“In the north, where you never yet trod, toward the point whence your instincts have warned you, there a spectre will seize you. ’Tis Death! I see a ship! it is haunted; ’tis chased! it sails on. Baffled navies sail after that ship. It enters the region of ice. It passes a sky red with meteors. Two moons stand on high, over ice-reefs. I see the ship locked between white defiles; they are ice-rocks. I see the dead strew the decks, stark and livid, green mould on their limbs. All are dead but one man,—it is you! But years, though so slowly they come, have then scathed you. There is the coming of age on your brow, and the will is relaxed in the cells of the brain. Still that will, though enfeebled, exceeds all that man knew before you; through the will you live on, gnawed with famine. And nature no longer obeys you in that death-spreading region; the sky is a sky of iron, and the air has iron clamps, and the ice-rocks wedge in the ship. Hark how it cracks and groans! Ice will imbed it as amber imbeds a straw. And a man has gone forth, living yet, from the ship and its dead; and he has clambered up the spikes of an iceberg, and the two moons gaze down on his form. That man is yourself, and terror is on you,—terror; and terror has swallowed up your will. And I see, swarming up the steep ice-rock, gray, grizzly things. The bears of the North have scented their quarry; they come near you and nearer, shambling, and rolling their bulk. And in that day every moment shall seem to you longer than the centuries through which you have passed. And heed this: after life, moments continued make the bliss or the hell of eternity.”
“Hush,” said the whisper. “But the day, you assure me, is far off, very far! I go back to the almond and rose of Damascus! Sleep!”
The room swam before my eyes. I became insensible. When I recovered, I found G—— holding my hand and smiling. He said, “You, who have always declared yourself proof against mesmerism, have succumbed at last to my friend Richards.”
“Where is Mr. Richards?”
“Gone, when you passed into a trance, saying quietly to me, ‘Your friend will not wake for an hour.’”
I asked, as collectedly as I could, where Mr. Richards lodged.
“At the Trafalgar Hotel.”
“Give me your arm,” said I to G——. “Let us call on him; I have something to say.”
When we arrived at the hotel, we were told that Mr. Richards had returned twenty minutes before, paid his bill, left directions with his servant (a Greek) to pack his effects, and proceed to Malta by the steamer that should leave Southampton the next day. Mr. Richards had merely said of his own movements, that he had visits to pay in the neighborhood of London, and it was uncertain whether he should be able to reach Southampton in time for that steamer; if not, he should follow in the next one.
The waiter asked me my name. On my informing him, he gave me a note that Mr. Richards had left for me, in case I called.