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THEOLOGICALLIBRARY














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"THE H. P. B. PRESS,
42, Henry Street, Regent's Park,
LONDON, N.W.


N igh tn)are Tales.
BY
H. P. BLAVATSKY.
LONDON:
THEOSOPHICAL PUBLISHING SocIETy,
7, DUKE STREET, ADELPHI, w.c.
NEW YORK :
THE PATH, 144, MADISON Ave NUE.
MADRAS:
THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, ADYAR.
1892.
PRICE ONE SHILLING.


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50
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CONTENTS.
A BEWITCHED LIFE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
THE CAVE OF THE ECHOES . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
THE LUMINOUS SHIELD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8I
FROM THE POLAR LANDS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
THE ENSOULED VIoLIN





A BEWIT LIFE.
(As Narrated by a Quill Pen.)
INTRODUCTION.
T was a dark, chilly night in Sep-
| tember, 1884. A heavy gloom
had descended over the streets
, a small town on the
Rhine, and was hanging like a
black funeral-pall over the dull fac-
tory burgh. The greater number of its in-
habitants, wearied by their long day's work, had hours
before retired to stretch their tired limbs, and lay their
aching heads upon their pillows. All was quiet in the
large house; all was quiet in the deserted streets.
I too was lying in my bed ; alas, not one of rest, but
of pain and sickness, to which I had been confined
for some days. So still was everything in the house,
that, as Longfellow has it, its stillness seemed almost
audible. I could plainly hear the murmur of the blood,
as it rushed through my aching body, producing that
monotonous singing so familiar to one who lends a
watchful ear to silence. I had listened to it until, in my
nervous imagination, it had grown into the sound of a


A BEWITCHED LIFE. 9
sounds. It was the low, and at first scarce audible,
whisper of a human voice. It approached, and gradually
strengthening seemed to speak in my very ear. Thus
sounds a voice speaking across a blue quiescent lake, in
one of those wondrously acoustic gorges of the snow-
capped mountains, where the air is so pure that a word
pronounced half a mile off seems almost at the elbow.
Yes; it was the voice of one whom to know is to rever-
ence; of one, to me, owing to many mystic associations,
most dear and holy; a voice familiar for long years and
ever welcome; doubly so in hours of mental or physical
suffering, for it always brings with it a ray of hope and
‘consolation.
“Courage,” it whispered in gentle, mellow tones.
“Think of the days passed by you in sweet associations;
of the great lessons received of Nature's truths; of the
many errors of men concerning these truths; and try to
add to them the experience of a night in this city. Let
the narrative of a strange life, that will interest you, help
to shorten the hours of suffering. . . Give your atten-
tion. Look yonder before you!”
“Yonder” meant the clear, large windows of an empty
House on the other side of the narrow street of the
German town. They faced my own in almost a straight
line across the street, and my bed faced the windows of
my sleeping room. Obedient to the suggestion, I directed
my gaze toward them, and what I saw made me for the
time being forget the agony of the pain that racked my
swollen arm and rheumatical body. -
Over the windows was creeping a mist; a dense, heavy,
serpentine, whitish mist, that looked like the huge
shadow of a gigantic boa slowly uncoiling its body.
Gradually it disappeared, to leave a lustrous light, soft
and silvery, as though the window-panes behind reflected


IO NIGHTMARE TALES.
a thousand moonbeams, a tropical star-lit sky—first from
outside, then from within the empty rooms. Next I saw
the mist elongating itself and throwing, as it were, a fairy
bridge across the street from the bewitched windows to
my own balcony, nay, to my very own bed. As I con-
tinued gazing, the wall and windows and the opposite
house itself, suddenly vanished. The space occupied by
the empty rooms had changed into the interior of another
smaller room, in what I knew to be a Swiss châlet—into
a study, whose old, dark walls were covered from floor to
ceiling with book shelves on which were many antiquated
folios, as well as works of a more recent date. In the
centre stood a large old-fashioned table, littered over
with manuscripts and writing materials. Before it, quill-
en in hand, sat an old man; a grim-looking, skeleton-
like personage, with a face so thin, so pale, yellow and
emaciated, that the light of the solitary little student’s
lamp was reflected in two shining spots on his high
cheek-bones, as though they were carved out of ivory.
As I tried to get a better view of him by slowly raising
myself upon my pillows, the whole vision, châlet and
study, desk, books and scribe, seemed to flicker and
move. Once set in motion, they approached nearer and
nearer, until, gliding noiselessly along the fleecy bridge
of clouds across the street, they floated through the
closed windows into my room and finally seemed to
settle beside my bed.
“Listen to what he thinks and is going to write”—said
in soothing tones the same familiar, far off, and yet near
voice. “Thus you will hear a narrative, the telling of
which may help to shorten the long sleepless hours, and
even make you forget for a while your pain. . . Try!”
—it added, using the well-known Rosicrucian and Kaba-
listic formula.


I2 NIGHTMARE TALES.
I.
THE STRANGER'S STORY.
My birth-place is a small mountain hamlet, a cluster of
Swiss cottages, hidden deep in a sunny nook, between
two tumble-down glaciers and a peak covered with eter-
nal snows. Thither, thirty-seven years ago, I returned
—crippled mentally and physically—to die, if death
would only have me. The pure, invigorating air of
my birth-place decided otherwise. I am still alive;
perhaps for the purpose of giving evidence to facts I
have kept profoundly secret from all—a tale of horror
I would rather hide than reveal. The reason for this
unwillingness on my part is due to my early education,
and to subsequent events that gave the lie to my most
cherished prejudices. Some people might be inclined
to regard these events as providential: I, however, be-
lieve in no Providence, and yet am unable to attribute
them to mere chance. I connect them as the cease-
1ess evolution of effects, engendered by certain direct
causes, with one primary and fundamental cause, from
which ensued all that followed. A feeble old man am
I now, yet physical weakness has in no way impaired
my mental faculties. I remember the smallest details
of that terrible cause, which engendered such fatal
results. It is these which furnish me with an addi-
tional proof of the actual existence of one whom I
fain would regard—oh, that I could do so!—as a crea-
ture born of my fancy, the evanescent production of a
feverish, horrid dream Oh that terrible, mild and all-
forgiving, that saintly and respected Being ! It was
that paragon of all the virtues who embittered my
whole existence. It is he, who, pushing me violently
out of the monotonous but secure groove of daily life,
was the first to force upon me the certitude of a life


A BEWITCHED LIFE. I3
hereafter, thus adding an additional horror to one al-
ready great enough.
With a view to a clearer comprehension of the situa-
tion, I must interrupt these recollections with a few
Words about myself. Oh how, if I could, would I ob-
literate that hated Self/
Born in Switzerland, of French parents, who centred
the whole world-wisdom in the literary trinity of Voltaire,
J. J. Rousseau and D'Holbach, and educated in a German
university, I grew up a thorough materialist, a confirmed
atheist. I could never have even pictured to myself any
beings—least of all a Being—above or even outside visible
nature, as distinguished from her. Hence I regarded
everything that could not be brought under the strictest
analysis of the physical senses as a mere chimera. A
Soul, I argued, even supposing man has one, must be
material. According to Origen's definition, incorporeus”
—the epithet he gave to his God—signifies a substance
only more subtle than that of physical bodies, of which,
at best, we can form no definite idea. How then can
that, of which our senses cannot enable us to obtain any
clear knowledge, how can that make itself visible or pro-
duce any tangible manifestations 2
Accordingly, I received the tales of nascent Spiritual-
ism with a feeling of utter contempt, and regarded the
overtures made by certain priests with derision, often
akin to anger. And indeed the latter feeling has never
entirely abandoned me.
Pascal, in the eighth Act of his “Thoughts,” confesses
to a most complete incertitude upon the existence of God.
Throughout my life, I too professed a complete certitude
as to the non-existence of any such extra-cosmic being,
and repeated with that great thinker the memorable
+ 3 /
Goropatos.


