantic dome fell back with a splash
 and a furrow into its reservoir.
 Faster and faster came the pulsations until at last I heard them no more and the stream
 became one continuously pouring flood whose roar resounded through all my frame.
 I gave myself up for lost since judgment, which still sat unimpaired above my perverted
 senses, argued that congestion must take place in a few moments and close the drama
 with my death.
 But my clutch would not yet relax from hope.
 The thought struck me.
 Might not this rapidity of circulation be after all imaginary?
 I determined to find out.
 Going to my own room I took out my watch and placed my hand upon my heart.
 The very effort which I made to ascertain the reality gradually brought perception back
 to its normal state.
 In the intensity of my observations I began to perceive that the circulation was not as
 rapid as I had thought.
 From a pulseless flow it gradually came to be apprehended as a hurrying succession of
 intense throbs, then less swift and less intense, until finally on comparing it with the second
 hand I found that about ninety a minute was its average rapidity.
 Greatly comforted I desisted from the experiment.
 Almost instantly the hallucination returned.
 Again I dreaded apoplexy, congestion, hemorrhage and a multiplicity of nameless deaths and
 drew my picture as I might be found on the morrow, stark and cold, by those whose agony
 would be redoubted by the mystery of my end.
 I reasoned with myself.
 I bathed my forehead.
 It did no good.
 There was one resource left.
 I would go to a physician.
 With this resolve I left my room and went to the head of the staircase.
 The family had all retired for the night and the gas was turned off from the burner in
 the hall below.
 I looked down the stairs.
 The depth was fathomless.
 It was a journey of years to reach the bottom.
 The dim light of the sky shone through the narrow panes at the sides of the front door
 and seemed a demon light in the middle darkness of the abyss.
 I never could get down.
 I sat me down despairingly upon the topmost step.
 Suddenly a sublime thought possessed me.
 If the distance be infinite, I am immortal.
 It shall be tried.
 I commenced the descent wearily, wearily down through my league-long, year-long journey
 to record my impressions in that journey would be to repeat what I have said of the time of Hashish.
 Now stopping to rest as a traveler would turn aside at a wayside inn, now toiling down through
 the lonely darkness, I came by and by to the end and passed out into the street.
 Chapter Two. Under the Shadow of Aesculapius.
 On reaching the porch of the physician's house, I rang the bell, but immediately forgot whom to ask for.
 No wonder. I was on the steps of a palace in Milan.
 No, and I laughed to myself for the blunder.
 I was on the staircase of the Tower of London, so I should not be puzzled through my ignorance of Italian.
 But whom to ask for?
 This question recalled me to the real bearings of the place, but did not suggest its requisite answer.
 Whom should I ask for?
 I began setting the most cunning traps of hypothesis to catch the solution of the difficulty.
 I looked at the surrounding houses.
 Of whom had I been accustomed to think as living next door to them?
 This did not bring it.
 Whose daughter had I not seen going to school from this house but the very day before?
 Her name was Julia. Julia.
 And I thought of every combination which had been made with this name from Julia Domna down to Julia Gristi.
 Ah, now I had it. Julia H.
 And her father naturally bore the same name.
 During this intellectual rummage, I had rung the bell half a dozen times,
 under the impression that I was kept waiting a small eternity.
 When the servant opened the door, she panted as if she had run for her life.
 I was shown upstairs to Dr. H.'s room, where he had thrown himself down to rest after a tedious operation.
 Locking the door after me with an air of determined secrecy,
 which must have conveyed to him pleasant little suggestions of a design upon his life,
 I approached his bedside.
 "I am about to reveal to you," I commenced, "something which I would not for my life allow to come to other ears.
 Do you pledge me your eternal silence?"
 "I do. What's the matter?"
 "I have been taking hashish, cannabis indica, and I fear that I am now going to die."
 "How much did you take?"
 "Thirty grains."
 "Let me feel your pulse."
 He placed his finger on my wrist and counted slowly while I stood waiting to hear my death warrant.
