“I was telling these young people, when you came in, of an ancient Korân which I was given in Alexandria by a learned man whom I operated upon for cataract.” He showed her a beautifully-written Arabic work, with wonderful capitals and headlines in gold. “You know that it is almost impossible for an infidel to acquire the holy book, and this is a particularly rare copy, for it was written by Kaït Bey, the greatest of the Mameluke Sultans.”
He handled the delicate pages as a lover of flowers would handle rose-leaves.
“And have you much literature on the occult sciences?” asked Susie.
Dr Porhoët smiled.
“I venture to think that no private library contains so complete a collection, but I dare not show it to you in the presence of our friend Arthur. He is too polite to accuse me of foolishness, but his sarcastic smile would betray him.”
Susie went to the shelves to which he vaguely waved, and looked with a peculiar excitement at the mysterious array. She ran her eyes along the names. It seemed to her that she was entering upon an unknown region of romance. She felt like an adventurous princess who rode on her palfrey into a forest of great bare trees and mystic silences, where wan, unearthly shapes pressed upon her way.
“I thought once of writing a life of that fantastic and grandiloquent creature, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Paracelsus Bombast von Hohenheim,” said Dr Porhoët, “and I have collected many of his books.”
He took down a slim volume in duodecimo, printed in the seventeenth century, with queer plates, on which were all manner of cabbalistic signs. The pages had a peculiar, musty odour. They were stained with iron-mould.
“Here is one of the most interesting works concerning the black art. It is the Grimoire of Honorius, and is the principal text-book of all those who deal in the darkest ways of the science.”
Then he pointed out the Hexameron of Torquemada and the Tableau de l’Inconstance des Démons, by Delancre; he drew his finger down the leather back of Delrio’s Disquisitiones Magicae and set upright the Pseudomonarchia Daemonorum of Wierus; his eyes rested for an instant on Hauber’s Acta et Scripta Magica, and he blew the dust carefully off the most famous, the most infamous, of them all, Sprenger’s Malleus Malefikorum.