A BEWITCHED LIFE. I5
Tzeonene, Enarino-Yassero, Kie-Missoo, Higadzi-Hong-
Vonsi, and many other famous temples.
Several years passed away, and during that whole
period I was not cured of my scepticism, nor did I ever
contemplate having my opinions on this subject altered.
I derided the pretensions of the Japanese bonzes and
ascetics, as I had those of Christian priests and Euro-
pean Spiritualists. I could not believe in the acquisition
of powers unknown to, and never studied by, men of
science; hence I scoffed at all such ideas. The super-
stitious and atrabilious Buddhist, teaching us to shun
the pleasures of life, to put to rout one's passions, to
render oneself insensible alike to happiness and suffer-
ing, in order to acquire such chimerical powers—seemed
supremely ridiculous in my eyes.
On a day for ever memorable to me—a fatal day—I
made the acquaintance of a venerable and learned Bonze,
a Japanese priest, named Tamoora Hideyeri. I met him
at the foot of the golden Kwon-On, and from that mo-
ment he became my best and most trusted friend. Not-
withstanding my great and genuine regard for him,
however, whenever a good opportunity was offered I
never failed to mock his religious convictions, thereby
very often hurting his feelings.
But my old friend was as meek and forgiving as any
true Buddhist's heart might desire. He never resented
my impatient sarcasms, even when they were, to say the
least, of equivocal propriety, and generally limited his
replies to the “wait and see” kind of protest. Nor could
he be brought to seriously believe in the sincerity of my
denial of the existence of any God or Gods. The full
meaning of the terms “atheism” and “scepticism” was
beyond the comprehension of his otherwise extremely
intellectual and acute mind. Like certain reverential


I6 NIGHTMARE TALES.
Christians, he seemed incapable of realizing that any
man of sense should prefer the wise conclusions arrived
at by philosophy and modern science to a ridiculous
belief in an invisible world full of Gods and spirits, dzins
and demons. “Man is a spiritual being,” he insisted,
“who returns to earth more than once, and is rewarded
or punished in the between times.” The proposition
that man is nothing else but a heap of organized dust,
was beyond him. Like Jeremy Collier, he refused to
admit that he was no better than “a stalking machine, a
speaking head without a soul in it,” whose “thoughts
are all bound by the laws of motion.” “For,” he argued,
“if my actions were, as you say, prescribed beforehand,
and I had no more liberty or free will to change the
course of my action than the running waters of the river
yonder, then the glorious doctrine of Karma, of merit
and demerit, would be a foolishness indeed.”
Thus the whole of my hyper-metaphysical friend's
ontology rested on the shaky superstructure of metem-
psychosis, of a fancied “just” Law of Retribution, and
other such equally absurd dreams.
“We cannot,” said he paradoxically one day, “hope to
live hereafter in the full enjoyment of our consciousness,
unless we have built for it beforehand a firm and solid
foundation of spirituality. . . Nay, laugh not, friend
of no faith,” he meekly pleaded, “but rather think and
reflect on this. One who has never taught himself to
live in Spirit during his conscious and responsible life
on earth, can hardly hope to enjoy a sentient existence
after death, when, deprived of his body, he is limited to
that Spirit alone.”
“What can you mean by life in Spirit?”—I enquired.
“Life on a spiritual plane; that which the Buddhists
call Tushita Devaloka (Paradise). Man can create such


A BEWITCHED LIFE. 17
a blissful existence for himself between two births, by
the gradual transference on to that plane of all the
faculties which during his sojourn on earth manifest
through his organic body and, as you call it, animal
brain.” -
“How absurd . And how can man do this?”
“Contemplation and a strong desire to assimilate the
blessed Gods, will enable him to do so.”
“And if man refuses this intellectual occupation, by
which you mean, I suppose, the fixing of the eyes on the
tip of his nose, what becomes of him after the death of
his body?” was my mocking question.
“He will be dealt with according to the prevailing
state of his consciousness, of which there are many
grades. At best—immediate rebirth; at worst—the state
of avitchi, a mental hell. Yet one need not be an ascetic
to assimilate spiritual life which will extend to the
hereafter. All that is required is to try and approach
Spirit.” -
“How so? Even when disbelieving in it?”—I re-
joined.
“Even sol One may disbelieve and yet harbour in
one’s nature room for doubt, however small that room
may be, and thus try one day, were it but for one mo-
ment, to open the door of the inner temple; and this
will prove sufficient for the purpose.”
“You are decidedly poetical, and paradoxical to boot,
reverend sir. Will you kindly explain to me a little
nmore of the mystery?”
“There is none; still I am willing. Suppose for a
moment that some unknown temple to which you have
never been before, and the existence of which you think
you have reasons to deny, is the ‘spiritual plane' of
which I am speaking. Some one takes you by the hand


I8 NIGHTMARE TALES.
and leads you towards its entrance, curiosity makes you
open its door and look within. By this simple act, by
entering it for one second, you have established an ever-
lasting connection between your consciousness and the
temple. You cannot deny its existence any longer, nor
obliterate the fact of your having entered it. And ac-
cording to the character and the variety of your work,
within its holy precincts, so will you live in it after your
consciousness is severed from its dwelling of flesh.”
“What do you mean? And what has my after-death
consciousness—if such a thing exists—to do with the
temple?”
“It has everything to do with it,” solemnly rejoined
the old man. “There can be no self-consciousness after
death outside the temple of spirit. That which you will
have done within its plane will alone survive. All the
rest is false and an illusion. It is doomed to perish in
the Ocean of Māyā.”
Amused at the idea of living outside one's body, I
urged on my old friend to tell me more. Mistaking my
meaning, the venerable man willingly consented.
Tamoora Hideyeri belonged to the great temple of
Tzi-Onene, a Buddhist monastery, famous not only in
all Japan, but also throughout Tibet and China. No
other is so venerated in Kioto. Its monks belong to the
sect of Dzeno-doo, and are considered as the most
learned among the many erudite fraternities. They are,
moreover, closely connected and allied with the Yama-
booshi (the ascetics, or hermits), who follow the doc-
trines of Lao-tze. No wonder, that at the slightest
provocation on my part the priest flew into the highest
metaphysics, hoping thereby to cure me of my infidelity.
No use repeating here the long rigmarole of the
most hopelessly involved and incomprehensible of all


A BEWITCHED LIFE. I9
doctrines. According to his ideas, we have to train
ourselves for spirituality in another world—as for gym-
nastics. Carrying on the analogy between the temple
and the “spiritual plane” he tried to illustrate his idea.
He had himself worked in the temple of Spirit two-
thirds of his life, and given several hours daily to
“contemplation.” Thus he knew (?!) that after he had
1aid aside his mortal casket, “a mere illusion,” he ex-
plained—he would in his spiritual consciousness live
Over again every feeling of ennobling joy and divine
bliss he had ever had, or ought to have had—only a
hundred-fold intensified. His work on the spirit-plane
had been considerable, he said, and he hoped, there-
fore, that the wages of the labourer would prove pro-
portionate.
“But suppose the labourer, as in the example you
have just brought forward in my case, should have no
more than opened the temple door out of mere curiosity;
had only peeped into the sanctuary never to set his foot
therein again. What then?
“Then,” he answered, “you would have only this
short minute to record in your future self-consciousness
and no more. Our life hereafter records and repeats
but the impressions and feelings we have had in our
spiritual experiences and nothing else. Thus, if instead
of reverence at the moment of entering the abode of
Spirit, you had been harbouring in your heart anger,
jealousy or grief, then your future spiritual life would be
a sad one, in truth. There would be nothing to record,
save the opening of a door, in a fit of bad temper.”
“How then could it be repeated?”—I insisted, highly
amused. “What do you suppose I would be doing
before incarnating again?”
“In that case,” he said, speaking slowly and weighing


2O NIGHTMARE TALES.
every word—“in that case, you could have, I fear, only to
open and shut the temple door, over and over again, during
a period which, however short, would seem to you an
eternity.”
This kind of after-death occupation appeared to me,
at that time, so grotesque in its sublime absurdity, that
I was seized with an almost inextinguishable fit of
laughter.
My venerable friend looked considerably dismayed at
such a result of his metaphysical instruction. He had
evidently not expected such hilarity. However, he said
nothing, but only sighed and gazed at me with increased
benevolence and pity shining in his small black eyes.
“Pray excuse my laughter,” I apologized. “But
really, now, you cannot seriously mean to tell me that
the ‘spiritual state” you advocate and so firmly believe
in, consists only in aping certain things we do in life?”
“Nay, nay; not aping, but only intensifying their
repetition; filling the gaps that were unjustly left un-
filled during life in the fruition of our acts and deeds,
and of everything performed on the spiritual plane of
the one real state. What I said was an illustration, and
no doubt for you, who seem entirely ignorant of the
mysteries of Soul- Vision, not a very intelligible one. It
is myself who am to be blamed. . . . What I sought
to impress upon you was that, as the spiritual state of
our consciousness liberated from its body is but the
fruition of every spiritual act performed during life,
where an act had been barren, there could be no results
expected—save the repetition of that act itself. This is
all. I pray you may be spared such fruitless deeds and
finally made to see certain truths.” And passing through
the usual Japanese courtesies of taking leave, the excel-
lent man departed.