 Very regularly.
 Shortly spoke the doctor.
 "You are wafflingly accelerated. Do you feel any pain?"
 "None at all."
 "Nothing the matter with you. Go home and go to bed."
 "But is there no danger of apoplexy?"
 "Bah!" said the doctor, and having delivered himself of this very Abernathy-like opinion in my case, he lay down again.
 My hand was on the knob when he stopped me with,
 "Wait a minute. I'll give you a powder to carry with you, and if you get frightened again after you leave me,
 you can take it as a sedative, step out on the landing, if you please, and call my servant."
 I did so, and my voice seemed to reverberate like thunder from every recess in the whole building.
 I was terrified at the noise I had made.
 I learned in after days that this impression is only one of the many due to the intense susceptibility of the sensorium as produced by hashish.
 At one time, having asked a friend to check me if I talked loudly or immoderately while in a state of fantasia among persons from whom I wished to conceal my state,
 I caught myself shouting and singing from very ecstasy and reproached him with a neglect of his friendly office.
 I could not believe him when he assured me that I had not uttered an audible word.
 The intensity of the inward emotion had affected the external through the internal ear.
 I returned and stood at the foot of the doctor's bed.
 All was perfect silence in the room, and had been perfect darkness also but for the small lamp which I held in my hand to light the preparation of the powder when it should come.
 And now a still sublimer mystery began to enwrap me.
 I stood in a remote chamber at the top of a colossal building, and the whole fabric beneath me was steadily growing into the air.
 Higher than the topmost pinnacle of Bell's Babylonish temple, higher than Ararat, on, on forever into the lonely dome of God's infinite universe we towered ceaselessly.
 The years flew on. I heard the musical rush of their wings in the abyss outside of me, and from cycle to cycle, from life to life, I careened a moat in eternity in space.
 Suddenly, emerging from the orbit of my transmigrations, I was again at the foot of the doctor's bed,
 and thrilled with wonder to find that we were both unchanged by the measureless lapse of time.
 The servant had not come. "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 anyone who did not realize what I felt, "I will not believe you are deceiving me,
 but to me it appears as if sufficient time has elapsed from then since for all the pyramids to have crumbled back to dust."
 "Ha ha, you're very funny tonight," said the doctor, "but here she comes, and I will send her for something that will comfort you on that score,
 and reestablish the pyramids in your confidence." He gave the girl his orders, and she went out again.
 The thought struck me that I would compare my time with other people's.
 I looked at my watch, found that its minute hand stood at the quarter mark past eleven, and returning it to my pocket, abandoned myself to my reflections.
 Presently I saw myself a gnome imprisoned by a most weird enchanter, whose part I assigned to the doctor before me in the Dom Daniel caverns under the roots of the ocean.
 Here, until the dissolution of all things, was I doomed to hold the lamp that lit the abysmal darkness, while my heart, like a giant clock, ticked solemnly the remaining years of time.
 Now, this hallucination departing, I heard in the solitude of the night outside the sound of a wondrous heaving sea.
 Its waves in sublime cadence rolled forward till they met the foundations of the building.
 They smoked them with a might which made the very topstone quiver, and then fell back with hiss and hollow murmur into the broad bosom whence they had arisen.
 Now, through the street, with measured tread, an armed host passed by. The heavy beat of their footfall and the girding of their brazen corselet rings alone broke the silence,
 for among them all there was no more speech, no music, than in a battalion of the dead.
 It was the army of the ages going by into eternity.
 A godlike sublimity swallowed up my soul. I was overwhelmed in a fathomless baranthrum of time, and I leaned on God and was immortal through all changes.
 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 halfway between fifteen and sixteen minutes past eleven.
 The watch must have stopped. I held it to my ear. No, no, it was still going.
 I had travelled through all that immeasurable chain of dreams in thirty seconds.
 My God, I cried, I am in eternity!
 But 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.
 Finally, the servant reappeared. I received my powder and went home.
