The light grew brighter and Argon, perforce, closed his eyelids. When he looked again the column of the portal occupied its former position, and he was alone.
Of these things Jack knew nothing.
The reaching out of his spirit toward Miriam, at the moment of swallowing the elixir, had dominated all other thoughts and impulses, and by operation of spiritual law, his immaterial entity, disembarrassed from the physical, at once was swept in her direction. Distances between persons, on the spiritual plane, where nothing operates to delay the inclinations of the mind, are necessarily and immediately determined by sympathies or repulsions, as the case may be, existing between them; and, as the separation from each other of the poles of the sidereal universe hardly suffices to indicate the gulf that yawns between incompatible natures and temperaments, so, between those who love each other, a handbreadth is still too far apart. Nothing else is possible in a sphere where all things live and the inertia of lifeless matter is not.
Jack, accordingly, soon became aware that he was in Miriam’s vicinity; but he was at first perplexed by an unconsidered circumstance of their mutual conditions.
The physical eye is fashioned to perceive material objects only; it is powerless to discern the forms of thoughts or the color of emotions. And in the spiritual plane, emotion and thought constitute, respectively, the substance and the shape of things seen. On the other hand, the spiritual eye is not less unable to have cognizance of material things; and the two worlds are thus effectively disjoined one from the other. Of course, the spirit incarnate is none the less in constant relations with the spirit disincarnate; but both alike are insensible, normally, to that fact.
Jack, during his journey from our earth to Saturn, had already experienced disincarnation; but inasmuch as his environment had then been also spiritual, he had felt no discrepancy between it and himself. Now, however, he, a spirit, was confronted with material surroundings, and must depend on methods of communication more subtle than those of spiritual sight and touch in order to make his presence felt, or himself to establish consciousness of the medium in which he sought to operate.
How was he to bring the world in which he was into practical relations with that which she occupied, since neither could she see nor touch him, nor he, her? This seemed like to prove an awkward obstacle in the way of what he aimed to accomplish.
But must not Solarion have foreseen this difficulty? And would he have deliberately mocked him, through the agency of the elixir, with a useless gift? The idea was preposterous! There must be some way of solving the problem.
He stood motionless, like a man in the darkness of an unfamiliar place, and set himself to the task of withdrawing from his outward sphere of consciousness. He was presently rewarded by the perception of the gradual emergence of an inner consciousness; it was as if the pupils of the eyes of the man in the dark place, slowly expanding, were becoming sensitive to rays of light before unperceived.
A path of communication between the two worlds did, then, exist. It was not normally accessible, because its existence was unsuspected; but when intelligently sought, it might be found. And Jack realized that if it were accessible to him, from his side, it must also be accessible to Miriam from hers. The inner consciousness, in her and in him, was a sort of common ground between them, in which they could meet and have intercourse. It was neither spiritual wholly, nor wholly material, but an intermediate region. Nor was there anything radically strange in this; had he not, in the earthly life, often felt aware of her proximity before his corporeal senses informed him of it, and had he been blindfolded, would not the touch of her hand have exerted an influence distinguishable from the touch of any other? If he were alive to such intuitions, much more should she, with her finer organization, be so.