A BEWITCHED LIFE. 2I
Alas, alas! had I but known at the time what I have
1earnt since, how little would I have laughed, and how
much more would I have learned!
But as the matter stood, the more personal affection
and respect I felt for him, the less could I become recon-
ciled to his wild ideas about an after-life, and especially
as to the acquisition by some men of supernatural powers.
I felt particularly disgusted with his reverence for the
Yamabooshi, the allies of every Buddhist sect in the
land. Their claims to the “miraculous” were simply
odious to my notions. To hear every Jap I knew at
Kioto, even to my own partner, the shrewdest of all the
business men I had come across in the East—men-
tioning these followers of Lao-tze with downcast eyes,
reverentially folded hands, and affirmations of their pos-
sessing “great” and “wonderful” gifts, was more than
I was prepared to patiently tolerate in those days. And
who were they, after all, these great magicians with
their ridiculous pretensions to super-mundane know-
ledge; these “holy beggars” who, as I then thought,
purposely dwell in the recesses of unfrequented moun-
tains and on unapproachable craggy steeps, so as the
better to afford no chance to curious intruders of find-
ing them out and watching them in their own dens?
Simply, impudent fortune-tellers, Japanese gypsies who
sell charms and talismans, and no better. In answer to
those who sought to assure me that though the Yama-
booshi lead a mysterious life, admitting none of the
profane to their secrets, they still do accept pupils, how-
ever difficult it is for one to become their disciple, and
that thus they have living witnesses to the great purity
and sanctity of their lives, in answer to such affirmations
I opposed the strongest negation and stood firmly by it.
I insulted both masters and pupils, classing them under


A BEWITCHED LIFE. 25
boats would permit. But suddenly there came a break
in my letters from home. For nearly a year I received
no intelligence; and day by day, I became more restless,
more apprehensive of some great misfortune. Vainly I
looked for a letter, a simple message; and my efforts to
account for so unusual a silence were fruitless.
“Friend,” said to me one day Tamoora Hideyeri, my
only confidant, “Friend, consult a holy Yamabooshi and
you will feel at rest.”
Of course the offer was rejected with as much modera-
tion as I could command under the provocation. But,
as steamer after steamer came in without a word of news,
I felt a despair which daily increased in depth and fixity.
This finally degenerated into an irrepressible craving, a
morbid desire to learn—the worst, as I then thought. I
struggled hard with the feeling, but it had the best of
me. Only a few months before a complete master of
myself—I now became an abject slave to fear. A fatal-
ist of the school of D'Holbach, I, who had always re-
garded belief in the system of necessity as being the
only promoter of philosophical happiness, and as having
the most advantageous influence over human weak-
nesses, I felt a craving for something akin to fortune-
telling ! I had gone so far as to forget the first principle
of my doctrine—the only one calculated to calm our
Sorrows, to inspire us with a useful submission, namely
a rational resignation to the decrees of blind destiny,
with which foolish sensibility causes us so often to be
overwhelmed—the doctrine that all is necessary. Yes;
forgetting this, I was drawn into a shameful, superstitious
longing, a stupid, disgraceful desire to learn—if not futu-
rity, at any rate that which was taking place at the other
side of the globe. My conduct seemed utterly modified,
my temperament and aspirations wholly changed; and


A BEWITCHED LIFE. 27
emaciated, was standing before me. There, where I had
expected to find servile obsequiousness, I only discerned
an air of calm and dignified composure, the attitude of
one who knows his moral superiority, and therefore
scorns to notice the mistakes of those who fail to recog-
nize it. To the somewhat irreverent and mocking ques-
tions, which I put to him one after another, with feverish
eagerness, he made no reply; but gazed on me in silence
as a physician would look at a delirious patient. From
the moment he fixed his eyes on mine, I felt—or shall I
say, saw—as though it were a sharp ray of light, a thin
silvery thread, shoot out from the intensely black and
narrow eyes so deeply sunk in the yellow old face. It
seemed to penetrate into my brain and heart like an
arrow, and set to work to dig out therefrom every
thought and feeling. Yes; I both saw and felt it, and
very soon the double sensation became intolerable.
To break the spell I defied him to tell me what he
had found in my thoughts. Calmly came the correct
answer—Extreme anxiety for a female relative, her hus-
band and children, who were inhabiting a house the
correct description of which he gave as though he knew
it as well as myself. I turned a suspicious eye upon my
friend, the Bonze, to whose indiscretions, I thought, I
was indebted for the quick reply. Remembering how-
ever that Tamoora could know nothing of the appear-
ance of my sister's house, that the Japanese are pro-
verbially truthful and, as friends, faithful to death—I
felt ashamed of my suspicion. To atone for it before
my own conscience I asked the hermit whether he could
tell me anything of the present state of that beloved
sister of mine. The foreigner—was the reply—would
never believe in the words, or trust to the knowledge of
any person but himself. Were the Yamabooshi to tell


28 NIGHTMARE TALES.
him, the impression would wear out hardly a few hours
later, and the inquirer find himself as miserable as be-
fore. There was but one means; and that was to make
the foreigner (myself) see with his own eyes, and thus
learn the truth for himself. Was the inquirer ready to
be placed by a Yamabooshi, a stranger to him, in the
required state?
I had heard in Europe of mesmerized somnambules
and pretenders to clairvoyance, and having no faith in
them, I had, therefore, nothing against the process it-
self. Even in the midst of my never-ceasing mental
agony, I could not help smiling at the ridiculous nature
of the operation I was willingly submitting to. Never-
theless I silently bowed consent.
III.
PSYCHIC MAGIC.
THE Old Yamabooshi lost no time. He looked at the
setting sun, and finding, probably, the Lord Ten-Dzio-
Dai-Dzio (the Spirit who darts his Rays) propitious for
the coming ceremony, he speedily drew out a little
bundle. It contained a small lacquered box, a piece of
vegetable paper, made from the bark of the mulberry
tree, and a pen, with which he traced upon the paper a
few sentences in the Maiden character—a peculiar style
of written language used only for religious and mystical
purposes. Having finished, he exhibited from under his
clothes a small round mirror of steel of extraordinary
brilliancy, and placing it before my eyes, asked me to
look into it. .
I had not only heard before of these mirrors, which
are frequently used in the temples, but I had often seen
them. It is claimed that under the direction and will of


3O NIGHTMARE TALES.
happened to fall upon its pages, I read the words, “The
veil which covers futurity is woven by the hand of
mercy.” This was enough. That same pride which
had hitherto held me back from what I regarded as a
degrading, superstitious experiment, caused me to chal-
lenge my fate. I picked up the ominously shining disk
and prepared to look into it.
While I was examining the mirror, the Yamabooshi
hastily spoke a few words to the Bonze, Tamoora, at
which I threw a furtive and suspicious glance at both.
I was wrong once more.
“The holy man desires me to put you a question and
give you at the same time a warning,” remarked the
Bonze. “If you are willing to see for yourself now, you
will have—under the penalty of seeing for ever, in the
hereafter, all that is taking place, at whatever distance, and
that against your will or inclination—to submit to a
regular course of purification, after you have learnt
what you want through the mirror.”
“What is this course, and what have I to promise P”
I asked defiantly.
“It is for your own good. You must promise him to
submit to the process, lest, for the rest of his life, he
should have to hold himself responsible, before his own
conscience, for having made an irresponsible seer of you.
Will you do so, friend?” -
“There will be time enough to think of it, if I see
anything”—I sneeringly replied, adding under my
breath—“something I doubt a good deal, so far.”
“Well, you are warned, friend. The consequences
will now remain with yourself,” was the solemn answer.
I glanced at the clock, and made a gesture of impa-
tience, which was remarked and understood by the
Yamabooshi. It was just seven minutes after five.