 There was a light in one of the upper windows, and I hailed it with unspeakable joy, for it relieved me from a fear which I could not conquer,
 that while I had been gone, all familiar things had passed away from earth.
 I was hardly safe in my room before I doubted having ever been out of it.
 "I have experienced some wonderful dreams," said I, as I lay here after coming home to Earth.
 If I had not been out, I reasoned I would have no powder in my pocket.
 The powder was there, and it steadied me little to find that I was not utterly hallucinated on every point,
 leaving the light burning, I set out to travel to my bed, which gently invited me in the distance.
 Reaching it after a sufficient walk, I threw myself down.
 Chapter Three, The Kingdom of the Dream
 The moment that I closed my eyes, a vision of celestial glory burst upon me.
 I stood on the silver strand of a translucent, boundless lake, across whose bosom I seemed to have been just transported.
 A short way up the beach, a temple, modeled like the Parthenon, lifted its spotless and gleaming columns of alabaster sublimely into a rosy air.
 Like the Parthenon, yet as much excelling it as the godlike ideal of architecture must transcend that ideal realized by man.
 Unblemished in its purity of whiteness, faultless in the unbroken symmetry of every line and angle,
 its pediment was draped in odorous clouds whose tints outshone the rainbow.
 It was the work of an unearthly builder, and my soul stood before it in a trance of ecstasy.
 Its folded doors were resplendent with the glory of a multitude of eyes of glass,
 which were inlaid throughout the marble surfaces at the corners of diamond figures from the floor of the porch to the topmost molding.
 One of these eyes was golden like the midday sun, another emerald, another sapphire,
 and thus onward through the whole gamut of hues, all of them set in such collocations as to form most exquisite harmonies,
 and whirling upon their axes with the rapidity of thought.
 At the mere vestibule of the temple I could have sat and drunk in ecstasy forever,
 but lo, I am yet more blessed. On silent hinges the doors swing open and I pass in.
 I did not seem to be in the interior of a temple.
 I beheld myself as truly in the open air as if I had never passed the portals.
 For whichever way I looked, there were no walls, no roof, no pavement.
 An atmosphere of fathomless and soul-satisfying serenity surrounded and transfused me.
 I stood upon the bank of a crystal stream whose waters, as they slid on,
 discoursed notes of music which tinkled on the ear like the tones of some exquisite bell-glove.
 The same impression which such tones produce of music refined to its ultimate ethereal spirit
 and born from a far distance characterized every ripple of those translucent waves.
 The gently sloping banks of the stream were luxuriant with a velvety cushioning of grass and moss,
 so living green that the eye and the soul reposed on them at the same time and drank in peace.
 Through this amaranthine herbage strayed the gnarled, fantastic roots of giant cedars of Lebanon,
 from whose primeval trunks great branches spread above me,
 and interlocking wove a roof of impenetrable shadow.
 And wandering down the still avenues below those grand arboreal arches
 went glorious bards whose snowy beards fell on their breasts beneath countenances of ineffable benignity and nobleness.
 They were all clad in flowing robes like God's high priests,
 and each one held in his hand a lyre of unearthly workmanship.
 Presently one stops midway down a shady walk, and bearing his right arm, begins a prelude.
 While his celestial chords were trembling up into their sublime fullness, another strikes his strings,
 and now they blend upon my ravished ear in such a symphony as was never heard elsewhere,
 and I shall never hear again out of the great presence.
 A moment more, and three are playing in harmony.
 Now the fourth joins the glorious rapture of his music to their own,
 and in the completeness of the chord my soul is swallowed up.
 I can bear no more, but yes, I am sustained, for suddenly the whole throng breaks forth in a chorus
 upon whose wings I am lifted out of the riven walls of sense,
 and music and spirit thrill in immediate communion.
 Forever rid of the intervention of pulsing air and vibrating nerve,
 my soul dilates with the swell of that transcendent harmony,
 and interprets from it arcana of a meaning which words can never tell.
 I am born aloft upon the glory of sound.
