While I gazed in breathless awe, I found myself involved in the procession. Resistance was in vain. I was conscious that I might as well have struggled against the tides of the ocean, or thought to stop the revolution of the globe. We advanced through the place of darkness by millions of millions, yet without crowding the majestic avenue or reaching its close. I rapidly recognized a multitude of faces which I had known from the models and memorials of the past ages. But the power that marshaled them had no regard for time. The pale, fixed Asiatic countenance of Ninus moved beside the glowing cheek and flashing eye of Alexander. The patriarch followed the Cæsar. The thousand years were as one day, the one day as a thousand years.
Again the whole stately train suddenly melted before the eye, and I was alone, in tenfold darkness—entombed. I lay in the sepulcher, but with the full vividness of life, and with a perfect knowledge that there it was my doom to lie forever. A miraculous foresight gave me the fearful privilege of looking, into the most remote futurity. Ages on ages unfolded themselves, with all their wonders, to tantalize me. I saw worlds awake from chaos and return to it in flood and flame. I saw systems swept away like the sand. The universe withered with years, and rolled up like the parchment scroll. I saw new regions of space, glowing with a new creation; the angelic hierarchies rising through new energies, new triumphs, new orders of existence; developments of power and magnificence, of sublime mercy and essential glory, too high for the conception of mortal faculties. Yet I was still to be entombed! No ray of light, no sound, no trace of external being, no sympathy of flesh or spirit, of earth or heaven was to reach me. The four narrow walls, the winding-sheet, the worm, were my world! I seemed to lie thus, for periods beyond all counting; powerless to move a limb; the sleepless, conscious, vivid victim of misery unspeakable—the bondsman of the sepulcher!
A Vivid Imagination
In those wanderings, I experienced not even the slightest recollection of the cause which had so sternly shaken my brain; wife, children, country, were a blank. Imagination, that strangest and most imperious of our faculties, whose soarings from earth to heaven may be among the indications of power beyond the grave, disdains to linger on the realities of our being. It delights in the commanding, the bold, the superb. In my instance it had the wildness of disease; but who has ever felt its workings, even in the dream of health, without wonder at its passion for the richer and more highly relieved remembrances; its singular skill in throwing together the loftier portions of life and nature, to the total disregard of the level; its subtlety in the seizure of the circumstances of pain, its fabrication of adventure, at once of the most regular consecutiveness, and the wildest originality; and all characterized by the same spontaneous swiftness of change and illimitable command over space and time, a power of instant flight from continent to continent, and from world to world—the transit that would actually fill up years and ages the work of a moment!—the actual moment expanding into years and ages!
What are those but the infant attributes of the disembodied spirit!—the imperfect developments of a state of being to which time and space are as nothing—when man, shaking off the covering of the grave, shall be clothed with the might of angels!—the splendid denizen of Infinitude and Eternity!
CHAPTER XIV
The Fury of a Tempest
At length the past returned to my mind. Dim recollections, shadows that alternately advanced and eluded me, sketches of forms and events, like pictures unfinished by the pencil, lay before me, colorless and undefined. But day by day the outlines grew more complete, the figures assumed a body, they lived—they moved—they uttered sounds; and while to other eyes I was a solitary and hopeless fugitive from human converse, to my own I was surrounded by a circle of all that I loved, yet with a continued sense of privation, a mysterious feeling of something imperfect in the indulgence that dashed my cup with bitterness.
Salathiel Further Wanders