32 NIGHTMARE TALES.
lyzed, my eyes, as I thought, unexpectedly caught a clear-
er and far more vivid glimpse than they had ever had in
reality, of my sister's new house at Nuremberg, which I
lmad never visited and knew only from a sketch, and other
scenery with which I had never been very familiar.
Together with this, and while feeling in my brain what
seemed like flashes of a departing consciousness—dying
persons must feel so, no doubt—the very last, vague
thought, so weak as to have been hardly perceptible, was
that I must look very, very ridiculous. . . . This feeling
—for such it was rather than a thought—was interrupted,
suddenly extinguished, so to say, by a clear mental vision
(I cannot characterize it otherwise) of myself, of that
which I regarded as, and knew to be my body, lying with
ashy cheeks on the settee, dead to all intents and pur-
poses, but still staring with the cold and glassy eyes of a
corpse into the mirror. Bending over it, with his two
emaciated hands cutting the air in every direction over its
white face, stood the tall figure of the Yamabooshi, for
whom I felt at that instant an inextinguishable, murder-
ous hatred. As I was going, in thought, to pounce upon
the vile charlatan, my corpse, the two old men, the room
itself, and every object in it, trembled and danced in a
reddish glowing light, and seemed to float rapidly away
from “me.” A few more grotesque, distorted shadows
before “my” sight; and, with a last feeling of terror and
a Supreme effort to realize who then was I now, since I was
not that corpse—a great veil of darkness fell over me, like
a funeral pall, and every thought in me was dead.
IV.
A VISION OF HORROR.
HOW strange! . . . Where was I now? It was
evident to me that I had once more returned to my


A BEWITCHED LIFE. 33
senses. For there I was, vividly realizing that I was
rapidly moving forward, while experiencing a queer,
strange sensation as though I were swimming, without
impulse or effort on my part, and in total darkness.
The idea that first presented itself to me was that of a
long subterranean passage of water, of earth, and stifling
air, though bodily I had no perception, no sensation, of
the presence or contact of any of these. I tried to utter
a few words, to repeat my last sentence, “I desire but
one thing: to learn the reason or reasons why my sister
has so suddenly ceased writing to me”—but the only
words I heard out of the twenty-one, were the two, “to
/earm,” and these, instead of their coming out of my own
larynx, came back to me in my own voice, but entirely
outside myself, near, but not in me. In short, they were
pronounced by my voice, not by my lips.
One more rapid, involuntary motion, one more plunge
into the Cymmerian darkness of a (to me) unknown
element, and I saw myself standing—actually standing
—underground, as it seemed. I was compactly and
thickly surrounded on all sides, above and below, right
and left, with earth, and in the mould, and yet it
weighed not, and seemed quite immaterial and trans-
parent to my senses. I did not realize for one second the
utter absurdity, nay, impossibility of that seeming fact!
One second more, one short instant, and I perceived—
oh, inexpressible horror, when I think of it now; for
then, although I perceived, realized, and recorded facts
and events far more clearly than ever I had done before,
I did not seem to be touched in any other way by what
I saw. Yes—I perceived a coffin at my feet. It was a
plain, unpretentious shell, made of deal, the last couch
of the pauper, in which, notwithstanding its closed lid,
I plainly saw a hideous, grinning skull, a man's skele-
- 3


34 NIGHTMARE TALES.
ton, mutilated and broken in many of its parts, as
though it had been taken out of some hidden chamber
of the defunct Inquisition, where it had been subjected
to torture. “Who can it be?”—I thought.
At this moment I heard again proceeding from afar
the same voice—my voice . . . “the reason or reasons
why.” it said; as though these words were the
unbroken continuation of the same sentence of which it
had just repeated the two words “to learn.” It sounded
near, and yet as from some incalculable distance; giving
me then the idea that the long subterranean journey,
the subsequent mental reflexions and discoveries, had
occupied no time; had been performed during the short,
almost instantaneous interval between the first and the
middle words of the sentence, begun, at any rate, if not
actually pronounced by myself in my room at Kioto,
and which it was now finishing, in interrupted, broken
phrases, like a faithful echo of my own words and
voice. -
Forthwith, the hideous, mangled remains began as-
suming a form, and, to me, but too familiar appearance.
The broken parts joined together one to the other, the
bones became covered once more with flesh, and I recog-
nized in these disfigured remains—with some surprise,
but not a trace of feeling at the sight—my sister's dead
husband, my own brother-in-law, whom I had for her
sake loved so truly. “How was it, and how did he come
to die such a terrible death?”—I asked myself. To put
oneself a query seemed, in the state in which I was, to
instantly solve it. Hardly had I asked myself the ques-
tion, when, as if in a panorama, I saw the retrospective
picture of poor Karl's death, in all its horrid vividness,
and with every thrilling detail, every one of which, how-
ever, left me then entirely and brutally indifferent.


A BEWITCHED LIFE. 35
Here he is, the dear old fellow, full of life and joy at
the prospect of more lucrative employment from his
principal, examining and trying in a wood-sawing fac-
tory a monster steam engine just arrived from America.
He bends over, to examine more closely an inner ar-
rangement, to tighten a screw. His clothes are caught
by the teeth of the revolving wheel in full motion, and
suddenly he is dragged down, doubled up, and his limbs
half severed, torn off, before the workmen, unacquainted
with the mechanism, can stop it. He is taken out, or
what remains of him, dead, mangled, a thing of horror,
an unrecognizable mass of palpitating flesh and blood!
I follow the remains, wheeled as an unrecognizable heap
to the hospital, hear the brutally given order that the
messengers of death should stop on their way at the
House of the widow and orphans. I follow them, and
find the unconscious family quietly assembled together.
I see my sister, the dear and beloved, and remain in-
different at the sight, only feeling highly interested in
the coming scene. My heart, my feelings, even my per-
sonality, seem to have disappeared, to have been left
behind, to belong to somebody else.
There “I” stand, and witness her unprepared recep-
tion of the ghastly news. I realize clearly, without one
moment's hesitation or mistake, the effect of the shock
upon her, I perceive clearly, following and recording, to
the minutest detail, her sensations and the inner process
that takes place in her. I watch and remember, missing
not one single point.
As the corpse is brought into the house for identifica-
tion I hear the long agonizing cry, my own name pro-
nounced, and the dull thud of the living body falling
upon the remains of the dead one. I follow with curi-
osity the sudden thrill and the instantaneous perturba-


38 NIGHTMARE TALES.
I opened my eyes in my own room, and the first thing I
fixed upon, by accident, was the clock. The hands of the
dial showed seven minutes and a half past five! . . . I
had thus passed through these most terrible experiences,
which it takes me hours to narrate, in precisely half a
minute of time !
But this, too, was an after-thought. For one brief
instant I recollected nothing of what I had seen. The
interval between the time I had glanced at the clock
when taking the mirror from the Yamabooshi's hand
and this second glance, seemed to me merged in one. I
was just opening my lips to hurry on the Yamabooshi
with his experiment, when the full remembrance of what
I had just seen flashed lightning-like into my brain.
Uttering a cry of horror and despair, I felt as though
the whole creation were crushing me under its weight.
For one moment I remained speechless, the picture of
human ruin amid a world of death and desolation. My
heart sank down in anguish: my doom was closed; and
a hopeless gloom seemed to settle over the rest of my
life for ever!
V.
RETURN OF DOUBTS.
THEN came a reaction as sudden as my grief itself. A
doubt arose in my mind, which forthwith grew into a
fierce desire of denying the truth of what I had seen. A
stubborn resolution of treating the whole thing as an
empty, meaningless dream, the effect of my overstrained
mind, took possession of me. Yes; it was but a lying
vision, an idiotic cheating of my own senses, suggesting
pictures of death and misery which had been evoked by
weeks of incertitude and mental depression.


A BEWITCHED LIFE. 39
“How could I see all that I have seen in less than half
a minute?”—I exclaimed. “The theory of dreams, the
rapidity with which the material changes on which our
ideas in vision depend, are excited in the hemispherical
ganglia, is sufficient to account for the long series of
events I have seemed to experience. In dream alone
can the relations of space and time be so completely
annihilated. The Yamabooshi is for nothing in this
disagreeable nightmare. He is only reaping that which
has been sown by myself, and, by using some infernal
drug, of which his tribe have the secret, he has con-
trived to make me lose consciousness for a few seconds
and see that vision—as lying as it is horrid. Avaunt all
such thoughts, I believe them not. In a few days there
will be a steamer sailing for Europe. . . I shall leave
to-morrow!” -
This disjointed monologue was pronounced by me
aloud, regardless of the presence of my respected friend
the Bonze, Tamoora, and the Yamabooshi. The latter
was standing before me in the same position as when he
placed the mirror in my hands, and kept looking at me
calmly, I should perhaps say looking through me, and in
dignified silence. The Bonze, whose kind countenance
was beaming with sympathy, approached me as he would
a sick child, and gently laying his hand on mine, and
with tears in his eyes, said: “Friend, you must not
leave this city before you have been completely purified
of your contact with the lower Daij-Dzins (spirits), who
had to be used to guide your inexperienced soul to the
places it craved to see. The entrance to your Inner
Self must be closed against their dangerous intrusion.
Lose no time, therefore, my son, and allow the holy
Master, yonder, to purify you at once.”
But nothing can be more deaf than anger once aroused.


