“None—none—” said Kremlin hastily—“But you will not succeed,—yours is too daring an attempt,—too arrogant and audacious a demand upon the unknown forces.”
“And what of the daring and arrogance displayed here?” asked El-Râmi, with a wave of his hand towards the glittering disc in front of them.
Kremlin jumped up excitedly.
“No, no!—you cannot call the mere scientific investigation of natural objects arrogant,” he said—“Besides, the whole thing is so very simple after all. It is well known that every star in the heavens sends forth perpetual radiations of light; which radiations in a given number of minutes, days, months, or years, reach our Earth. It depends of course on the distance between the particular star and our planet, as to how long these light-vibrations take to arrive here. One ray from some stars will occupy thousands of years in its course,—in fact, the original planet from which it fell may be swept out of existence before it has time to penetrate our atmosphere. All this is in the lesson-books of children, and is familiar to every beginner in the rudiments of astronomy. But apart from time and distance, there is no cessation to these light-beats or vibrations; they keep on arriving for ever, without an instant’s pause. Now my great idea was, as you know, to catch these reflexes on a mirror or dial of magnetic spar,—and you see for yourself that this thing, which seemed impossible, is to a certain extent done. Magnetic spar is not a new substance to you, any more than it was to the Egyptian priests of old—and the quality it has, of attracting light in its exact lines wherever light falls, is no surprise to you, though it might seem a marvel to the ignorant. Every little zigzag or circular flash on that disc is a vibration of light from some star,—but what puzzles and confounds my skill is this;—That there is a meaning in those lines—a distinct meaning which asks to be interpreted,—a picture which is ever on the point of declaring itself, and is never declared. Mine is the torture of a Tantalus watching night after night that mystic dial!”
He went close up to the disc, and pointed out one particular spot on its surface where at that moment there was a glittering tangle of little prismatic tints.
“Observe this with me—” he said, and El-Râmi approached him—“Here is a perfect cluster of light-vibrations,—in two minutes by my watch they will be here no longer,—and a year or more may pass before they appear again. From what stars they fall, and why they have deeper colours than most of the reflexes, I cannot tell. There—see!” and he looked round with an air of melancholy triumph, mingled with wonder, as the little spot of brilliant colour suddenly disappeared like the moisture of breath from a mirror—“They are gone! I have seen them four times only since the disc was balanced twelve years ago,—and I have tried in every way to trace their origin—in vain—all, all in vain! If I could only decipher the meaning!—for as sure as God lives there is a meaning there.”
El-Râmi was silent, and Dr. Kremlin went on.
“The air is a conveyer of Sound—” he said meditatively—“The light is a conveyer of Scenes. Mark that well. The light may be said to create landscape and generate Colour. Reflexes of light make pictures,—witness the instantaneous flash, which, with the aid of chemistry, will give you a photograph in a second. I firmly believe that all reflexes of light are so many letters of a marvellous alphabet, which, if we could only read it, would enable us to grasp the highest secrets of creation. The seven tones of music, for example, are in Nature;—in any ordinary storm, where there is wind and rain and the rustle of leaves, you can hear the complete scale on which every atom of musical composition has ever been written. Yet what ages it took us to reduce that scale to a visible tangible form,—and even now we have not mastered the quarter-tones heard in the songs of birds. And just as the whole realm of music is in seven tones of natural Sound, so the whole realm of light is in a pictured language of Design, Colour, and Method, with an intention and a message, which we—we human beings—are intended to discover. Yet, with all these great mysteries waiting to be solved, the most of us are content to eat and drink and sleep and breed and die, like the lowest cattle, in brutish ignorance of more than half our intellectual privileges. I tell you, El-Râmi, if I could only find out and place correctly one of those light-vibrations, the rest might be easy.”
He heaved a profound sigh,—and the great disc, circling steadily with its grave monotonous hum, might have passed for the wheel of Fate which he, poor mortal, was powerless to stop though it should grind him to atoms.
El-Râmi watched him with interest and something of compassion for a minute or two,—then he touched his arm gently.