Nyolcadik fejezet

His host carries the Author up a mountain, where wondrous discoveries astound the Author.

The Author returns to his own country, and finds his family in good health.

I might have filled volumes, and written a hundred musical works, upon what I learned in Faremido, yet there has come of it only a brief sketch, to which I shall hardly set my hand again.

The lesson which I there apprehended, in wind and in tempest, in the bodiless music of heat and electricity, I cannot expound here upon Earth in its final truth; for that one tongue in which I might express it is, among us, but a strange and unintelligible stammering, which we call the mystery of music, and beneath which we surmise only some such thing, and only so much, as the sleeper surmises of the speech of those who stand about his bed.

Let the memory, then, of my Faremidian journey remain told in words, a confused and tangled fragment, a humble little token, a soot-blackened splinter of a star in the museum, to proclaim, to him who dares believe it, that there was a man who trod the shores of that star.

In a few words, rather for myself, let me then set down my last day in Faremido, and how I came back to the Earth.

One day my host, Midore, carried me up with him onto a high mountain, and seated me beside him.

Whithersoever I looked, an endless sea spread out into the distance: a sea that has no horizon, but on every side melts away into the sky, as though that mountain whereon we sat rose up alone out of infinite space.

Then, sitting there beside my host, I felt again that which I had felt at the first, when upon the soil of Faremido I first caught sight of him: the delight of infinite Beauty, that which an artist feels when he carves his beloved, her that is of flesh and blood, into a marble more lasting than flesh and blood and more worthy of her beauty.

Thereupon a strange sadness took hold of me, not tormenting, but rather grateful.

I thought over all that Midore had told me concerning Organic Life as a disease, and I no longer wished to dispute with him.

There came into my mind that confused and preposterous panorama of misery, of suffering, of sickness, of slaughter, of the death-rattle and of death, of blood and of hissing, of terror and of gloom, of skulking and of falsehood, of contradictory and ill-boding desires, which among us every science has called the history of Life.

And when, after all this, I looked into Midore's face, which, according to our earthly knowledge, was made of dead and lifeless matter, of gold and cold stones, and from which, behold, the fairest rhythm, the most purposeful motion, the most radiant light, the purest warmth, the sweetest sound streamed toward me: I could not but feel clearly that I had erred, and with me the whole of human understanding.

Then I fell to sobbing, and stammering and faltering I told Midore of my doubts and of my conversion, and, kneeling, I besought him to redeem me from my worthless and foolish life, which is but a sickness and a burden, to others and to myself.

In despair I cried out that I did not wish to become like those grieving, withered-up trees, here along the highroad, when at length the diseased life should perish from the earth and the true law of Being should take up its dominion: heat and force, magnetism and light.

I reminded him that even my wretched and diseased body contains pure and noble substances: inorganic substances, quartz and carbon and water; let him therefore destroy me, burn me, distill me in a retort, draw out of me that which is worth something and put it to use, as best he could, for the eye, or the mouth, or the ear of a solasi, and let him scatter the rest to the wind, that it might never come together again.

Or, if he would not do this, let him add something to me, bathe me in something whereby I should turn to stone and grow rigid (for they know all things and understand all things: they have lived now these many millions of years, and nature has no secret from them any longer), and I should not have to die with the torment of torments, as a punishment for that I had come into the world.

Midore smiled, and in his kindly and tranquil manner admonished me how faultily I had expressed myself, when I spoke of their having solved every secret of nature.

The solasi has no need of this, for the solasi is itself the secret of nature; the solasi is itself nature.

The truth is that, to understand this, I should indeed have need of their understanding, which is of pure and transparent, unchanging matter, and which immediate forces set in motion, and not of my own steaming brain, driven by blood and ripe for all rot and ruin.

As touching that desire of mine, that he should heal my body and put it to some use: this desire is very logical and just, and from it he sees that I am beginning to surmise something of the essence of Being.

One might indeed speak of the matter, for it would be a question of a simple chemical process; one would have to employ reagents, filters, and sweating-furnaces, wherein the oxidation enters upon its process.

Only, my body in its present form is not yet ripe for this; were he to perform this work upon me now, he would cause me needless pains, and of that there is no need, seeing that after a short while, what we call ten or twenty years, this process will of itself set in within me, and I shall not then have to suffer on account of it.

With what disturbances and torments this process would now be attended, he could straightway prove to me: he had by him a certain liquid which, were he to inject it into my medulla oblongata, would for a few minutes somewhat clear my understanding, and my sense-organs would apprehend phenomena somewhat more distinctly.

Midore took out a glass syringe and pricked my neck; I felt the cool liquid forcing its way into my veins.

For a few moments the world darkened before me; then I awoke to a music ever louder and more triumphant.

Of what, in the way of sensations, I lived through in these few minutes, I can in truth give but a very confused picture in words: it was the music of manifold instruments, sharply distinct one from another and yet flowing one into another; Midore then even showed me the instruments, one by one, and in these few minutes I saw also that which it has not until now been granted to the human eye to see.

I saw heat, as it flowed round about in a colored and undulating stream, and covered over my body; I saw light, as it drew near by leaps, from one object to another; I saw attraction, as bodies shot forth from themselves feelers and points, groped at, laid hold of one another, and set out one toward another.

But more important than all was that which I then understood through my feeling: that all this, which I now saw with my eyes, had lived within me all along, within me and within every man, through thousands of years; that this palpable and simple world was that which we had called the inexpressible and the Otherworldly and the Superhuman, whereas it was within us and about us, only our senses, those dull and imperfect instruments, gave no picture of it to our mind.

As one who had groped in the dark, and, catching sight of the sun, falls down before it and calls it god, so did we call god that being who, behold, stood here before me, and who is none other than that which I ought to be, had I fallen into good hands, that which I must become, if I rightly apprehend myself and cleanse my body of corruptible matter.

I looked into Midore's eye, and then I perceived that this eye was the very one I had seen from the Earth and had called a Star, a perfect instrument, wrought by understanding; and I took his hand, and then I felt as I once had, in my childhood, when I woke in the night screaming, because a cold and wet and strange hand was gripping my arm, and when they ran to me they laughingly hushed me, and showed me that it had been my own hand, upon which I had lain in my sleep and which I had numbed.

And when I had thus apprehended all this, great confusion and disquiet arose in my heart, and I cried aloud: "but why? why?" thus I cried, "why must it have happened so, why did we not understand at once this clear and simple word of the spheres?"

But no one answered, and the effect of the magic liquid slowly began to disperse; ever softer about me grew the music of the elements, and before my eyes there descended the curtain of a dim veil of mist.

Then I owned that Midore was right, that my body and my mind were not yet ripe enough for me to be able to part from them without pain and sorrow, for the sake of a better end, a purer harmony.

I asked him what, then, I should do, and he counseled me to return to the earth, and to live the life of men until such time as they should judge me fit, up here, to be subjected to the aforesaid chemical process.

He promised that, so long as I should be upon the Earth, they would by means of their splendid instruments watch over me continually, let this serve for my consolation, if, after what I had seen here, I should fall into despondency.

This Midore added because, in anguish and faintheartedness, I had complained to him how I should endure, after all this, the company of men and of beasts: the whole dosire, which, beholding it through their instruments, I had come so to loathe.

To the question how my journey home should be accomplished, my host smiled, and said that I might leave this wholly to him.

That day, with an aching heart and hopeless grief in my soul, I took my leave of those solasis whom I had had the good fortune to come to know.