4O NIGHTMARE TALES.
“The sap of reason” could no longer “quench the fire
of passion,” and at that moment I was not fit to listen to
his friendly voice. His is a face I can never recall to
my memory without genuine feeling; his, a name I will
ever pronounce with a sigh of emotion; but at that
ever memorable hour when my passions were inflamed
to white heat, I felt almost a hatred for the kind, good
old man, I could not forgive him his interference in the
present event. Hence, for all answer, therefore, he
received from me a stern rebuke, a violent protest on my
part against the idea that I could ever regard the vision
I had had, in any other light save that of an empty
dream, and his Yamabooshi as anything better than an
impostor. “I will leave to-morrow, had I to forfeit my
whole fortune as a penalty”—I exclaimed, pale with rage
and despair.
“You will repent it the whole of your life, if you do so
before the holy man has shut every entrance in you
against intruders ever on the watch and ready to enter
the open door,” was the answer. “The Daij-Dzins will
Have the best of you.”
I interrupted him with a brutal laugh, and a still more
brutally phrased enquiry about the fees I was expected
to give the Yamabooshi, for his experiment with me.
“He needs no reward,” was the reply. “The order he
belongs to is the richest in the world, since its adherents
need nothing, for they are above all terrestrial and venal
desires. Insult him not, the good man who came to help
you out of pure sympathy for your suffering, and to
relieve you of mental agony.”
But I would listen to no words of reason and wisdom.
The spirit of rebellion and pride had taken possession of
me, and made me disregard every feeling of personal
friendship, or even of simple propriety. Luckily for me,


A BEWITCHED LIFE. 4. I
on turning round to order the medicant monk out of my
presence, I found he had gone. -
I had not seen him move, and attributed his stealthy
departure to fear at having been detected and under-
stood.
Fool! blind, conceited idiot that I was Why did I
fail to recognize the Yamabooshi's power, and that the
peace of my whole life was departing with him, from
that moment for ever? But I did so fail. Even the fell
demon of my long fears—uncertainty—was now entirely
overpowered by that fiend scepticism—the silliest of all.
A dull, morbid unbelief, a stubborn denial of the evidence
of my own senses, and a determined will to regard the
whole vision as a fancy of my overwrought mind, had
taken firm hold of me.
“My mind,” I argued, “what is it? Shall I believe
with the superstitious and the weak that this production
of phosphorus and grey matter is indeed the superior
part of me; that it can act and see independently of my
physical senses? Never! As well believe in the plane-
tary “intelligences’ of the astrologer, as in the ‘Daij-
Dzins’ of my credulous though well-meaning friend, the
priest. As well confess one's belief in Jupiter and Sol,
Saturn and Mercury, and that these worthies guide their
spheres and concern themselves with mortals, as to give
one serious thought to the airy nonentities supposed to
have guided my “soul’ in its unpleasant dream! I loathe
and laugh at the absurd idea. I regard it as a personal
insult to the intellect and rational reasoning powers of
a man, to speak of invisible creatures, ‘subjective intelli-
gences,’ and all that kind of insane superstition.” In
short, I begged my friend the Bonze to spare me his
protests, and thus the unpleasantness of breaking with
him for ever.


A BEWITCHED LIFE. 43
he had all others. Never shall I forget the solemn
earnestness of his parting words, the pitying, remorseful
look on his face when he found that it was, indeed, all to
no purpose, that by his kindly meant interference he
had only led me to my destruction. -
“Lend me your ear, good sir, for the last time,” he
began, “learn that unless the holy and venerable man,
who, to relieve your distress, opened your “soul vision,”
is permitted to complete his work, your future life will,
indeed, be little worth living. He has to safeguard you
against involuntary repetitions of visions of the same
character. Unless you consent to it of your own free
will, however, you will have to be left in the power of
Forces which will harass and persecute you to the verge
of insanity. Know that the development of “Long
Vision' [clairvoyance]—which is accomplished at will
only by those for whom the Mother of Mercy, the great
Kwan-On, has no secrets—must, in the case of the be-
gunner, be pursued with help of the air Dzins (ele-
mental spirits) whose nature is soulless, and hence
wicked. Know also that, while the Arihat, “the de-
stroyer of the enemy,’ who has subjected and made of
these creatures his servants, has nothing to fear; he who
has no power over them becomes their slave. Nay,
laugh not in your great pride and ignorance, but listen
further. During the time of the vision and while the
inner perceptions are directed toward the events they
seek, the Daij-Dzin has the seer—when, like yourself, he
is an inexperienced tyro–entirely in its power; and for
the time being that seer is no longer himself. He partakes
of the nature of his ‘guide.” The Daij-Dzin, which
directs his inner sight, keeps his soul in durance vile,
making of him, while the state lasts, a creature like itself.
Bereft of his divine light, man is but a soulless being;


44 NIGHTMARE TALES.
hence during the time of such connection, he will feel no
human emotions, neither pity nor fear, love nor mercy.”
“Hold !” I involuntarily exclaimed, as the words
vividly brought back to my recollection the indifference
with which I had witnessed my sister's despair and
sudden loss of reason in my “hallucination.” “Hold!
. . . But no; it is still worse madness in me to heed
or find any sense in your ridiculous tale ! But if you
knew it to be so dangerous why have advised the ex-
periment at all?”—I added mockingly.
“It had to last but a few seconds, and no evil could
have resulted from it, had you kept your promise to
submit to purification,” was the sad and humble reply.
“I wished you well, my friend, and my heart was nigh
breaking to see you suffering day by day. The experi-
ment is harmless when directed by one who knows, and
becomes dangerous only when the final precaution is
neglected. It is the ‘Master of Visions,’ he who has
opened an entrance into your soul, who has to close it by
using the Seal of Purification against any further and
deliberate ingress of .”
“The ‘Master of Visions,’ forsooth !” I cried, brutally
interrupting him, “say rather the Master of Imposture!”
The look of sorrow on his kind old face was so intense
and painful to behold that I perceived I had gone too
far; but it was too late.
“Farewell, then l’” said the old Bonze, rising; and
after performing the usual ceremonials of politeness,
Tamoora left the house in dignified silence.
VI.
I DEPART-BUT NOT ALONE.
SEVERAL days later I sailed, but during my stay I saw
my venerable friend, the Bonze, no more. Evidently on


A BEWITCHED LIFE. 47
near him the yellow, villainous face of a man answering
to his description. I kept silence about such hallucina-
tions; but as they became more and more frequent, I
felt very much disturbed, though still attributing them
to natural causes, such as I had read about in medical
books.
One night I was abruptly awakened by a long and
loud cry of distress. It was a woman's voice, plaintive
like that of a child, full of terror and of helpless despair.
I awoke with a start to find myself on land, in a strange
room. A young girl, almost a child, was desperately
struggling against a powerful middle-aged man, who
had surprised her in her own room, and during her sleep.
Behind the closed and locked door, I saw listening an
old woman, whose face, notwithstanding the fiendish
expression upon it, seemed familiar to me, and I imme-
diately recognized it: it was the face of the Jewess who
had adopted my niece in the dream I had at Kioto. She
Had received gold to pay for her share in the foul crime,
and was now keeping her part of the covenant.
But who was the victim 2 O horror unutterable! Un-
speakable horror! When I realized the situation after
coming back to my normal state, I found it was my own
child-niece.
But, as in my first vision, I felt in me nothing of the
nature of that despair born of affection that fills one's
heart, at the sight of a wrong done to, or a misfortune
befalling, those one loves; nothing but a manly indigna-
tion in the presence of suffering inflicted upon the weak
and the helpless. I rushed, of course, to her rescue, and
seized the wanton, brutal beast by the neck. I fastened
upon him with powerful grasp, but, the man heeded it
not, he seemed not even to feel my hand. The coward,
seeing himself resisted by the girl, lifted his powerful


48 - NIGHTMARE TALES.
arm, and the thick fist, coming down like a heavy
hammer upon the sunny locks, felled the child to the
ground. It was with a loud cry of the indignation of a
stranger, not with that of a tigress defending her cub,
that I sprang upon the lewd beast and sought to throttle
him. I then remarked, for the first time, that, a shadow
myself, I was grasping but another shadow ! . . . .
My loud shrieks and imprecations had awakened the
whole steamer. They were attributed to a nightmare.
I did not seek to take anyone into my confidence; but,
from that day forward, my life became a long series of
mental tortures, I could hardly shut my eyes without
becoming witness of some horrible deed, some scene of
misery, death or crime, whether past, present or even
future—as I ascertained later on. It was as though
some mocking fiend had taken upon himself the task of
making me go through the vision of everything that was
bestial, malignant and hopeless, in this world of misery.
No radiant vision of beauty or virtue ever lit with the
faintest ray these pictures of awe and wretchedness that
I seemed doomed to witness. Scenes of wickedness, of
murder, of treachery and of lust fell dismally upon my
sight, and I was brought face to face with the vilest
results of man’s passions, the most terrible outcome of
his material earthly cravings.
Had the Bonze foreseen, indeed, the dreary results,
when he spoke of Daij Dzins to whom I left “an ingress”
“a door open” in me? Nonsense! There must be some
physiological, abnormal change in me. Once at Nurem-
berg, when I have ascertained how false was the direc-
tion taken by my fears—I dared not hope for no misfor-
tune at all—these meaningless visions will disappear as
they came. The very fact that my fancy follows but
one direction, that of pictures of misery, of human pas-