 I float in a trance among the burning choir of the seraphim,
 but as I am melting through the purification of that sublime ecstasy into oneness with the deity himself,
 one by one those peeling lyres faint away,
 and as the last throb dies down along the measureless ether,
 visionless arms swiftly as lightning carry me far into the profound and set me down before another portal.
 Its leaves, like the first, are of spotless marble, but ungemmed with wheeling eyes of burning color.
 Before entering on the record of this new vision,
 I will make a digression for the purpose of introducing two laws of the hashish 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 surroundings.
 In this transition, the general character of the emotion may remain unchanged.
 I may be happy in paradise and happy at the sources of the Nile,
 but seldom either in paradise or on the Nile, twice in succession.
 I may writhe in Etna and burn unquenchably in Gehanna,
 but almost never in the course of the same delirium shall Etna or Gehanna witness my torture a second time.
 Second, after the full storm of a vision of intense sublimity has blown past the hashish eater,
 his next vision is generally of a quiet, relaxing, and recreating nature.
 He comes down from his clouds or up from his abyss into a middle ground of gentle shadows
 where he may rest his eyes from the splendor of the seraphim or the flames of fiends.
 There is a wise philosophy in this arrangement,
 for otherwise the soul would soon burn out in the excess of its own oxygen.
 Many a time, it seems to me, has my own thus been saved from extinction.
 This next vision illustrated both, but especially the latter of these laws.
 The temple doors opened noiselessly before me,
 but it was no sense of sublimity which thus broke in upon my eyes.
 I stood in a large apartment which resembled the Senate chamber at Washington
 more than anything else to which I can compare it.
 Its roof was vaulted, and at the side opposite the entrance,
 the floor rose into a dais surrounded by a large armchair.
 The body of the house was occupied by similar chairs disposed in arcs.
 The heavy paneling of the walls was adorned with grotesque frescoes
 of every imaginable bird, beast, and monster,
 which, by some hidden law of life and motion,
 were forever changing like the figures of the kaleidoscope.
 Now the walls bristled with hippographs.
 Now, from wainscot to ceiling, toucans and macatas swung and nodded
 from their perches amid emerald palms.
 Now centaurs and lepenthey clashed in ferocious tumult,
 while cratter and scionfests were crushed beneath ringing hoof and heel.
 But my attention was quickly distracted from the frescoes
 by the sight of a most witchly congress,
 which filled all the chairs of that broad chamber.
 On the dais sat an old crone whose commanding position
 first engaged my attention to her personal appearance,
 and, upon rather impolite scrutiny,
 I beheld that she was the product of an art held in preeminent favor
 among persons of her age and sex.
 She was knit of purple yarn.
 In faultless order, the stitches ran along her face.
 In every pucker of her retrenting mouth,
 in every wrinkle of her brow,
 she was a yarny counterfeit of the grand dame of actual life,
 and by some skillful process of stuffing her nose
 had received its due peak and her chin its projection.
 The occupants of the seats below
 were all but reproductions of their president.
 Both she and they were constantly swaying from side to side,
 forward and back, to the music of some invisible instruments
 whose tone and style were most intensely and ludicrously Ethiopian.
 Not a word was spoken by any of the woolly conclave,
 but with untiring industry they were all knitting, knitting, knitting,
 ceaselessly, as if their lives depended upon it.
 I looked to see the objects of their manufacture.
 They were knitting old women like themselves.
 One of the sisterhood had nearly brought her double to completion.
 Earnestly another was engaged in rounding out an eyeball.
 Another was fastening the gathers at the corners of a mouth.
 Another was setting up stitches for an old woman in petto.
 With marvelous rapidity this work went on, ever and anon.
 Some completed crone sprang from the needles which had just achieved her
 and instantly vivified, took up the instruments of reproduction
 and fell to work as assiduously as if she had been a member of the Congress
 since the world began.
 "Here," I cried, "here at last do I realize the meaning of endless progression.
 And through the dome echoed my peals of laughter.
