I ought, perhaps, to tell first the dream which my friend G—— told me before I left Vladikavkaz, when he warned me of a great impending world calamity. G—— said that one night, after an arduous day’s work teaching in class and coaching private pupils at home, he lay down on his couch and dozed. Hardly had he fallen asleep, when three men of Eastern aspect, dark faced, bright eyed, brown handed, with white robes from their shoulders and white turbans on their heads, appeared to him and pronounced six words in a loud, oracular voice and disappeared. A second time they appeared and did the same. A third time they appeared and pronounced them, and this time one of them took up a pen and made as if to write. The words were not Russian, or, indeed, any language which G—— knew, but after the third apparition and disappearance he wakened up with a start and at once picked up an exercise-book and wrote the words down. They were: Imaktúr nites óides ilvéna varen cevertae. G—— had never been a student of the occult before, but this caused him to consider. I begged G—— to write them down for me and let me see how they looked in black and white.
“Well, what do they mean?” I asked.
“I cannot yet be sure,” said G——. “They are certainly part of a language. Of that I am convinced. I have consulted many great linguists, and whilst they cannot say what language it is or where its lingual affinities are to be found, they all agree that it has the nature of real language. I have thought, as I lived in the Caucasus in the midst of so many Eastern tribes, that it might conceivably be intelligible to one or other of them. I have questioned Ingooshi, Ossetini, Khevsuri, but none recognised any likeness to any tongue they had ever heard in the mountains. I have been to Petersburg, Berlin, Paris to try and find out what the words meant, and all to no avail. Specialists were most sympathetic, but could tell me nothing. However, since then I have made a profound study of occult language, and have arrived at some understanding of the significance of the dream. All I can tell you is that a world calamity is coming, a great cataclysm or natural subversion. We may expect great earthquakes. Germany certainly is in danger.”
The dream I had in Aulie Ata was certainly much worse than this. I thought G—— rather crazy about this dream of his at the time, and I listened incredulously to his prophecies. But if I regarded them flippantly perhaps I was wrong. Certainly, if I held there was no such verity as the occult I was wrong.
They say that Fear stands on the threshold of the occult world, and as my dream consciousness impinged upon it I experienced abject terror, a terror that creeps through the marrow of the bones and lifts the roots of one’s hair at a thought.
I lay down in my dark room at the Hotel London at Aulie Ata after the fight between landlady and lodger had ceased but whilst the Sart orchestra still blew their horns over the city. The bed was a foot short for my tired body; the shutters of the room were barred; I had no lamp, but only a bit of candle of my own. After a fortnight spent under the stars and in the immense open house of earth and heaven, it was sufficiently oppressing and depressing in this shuttered chamber. But I was tired with the tiredness of one who has tramped under a sub-tropical sun from dawn to sunset and has added an evening of town excitement to the weariness of a long journey.
I had hardly lain down before I fell asleep. At once I began to dream. I had been invited to a friend’s house, and was for a moment by myself in his dining-room; there was nothing on the table but the cruet. I was terribly thirsty, and I rushed to one of the bottles and began to drink from it, but, my host coming along the corridor and into the room, I at once put the bottle back and pretended that I had been doing nothing of the kind. This awoke me. My eyes opened, and I thought to myself: “What an absurd dream! What a dreadful thing pretending is. Why cannot we be as we are? Manners is, in a way, pretence. Every polite man who comes up to you to shake hands, if we only knew it, has been doing something the moment before as impossible as drinking the contents of the cruet. Mankind are pretenders. The spirit is truth, but the incarnation is a mask. The whole aspect of humanity is a pretending to be what it is not....”
I was rather struck by the thought, but lapsed into sleep again. And then came my terrible dream. In the depths of my sleep a voice suddenly cried out the most terrifying words I think I have ever heard, and they were: “A great dissimulator has escaped, shut in prison from everlasting.”
At that I started up from my bed with the perspiration on my brow and the most hideous fear of the Devil. I felt that some new evil spirit was at large and was seeking a home in a man. My earlier thought came back to me—all spirits are dissimulators, whether they be devils or angels, and we men and women are all angels pretending to be men and women. But now I knew that some devil from which the world had mercifully been preserved (from everlasting) had escaped into our life, and would take the form and the appearance of a man somewhere. I had intelligence of the Antichrist. And now that we are all in the depths of this war I ask myself sometimes is there a genius of evil in all this, has the Antichrist perhaps appeared? Does not the fact that St. George and the angels (the angels, at least, of Mons) are fighting on our side suggest that the evil powers incarnate are on the other side?
It was two in the morning; the Sarts had stopped blowing their horns, there was a breathless stillness. I wakened up the hotel porter and bade him open the shutters of my windows. I lit my candle, took up pen and paper, and wrote a long letter home. I took out Vera’s ikon of Martha and Mary, and put it in front of me. I looked at it and wrote—wrote, wrote. I told all the happenings of the long day past, the tramping, the sun, the far away vision of Aulie Ata, the strange town, the Sart orchestra, the Armenian garden restaurant, the Hotel London, the fight of the two women, the dream of the dissimulator. I was afraid the candle would go out before dawn. Dawn seemed a long time coming. But at last the nightingales began to sing, p-r-r-r-r ... sweet, sweet, sweet. A muezzin was calling through the dark night. How resonant his voice! Somehow it went with the nightingale’s song.