A BEWITCHED LIFE. 49
sions in their worst, material shape, is a proof, to me, of
their unreality.
“If, as you say, man consists of one substance, matter,
the object of the physical senses; and if perception with
its modes is only the result of the organization of the
brain, then should we be naturally attracted but to the
material, the earthly” . . . . I thought I heard the
familiar voice of the Bonze interrupting my reflections,
and repeating an often used argument of his in his dis-
cussions with me.
“There are two planes of visions before men,” I again
heard him say, “the plane of undying love and spiritual
aspirations, the efflux from the eternal light; and the
plane of restless, ever changing matter, the light in
which the misguided Daij-Dzins bathe.” -
VII.
ETERNITY IN A SHORT DREAM.
In those days I could hardly bring myself to realize,
even for a moment, the absurdity of a belief in any kind
of spirits, whether good or bad. I now understood, if
I did not believe, what was meant by the term, though I
still persisted in hoping that it would finally prove some
physical derangement or nervous hallucination. To
fortify my unbelief the more, I tried to bring back to my
memory all the arguments used against faith in such
superstitions, that I had ever read or heard. I recalled
the biting sarcasms of Voltaire, the calm reasoning of
Hume, and I repeated to myself ad nauseam the words
of Rousseau, who said that superstition, “the disturber of
Society,” could never be too strongly attacked. “Why
should the sight, the phantasmagoria, rather”—I argued
4


5O NIGHTMARE TALES.
—“of that which we know in a waking sense to be false,
come to affect us at all?” Why should—
“Names, whose sense we see not
Fray us with things that be not?”
One day the old captain was narrating to us the various
superstitions to which sailors were addicted; a pompous
English missionary remarked that Fielding had declared
long ago that “superstition renders a man a fool,”—after
which he hesitated for an instant, and abruptly stopped.
I had not taken any part in the general conversation;
but no sooner had the reverend speaker relieved himself
of the quotation, then I saw in that halo of vibrating
light, which I now noticed almost constantly over every
human head on the steamer, the words of Fielding's next
proposition—“and scepticism makes him mad.”
I had heard and read of the claims of those who pre-
tend to seership, that they often see the thoughts of
people traced in the aura of those present. Whatever
“aura” may mean with others, I had now a personal ex-
perience of the truth of the claim, and felt sufficiently
disgusted with the discovery! I—a clairvoyant / a new
horror added to my life, an absurd and ridiculous gift
developed, which I shall have to conceal from all, feeling
ashamed of it as if it were a case of leprosy. At this
moment my hatred to the Yamabooshi, and even to my
venerable old friend, the Bonze, knew no bounds. The
former had evidently by his manipulations over me while
I was lying unconscious, touched some unknown physio-
logical spring in my brain, and by loosing it had called
forth a faculty generally hidden in the human constitu-
tion; and it was the Japanese priest who had introduced
the wretch into my house!
But my anger and my curses were alike useless, and
could be of no avail. Moreover, we were already in


A BEWITCHED LIFE. 5I
European waters, and in a few more days we should be
at Hamburg. Then would my doubts and fears be set
at rest, and I should find, to my intense relief, that
although clairvoyance, as regards the reading of human
thoughts on the spot, may have some truth in it, the
discernment of such events at a distance, as I had
dreamed of, was an impossibility for human faculties.
Notwithstanding all my reasoning, however, my heart
was sick with fear, and full of the blackest presenti-
ments; I felt that my doom was closing. I suffered
terribly, my nervous and mental prostration becoming
intensified day by day.
The night before we entered port I had a dream.
I fancied I was dead. My body lay cold and stiff in
its last sleep, whilst its dying consciousness, which still
regarded itself as “I,” realizing the event, was preparing
to meet in a few seconds its own extinction. It had been
always my belief that as the brain preserved heat longer
than any of the other organs, and was the last to cease its
activity, the thought in it survived bodily death by several
minutes. Therefore, I was not in the least surprised to
find in my dream that while the frame had already crossed
that awful gulf “no mortal e'er re-passed,” its conscious-
ness was still in the gray twilight, the first shadows of
the great Mystery. Thus my THOUGHT wrapped, as I
believed, in the remnants, of its now fast retiring vitality,
was watching with intense and eager curiosity the ap-
proaches of its own dissolution, i.e., of its annihilation.
“I” was hastening to record my last impressions, lest
the dark mantle of eternal oblivion should envelope me,
before I had time to feel and enjoy, the great, the supreme
triumph of learning that my life-long convictions were
true, that death is a complete and absolute cessation of
conscious being. Everything around me was getting


A BEWITCHED LIFE. 53
roaring billows of the Ocean of life, whose breakers lash
in vain the rock-bound shores of Death. Happy the
lonely bark that drifts into the still waters of its black
gulf, after having been so long, so cruelly tossed about
by the angry waves of sentient life. Moored in it for
evermore, needing no longer either sail or rudder, my
bark will now find rest. Welcome then, O Death, at
this tempting price; and fare thee well, poor body,
which, having neither sought it nor derived pleasure
from it, I now readily give up! -
While uttering this death-chant to the prostrate form
before me, I bent over, and examined it with curiosity.
I felt the surrounding darkness oppressing me, weighing
on me almost tangibly, and I fancied I found in it the ap-
proach of the Liberator I was welcoming. And yet . . .
how very strange! If real, final Death takes place in our
consciousness; if after the bodily death, “I” and my
conscious perceptions are one—how is it that these per-
ceptions do not become weaker, why does my brain-
action seem as vigorous as ever now . . . that I am
de facto dead? . . . . Nor does the usual feeling of
anxiety, the “heavy heart” so-called, decrease in inten-
sity; nay, it even seems to become worse . . . un-
speakably so! . . How long it takes for full oblivion
to arrive . . . Ah, here's my body again
Vanished out of sight for a second or two, it reappears
before me once more. . . . How white and ghastly it
looks! Yet . . . its brain cannot be quite dead, since
“I,” its consciousness, am still acting, since we two
fancy that we still are, that we live and think, discon-
nected from our creator and its ideating cells.
Suddenly I felt a strong desire to see how much longer
the progress of dissolution was likely to last, before it
placed its last seal on the brain and rendered it inactive.


54 NIGHTMARE TALES.
I examined my brain in its cranial cavity, through the
(to me) entirely transparent walls and roof of the skull,
and even touched the brain-matter. . . . How, or with
whose hands, I am now unable to say; but the impression
of the slimy, intensely cold matter produced a very
strong impression on me, in that dream. To my great
dismay, I found that the blood having entirely congealed
and the brain-tissues having themselves undergone a
change that would no longer permit any molecular
action, it became impossible for me to account for the
phenomena now taking place with myself. Here was I,
—or my consciousness, which is all one—standing ap-
parently entirely disconnected from my brain which
could no longer function. . . . But I had no time
left for reflection. A new and most extraordinary
change in my perceptions had taken place and now
engrossed my whole attention. . . . What does this
signify?
The same darkness was around me as before, a black,
impenetrable space, extending in every direction. Only
now, right before me, in whatever direction I was look-
ing, moving with me which way soever I moved, there
was a gigantic round clock; a disk, whose large white
face Shone ominously on the ebony-black background.
As I looked at its huge dial, and at the pendulum mov-
ing to and fro regularly and slowly in Space, as if its
Swinging meant to divide eternity, I saw its needles
pointing to seven minutes past five. “The hour at which
my torture had commenced at Kioto !” I had barely
found time to think of the coincidence, when, to my
unutterable horror, I felt myself going through the
same, the identical, process that I had been made to
experience on that memorable and fatal day. I swam
underground, dashing Swiftly through the earth; I found