 I saw no motion of astonishment in the stitches of a single face.
 But as for dear life, the manufacture of old women went on,
 unobstructed by the involuntary rudeness of the stranger.
 An irresistible desire to aid in the work possessed me.
 I was half determined to snatch up a quartet of needles and join the sisterhood.
 My nose began to be ruffled with stitches,
 and the next moment I had been a partner in their yarny destinies
 but for a hand which pulled me backward through the door
 and shut the Congress forever from my view.
 For a season I abode in an utter void of sight and sound.
 But I waited patiently in the assurance that some new changes of magnificence
 were preparing for me.
 I was not disappointed.
 Suddenly, at a far distance, three intense luminous points
 stood on the triple wall of darkness,
 and through each of them shot twin attenuated rays of magic light and music.
 Without being able to perceive anything of my immediate surroundings,
 I still felt that I was noiselessly drifting toward those radiant and vocal points.
 With every moment they grew larger, the light and the harmony came clearer,
 and before long I could distinguish plainly three colossal arches
 rising from the bosom of a waveless water.
 The mid-arch towered highest.
 The two on either side were equal to each other.
 Presently I beheld that they formed the portals of an enormous cavern
 whose dome rose above me into such sublimity
 that its cope was hidden from my eyes in wreaths of cloud.
 On each side of me ran a wall of gnarled and rugged rock
 from whose jutting points, as high as the eye could reach,
 depended stalactites of every imagined form and tinge of beauty,
 while below me, in the semblance of an even pavement
 from the reflection of its overshadowing arrogues,
 lay a level lake whose exquisite transparency
 I wanted but the smile of the sun to make it glow like a floor of adamant.
 On this lake I lay in a little boat divinely carved from pearl
 after the similitude of Triton's Shelley-shallop.
 Its rudder and its orage were my own unconscious will,
 and without the labors of a special volition,
 I floated as I list with a furrowless keel
 swiftly toward the central giant arch.
 With every moment that brought me nearer to my exit,
 the harmony that poured through it developed into a grander volume
 and an intenser beauty, and now I passed out.
 Claude Lorrain, freed from the limitations of sense
 and gifted with an infinite canvas,
 may, for aught I know, be upon some Halcyon island of the universe
 painting such a view as now sailed into my vision.
 Fitting employment would it be for his immortality,
 where his pencil dipped into the very fountains of the light.
 Many a time in the course of my life have I yearned for the possession
 of some grand old master's soul and culture
 in the presence of revelations of nature's loveliness
 which I dared not trust to memory.
 Before this vision, as now in the remembrance of it,
 that longing became a heartfelt pain.
 Yet, after all, it was well.
 The mortal Lungner would have fainted in his task.
 Alas, how does the material in which we must embody the spiritual cramp
 and resist its execution?
 Standing before windows where the invisible spirit of the frost
 had traced his exquisite algae, his palms and his ferns,
 have I said to myself with a sigh,
 "Ah, nature alone of all artists is gifted to work out her ideals."
 Shall I be so presumptuous as to attempt in words
 that which would beggar the palette and the pencil
 of old-time disciples of the beautiful?
 I will, if it be only to satisfy a deep longing.
 From the arches of my cavern I had emerged upon a horizonless sea.
 Through all the infinitudes around me I looked out
 and met no boundaries of space.
 Often in aftertimes have I beheld the heavens and the earth
 stretching out in parallel lines forever.
 But this was the first time I had ever stood unringed by the azure world
 and I exulted in all the sublimity of the new conception.
 The whole atmosphere was one measureless suffusion of golden motes
 which throbbed continually in cadence
 and showered radiance and harmony at the same time.
 With ecstasy, vision spread her wings for a flight
 against which material laws locked no barrier.
 And every moment grew more and more entranced
 at further and fuller glimpses of a beauty
 which floated like incense from the pavement of that eternal sea.
 With ecstasy, the spiritual ear gathered in continually
 some more distant and unimaginable tone
 and grouped the growing harmonies into one sublime chant of benediction.
