The Immortal replied, “You must leave your body here; your spiritual being can accompany me.”
Sleeper.—“But I fear that before my return my friends may see and regard my inanimate body as dead, and bury it.”
Immortal.—“Fear not. I will restore you in due time to your body; and I will prepare you for our adventures as I am prepared.”
Thus assured, the somnipathist crept gently out, headway, from his “mortal coil,” glided over the headboard of his bedstead, glanced back upon his sleeping frame in his very image, then sprang lithely to the sill of the window, where the sash had already been thrown up by the Morpheus, and finding himself equipped with needed dress and wings, soared with his companion into the air.
Immortal.—“What route do you prefer?”
Mortal.—“I wish to have a birdseye view of Charleston, (once my home,) by gas-light and then toward the Arctic Pole.”
The aerial voyageurs were, as if in a moment, hovering in a slow, scrutinizing flight over Charleston, with stars above, and looking as upon stars below; and in front, athwart the ocean, a long line of light, gleaming from a newly-risen moon, invited their quickened pinions into the illimitable spaces over the far-bounded deep. Curving in a wide ocean-sweep northward, and moving with lightning-speed, they perceived, although having a full sense of comfort, varying currents of icy gales and warm breezes; and from their transparent height saw beneath them the dark, girdling strata of cyclone hurricanes, or sheeny, swathe-clouds of crystal congelations; or, within their extended girdles, broad, oval areas of clear-rolling sea, and far down, by a peculiar dim lighting of its depths, the plains, hills and vales it immersed, and the myriad tribes of the deep in their amazing animate forms.
Mortal.—“I would see the borealis.”
Immortal.—“You shall, anon.”
The dream seemed to change. The parties suddenly found themselves lying in open sea-shells, structured to their lengths and sizes, floating side by side on a tranquil waste of waters, feet foremost, heads pillowed, and eyes bent upward and northward. A lowered and murky sky appeared as a dun-colored ceiling, of little height above them; and they were thoughtful, and in low tones they occasionally uttered weird thoughts on life—mankind—earth—God. A drowsy moment ensues. Then slowly lifts the gloomy canopy, and along the distant northern horizon, the fog having rapidly disappeared, a lengthened arc of whitish light spans itself. The heavens are again clear. From the bright arc dart upward along their northern hemisphere radiant streams of every lighter hue, and in incessant changeful brilliancy—a panoramic spread of incandescent splendors. A whirl of cold, shimmering light dashes around and over towering icebergs, and amazes the eye. It closes, and when again it opens, the Arctic travellers find themselves soaring aloft, and they look upon an open, calm, unfrozen polar sea.[A] The Spirit of Morphine remarks: “You now see, and will see, things unknown to man. This comparative warmth comes from the fire and glowing heat in the bowels of the earth, as you will soon ascertain.”