A BEWITCHED LIFE. 55
myself once more in the pauper's grave and recognized
my brother-in-law in the mangled remains; I witnessed
his terrible death; entered my sister's house; followed
her agony, and saw her go mad. I went over the same
scenes without missing a single detail of them. But,
alas! I was no longer iron-bound in the calm indiffer-
ence that had then been mine, and which in that first
vision had left me as unfeeling to my great misfortune
as if I had been a heartless thing of rock. My mental
tortures were now becoming beyond description and
well-nigh unbearable. Even the settled despair, the
never-ceasing anxiety I was constantly experiencing
when awake, had become now, in my dream and in
the face of this repetition of vision and events, as an
hour of darkened sunlight compared to a deadly cy-
clone. Oh! how I suffered in this wealth and pomp of
infernal horrors, to which the conviction of the survival
of man’s consciousness after death—for in that dream I
firmly believed that my body was dead—added the most
terrifying of all!
The relative relief I felt, when, after going over the
last scene, I saw once more the great white face of the
dial before me was not of long duration. The long,
arrow-shaped needle was pointing on the colossal disk
at—seven minutes and a-half past five o'clock. But,
before I had time to well realize the change, the
needle moved slowly backwards, stopped at precisely
the seventh minute, and—O cursed fate! . . . I
found myself driven into a repetition of the same series
Over again! Once more I swam underground, and saw,
and heard, and suffered every torture that hell can pro-
vide; I passed through every mental anguish known to
man or fiend. I returned to see the fatal dial and its
needle—after what appeared to me an eternity—moved,


A BEWITCHED LIFE. 59
during a period which, however short, would seem to you an
eternity.” . . .
The clock had vanished, darkness made room for
light, the voice of my old friend was drowned by a mul-
titude of voices overhead on deck; and I awoke in my
berth, covered with a cold perspiration, and faint with
terror.
VIII.
- A TALE OF WOE.
WE were at Hamburg, and no sooner had I seen my
partners, who could hardly recognize me, than with their
consent and good wishes I started for Nüremberg.
Half-an-hour after my arrival, the last doubt with
regard to the correctness of my vision had disappeared.
The reality was worse than any expectations could have
made it, and I was henceforward doomed to the most
desolate life. I ascertained that I had seen the terrible
tragedy, with all its heartrending details. My brother-
in-law, killed under the wheels of a machine; my sister,
insane, and now rapidly sinking toward her end; my
niece—the sweet flower of nature’s fairest work—dis-
Honoured, in a den of infamy; the little children dead
of a contagious disease in an orphanage; my last sur-
viving nephew at sea, no one knew where. A whole
house, a home of love and peace, scattered; and I, left
alone, a witness of this world of death, of desolation and
dishonour. The news filled me with infinite despair,
and I sank helpless before this wholesale, dire disaster,
which rose before me all at once. The shock proved too
much, and I fainted. The last thing I heard before
entirely losing my consciousness was a remark of the
Burgmeister: “Had you, before leaving Kioto, tele-


60 NIGHTMARE TALES.
graphed to the city authorities of your whereabouts,
and of your intention of coming home to take charge of
your young relatives, we might have placed them else-
where, and thus have saved them from their fate. No
one knew that the children had a well-to-do rela-
tive. They were left paupers and had to be dealt with
as such. They were comparatively strangers in Nürem-
berg, and under the unfortunate circumstances you
could hardly have expected anything else. . . I can
only express my sincere sorrow.”
It was this terrible knowledge that I might, at any
rate, have saved my young niece from her unmerited
fate, but that through my neglect I had not done so, that
was killing me. Had I but followed the friendly advice
of the Bonze, Tamoora, and telegraphed to the authorities
some weeks previous to my return much might have been
avoided. It was all this, coupled with the fact that I could
no longer doubt clairvoyance and clairaudience—the
possibility of which I had so long denied—that brought
me so heavily down upon my knees. I could avoid the
censure of my fellow-creatures, but I could never escape
the stings of my conscience, the reproaches of my own
aching heart—no, not as long as I lived I cursed my
stubborn scepticism, my denial of facts, my early educa-
cation, I cursed myself and the whole world.
For several days I contrived not to sink beneath my
load, for I had a duty to perform to the dead and to the
living. But my sister once rescued from the pauper's
asylum, placed under the care of the best physicians,
with her daughter to attend to her last moments, and
the Jewess, whom I had brought to confess her crime,
Safely lodged in gaol-my fortitude and strength sud-
denly abandoned me. Hardly a week after my arrival I
was myself no better than a raving maniac, helpless in


A BEWITCHED LIFE. 6 I
the strong grip of a brain fever. For several weeks I
1ay between life and death, the terrible disease defying
the skill of the best physicians. At last my strong con-
stitution prevailed, and—to my life-long sorrow—they
proclaimed me saved.
I heard the news with a bleeding heart. Doomed to
drag the loathsome burden of life henceforth alone, and
in constant remorse; hoping for no help or remedy on
earth, and still refusing to believe in the possibility of
anything better than a short survival of consciousness
beyond the grave, this unexpected return to life added
only one more drop of gall to my bitter feelings. They
were hardly soothed by the inn mediate return, during
the first days of my convalescence, of those unwelcome
and unsought for visions, whose correctness and reality
I could deny no more. Alas the day! they were no
longer in my sceptical, blind mind–
“The children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy”;
but always the faithful photographs of the real woes and
sufferings of my fellow creatures, of my best friends.
Thus I found myself doomed, whenever I was
left for a moment alone, to the helpless torture of a
chained Prometheus. During the still hours of night,
as though held by some pitiless iron hand, I found my-
self led to my sister's bedside, forced to watch there
hour after hour, and see the silent disintegration of her
wasted organism; to witness and feel the sufferings that
her own tenantless brain could no longer reflect or con-
vey to her perceptions. But there was something still
more horrible to barb the dart that could never be ex-
tricated. I had to look, by day, at the childish innocent
face of my young niece, so sublimely simple and guile-
less in her pollution; and to witness, by night, how the


62 NIGHTMARE TALES.
full knowledge and recollection of her dishonour, of her
young life now for ever blasted, came to her in her
dreams, as soon as she was asleep. These dreams took
an objective form to me, as they had done on the
steamer; I had to live them over again, night after
night, and feel the same terrible despair. For now,
since I believed in the reality of seership, and had come
to the conclusion that in our bodies lies hidden, as in
the caterpillar, the chrysalis which may contain in its
turn the butterfly—the symbol of the soul—I no longer
remained indifferent, as of yore, to what I witnessed in
my Soul-life. Something had suddenly developed in
me, had broken loose from its icy cocoon. Evidently I
no longer saw only in consequence of the identification
of my inner nature with a Daij-Dzin; my visions arose
in consequence of a direct personal psychic development,
the fiendish creatures only taking care that I should see
nothing of an agreeable or elevating nature. Thus, now,
not an unconscious pang in my dying sister's emaciated
body, not a thrill of horror in my niece's restless sleep at
the recollection of the crime perpetrated upon her, an
innocent child, but found a responsive echo in my bleed-
ing heart. The deep fountain of sympathetic love and
Sorrow had gushed out from the physical heart, and was
now loudly echoed by the awakened soul separated from
the body. Thus had I to drain the cup of misery to the
very dregs! Woe is me, it was a daily and nightly tor-
ture! Oh, how I mourned over my proud folly; how I
was punished for having neglected to avail myself at
Kioto of the proffered purification, for now I had come
to believe even in the efficacy of the latter. The Daij-
Dzin had indeed obtained control over me; and the fiend
had let loose all the dogs of hell upon his victim. . . .
At last the awful gulf was reached and crossed. The


A BEWITCHED LIFE. 63
poor insane martyr dropped into her dark, and now wel-
come grave, leaving behind her, but for a few short
months, her young, her first-born, daughter. Consump-
tion made short work of that tender girlish frame.
Hardly a year after my arrival, I was left alone in the
whole wide world, my only surviving nephew having
expressed a desire to follow his sea-faring career.
And now, the sequel of my sad, sad story is soon told.
A wreck, a prematurely old man, looking at thirty as
though sixty winters had passed over my doomed head,
and owing to the never-ceasing visions, myself daily on
the verge of insanity, I suddenly formed a desperate
resolution. I would return to Kioto and seek out the
Yamabooshi. I would prostrate myself at the feet of the
holy man, and would not leave him until he had recalled
the Frankenstein he had raised, the Frankenstein with
whom at the time, it was I, myself, who would not part,
through my insolent pride and unbelief.
Three months later I was in my Japanese home again,
and I at once sought out my old, venerable Bonze,
Tamoora Hideyeri, I now implored him to take me with-
out an hour's delay, to the Yamabooshi, the innocent
cause of my daily tortures. His answer but placed the
last, the supreme seal on my doom and tenfold intensified
my despair. The Yamabooshi had left the country for
lands unknown He had departed one fine morning into
the interior, on a pilgrimage, and according to custom,
would be absent, unless natural death shortened the
period, for no less than seven years!
In this mischance, I applied for help and protection to
other learned Yamabooshis; and though well aware how
useless it was in my case to seek efficient cure from any
other “adept,” my excellent old friend did everything
he could to help me in my misfortune. But it was to no