 With ecstasy, the whole soul sank in revelations from every province
 and cried out, "Oh, awful loveliness!"
 And now, out of my shallop, I was born away into the full light of the mid-firmament,
 now seated on some toppling peak of a cloud mountain
 whose yawning rifts disclosed far down the mines of reserved lightning,
 now bathed in my ethereal travel by the rivers of the rainbow
 which side by side coursed through the valleys of heaven,
 now dwelling for a season in the environment of unbroken sunlight,
 yet bearing it like the eagle with undazzled eye,
 now crowned with the coronal of prismatic beads of dew.
 Through whatever region or circumstances I passed,
 one characteristic of the vision remained unchanged.
 Peace, everywhere godlike peace,
 the sum of all conceivable desires satisfied.
 Slowly I floated down to earth again.
 There, oriental gardens waited to receive me.
 From fountain to fountain I danced in graceful mazes with inimitable hoories
 whose foreheads were bound with fillets of jasmine.
 I pelted with figs the rare exotic birds
 whose golden crimson wings went flashing from branch to branch
 or wheeled them to me with Arabic phrases of endearment.
 Through avenues of palm I walked arm in arm with Hafez
 and heard the hours flow singing through the channels of his matchless poetry.
 In gay kiosks I quaffed my sherbert
 and in the luxury of lawlessness kissed away by drops that other juice
 which is contraband unto the faithful.
 And now beneath citron shadows I laid me down to sleep.
 When I awoke it was morning, actually morning, and not a hashish hallucination.
 The first emotion that I felt upon opening my eyes
 was happiness to find things again wearing a natural air.
 Yes, although the last experience of which I had been conscious
 had seemed to satisfy every human want, physical or spiritual,
 I smiled on the four plain white walls of my bedchamber
 and hailed their familiar unostentatiousness
 with a pleasure which had no wish to transfer itself to arabesque or rainbows.
 It was like returning home from an eternity
 spent in loneliness among the palaces of strangers.
 Well may I say an eternity, for during the whole day
 I could not rid myself of the feeling that I was separated
 from the preceding one by an immeasurable lapse of time.
 In fact, I never wholly got rid of it.
 I rose that I might test my reinstated powers
 and see if the restoration was complete.
 Yes, I felt not one trace of bodily weariness nor mental depression.
 Every function had returned to its normal state
 with the one exception mentioned.
 Memory could not efface the traces of my having passed through a great mystery.
 I recalled the events of the past night
 and was pleased to think that I had betrayed myself to no one but Dr. H.
 I was satisfied with my experiment.
 Ah, would that I had been satisfied!
 Yet, history must go on.
 [birds chirping]
 Terrence McKenna has read stories by Bayard Taylor and Fitzhugh Ludlow,
 and Kathleen Harrison McKenna has read from Louisa May Alcott
 and the translations of Sir Richard Burton.
 Victorian Tales of Cannabis was produced by Sound Photosynthesis,
 which is Faustin Bray and Brian Wallace at the Sound Photosynthesis studios.
 Brian played cello, sarod, guitars, ocarina, percussion,
 Tibetan bells, sound effects, and various voices.
 Faustin played flute, percussion, Tibetan bells, marimba,
 zub, tube, and various voices.
 Lynn Taussig played chandrasarang.
 Harry Ely played hammered dulcimer.
 Other voices and musicians were Peyton Bray,
 Morgan Russell, and Bertram Davies,
 with contributions by Roy Tuchman, John Zeitz, and Paul and Steve Gaskin.
 The preceding program is copyright Sound Photosynthesis.
 Please browse our website at sound.photosynthesis.com
 to obtain information about this recording
 or to request a catalog containing thousands of other audio and video recordings
 and books from the cutting edge of cultural evolution,
 please write Sound Photosynthesis, PO Box 2111, Mill Valley, CA 94942, USA.
 And please browse our website at sound.photosynthesis.com.
 Thanks for watching.


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