Another turn, and I looked upon the face of a glorious man!
Another, and the illusion, Space, shrank away beneath my feet, my eye soared over her abysses, and gazed into the eye of an immortal.
But now,--oh, horror!--turning back to earth, I remembered that I had not analyzed the precious liquid which could so link world with world. Seized with a sudden agony, I tried to strain one least drop more; but, alas! the power had perished from the earth!
For this loss I deserve all that has happened to me. My haste to fulfil my life's object proved me the victim of a mental lust, and I saw why the highest truth is not revealed: simply, it awaits those who can receive and not be intoxicated by it. And now the planet which I had disobeyed for another avenges itself,--seeing, naturally, in strange results, whose methods are untraceable, nothing but monomania. The photographs, in which the pollens of two planet-flowers mingle, lie in my attic, dust-eaten:--"Above all, the patient must not see anything of that kind," has been the order ever since I published a card announcing my discovery to my fellow-citizens.
But they were gentle; they did not take away all. The old books are with me, each a benison from a brother. The best works of ancient times are, I think, best understood when read by prison-light.
Hist! some visitor comes! Many come from curiosity to see one who thinks he descried a man in a planet "Distinguished man of science from Boston to see me,"--ah, indeed! Celebrated paper on tadpoles, I suppose! But now that I look closer, I like my Boston man-of-science's eye, and his voice is good. I have not yet exhausted the fingers of one hand in counting up all the sane people who have visited me since I have been immured.
How do I test them?
As now I test you.
Here my treasure of treasures I open. It is the old suppressed volume of John de Sacro Bosco, inscribed to that Castilian Alphonso who dared to have the tables of Ptolemy corrected. (Had he not been a king, he had been mad: such men as Bosco were mad after Alphonso died.) And thus to my curious scientific visitor I read what I ask may go into his report along with the description of my case.
"John de Sacro Bosco sendeth this book to Alphonso de Castile. A. D. 1237."