A BEWITCHED LIFE. 65
burden; and such was my indifference to my future,
that while giving away all my fortune to my nephew—
in case he should return alive from his sea voyage—I
should have neglected entirely even a small provision
for myself, had not my native partner interfered and
insisted upon my making it. I now recognized, with
Lao-tze, that Knowledge was the only firm hold for a
man to trust to, as it is the only one that cannot be
shaken by any tempest. Wealth is a weak anchor in
days of sorrow, and self-conceit the most fatal coun-
sellor. Hence I followed the advice of my friends, and
laid aside for myself a modest sum, which would be
sufficient to assure me a small income for life, or if I
ever left my new friends and instructors. Having settled
my earthly accounts and disposed of my belongings at
Kioto, I joined the “Masters of the Long Vision,” who
took me to their mysterious abode. There I remained
for several years, studying very earnestly and in the
most complete solitude, seeing no one but a few of the
members of our religious community. : ,
Many are the mysteries of nature that I have fathomed
since then, and many a secret folio from the library of
Tzion-ene have I devoured, obtaining thereby mastery
over several kinds of invisible beings of a lower order.
But the great secret of power over the terrible Daij-,
Dzin I could not get. It remains in the possession of a
very limited number of the highest Initiates of Lao-
tze, the great majority of the Yamabooshis themselves
being ignorant, how to obtain such mastery over the
dangerous Elemental. One who would reach such
power of control would have to become entirely iden-
tified with the Yamabooshis, to accept their views and
beliefs, and to attain the highest degree of Initiation.
Very naturally, I was found unfit to join the Fraternity,
5


THE CAVE OF THE ECHOES.
A Strange but True Story.”
N one of the distant governments of the
Russian empire, in a small town on the
borders of Siberia, a mysterious tragedy
occurred more than thirty years ago. About
six versts from the little town of P >
famous for the wild beauty of its scenery,
and for the wealth of its inhabitants—gener-
ally proprietors of mines and of iron foun-
dries—stood an aristocratic mansion. Its
household consisted of the master, a rich old
bachelor and his brother, who was a widower
It was known that the proprietor, Mr. Izvertzoff,
had adopted his brother's children, and, having formed an
especial attachment for his eldest nephew, Nicolas, he
had made him the sole heir of his numerous estates.
Time rolled on. The uncle was getting old, the
nephew was coming of age. Days and years had passed
in monotonous serenity, when, on the hitherto clear
horizon of the quiet family, appeared a cloud. On an
* This story is given from the narrative of an eye-witness, a
Russian gentleman, very pious, and fully trustworthy. Moreover,
the facts are copied from the police records of P−. The eye-
witness in question attributes it, of course, partly to divine inter-
ference and partly to the Evil One.-H. P. B.
and the father of two sons and three daughters.


THE CAVE OF THE ECHOEs. 69
unlucky day one of the nieces took it into her head to
study the zither. The instrument being of purely Teu-
tonic origin, and no teacher of it residing in the neigh-
bourhood, the indulgent uncle sent to St. Petersburg
for both. After diligent search only one Professor
could be found willing to trust himself in such close
proximity to Siberia. It was an old German artist, who,
sharing his affections equally between his instrument
and a pretty blonde daughter, would part with neither.
And thus it came to pass that, one fine morning, the old
Professor arrived at the mansion, with his music box
under one arm and his fair München leaning on the
other.
From that day the little cloud began growing rapidly;
for every vibration of the melodious instrument found
a responsive echo in the old bachelor's heart. Music
awakens love, they say, and the work begun by the
zither was completed by München's blue eyes. At the
expiration of six months the niece had become an
expert zither player, and the uncle was desperately
in love.
One morning, gathering his adopted family around
him, he embraced them all very tenderly, promised to
remember them in his will, and wound up by declaring
his unalterable resolution to marry the blue-eyed Mün-
chen. After this he fell upon their necks, and wept in
silent rapture. The family, understanding that they
were cheated out of the inheritance, also wept; but it
was for another cause. Having thus wept, they con-
soled themselves and tried to rejoice, for the old gentle-
man was sincerely beloved by all. Not all of them
rejoiced, though. Nicolas, who had himself been smitten
to the heart by the pretty German, and who found him-
self defrauded at once of his belle and of his uncle's


7o NIGHTMARE TALES.
money, neither rejoiced nor consoled himself, but dis-
appeared for a whole day.
Meanwhile, Mr. Izvertzoff had given orders to prepare
his travelling carriage on the following day, and it was
whispered that he was going to the chief town of the
district, at some distance from his home, with the in-
tention of altering his will. Though very wealthy, he
had no superintendant on his estate, but kept his books
himself. The same evening after supper, he was heard
in his room, angrily scolding his servant, who had been
in his service for over thirty years. This man, Ivan,
was a native of northern Asia, from Kamschatka; he
had been brought up by the family in the Christian
religion, and was thought to be very much attached to
his master. A few days later, when the first tragic cir-
cumstance I am about to relate had brought all the
police force to the spot, it was remembered that on that
night Ivan was drunk; that his master, who had a horror
of this vice, had paternally thrashed him, and turned
him out of his room, and that Ivan had been seen reel-
ing out of the door, and had been heard to mutter
threats.
On the vast domain of Mr. Izvertzoff there was a
curious cavern, which excited the curiosity of all who
visited it. It exists to this day, and is well known to
every inhabitant of P−. A pine forest, commencing
a few feet from the garden gate, climbs in steep terraces
up a long range of rocky hills, which it covers with a
broad belt of impenetrable vegetation. The grotto lead-
ing into the cavern, which is known as the “Cave of the
Echoes,” is situated about half a mile from the site of
the mansion, from which it appears as a small excava-
tion in the hill-side, almost hidden by luxuriant plants,
but not so completely as to prevent any person entering


74 NIGHTMARE TALES.
at the same time to hate him bitterly. He seldom em-
braced or caressed the child, but, with livid cheek and
staring eye, he would pass long hours watching him, as
the child sat quietly in his corner, in his goblin-like,
old-fashioned way.
The child had never left the estate, and few outside
the family knew of his existence.
About the middle of July, a tall Hungarian traveller,
preceded by a great reputation for eccentricity, wealth
and mysterious powers, arrived at the town of P
from the North, where, it was said, he had resided for
many years. He settled in the little town, in company
with a Shaman or South Siberian magician, on whom
he was said to make mesmeric experiments. He gave
dinners and parties, and invariably exhibited his Shaman,
of whom he felt very proud, for the amusement of his
guests. One day the notables of P− made an unex-
pected invasion of the domains of Nicolas Izvertzoff,
and requested the loan of his cave for an evening enter-
tainment. Nicolas consented with great reluctance,
and only after still greater hesitancy was he prevailed
upon to join the party. -
The first cavern and the platform beside the bottom-
less lake glittered with lights. Hundreds of flickering
candles and torches, stuck in the clefts of the rocks,
illuminated the place and drove the shadows from the
mossy nooks and corners, where they had crouched un-
disturbed for many years. The stalactites on the walls
sparkled brightly, and the sleeping echoes were suddenly
awakened by a joyous confusion of laughter and conver-
sation. The Shaman, who was never lost sight of by
his friend and patron, sat in a corner, entranced as
usual. Crouched on a projecting rock, about midway
between the entrance and the water, with his lemon-


76 NIGHTMARE TALES.
“Good God! what an extraordinary resemblance!”
muttered an old resident of the town, a friend of the lost
111a11. -
“You lie, child!” fiercely exclaimed the father. “Go
to bed; this is no place for you.” -
“Come, come,” interposed the Hungarian, with a
strange expression on his face, and encircling with his
arm the slender childish figure; “the little fellow has
seen the double of my Shaman, which roams sometimes
far away from his body, and has mistaken the phantom
for the man himself. Let him remain with us for a
while.”
At these strange words the guests stared at each other
in mute surprise, while some piously made the sign of
the cross, spitting aside, presumably at the devil and all
his works.
“By-the-bye,” continued the Hungarian with a pecu-
liar firmness of accent, and addressing the company
rather than any one in particular; “why should we not
try, with the help of my Shaman, to unravel the mystery
hanging over the tragedy? Is the suspected party still
lying in prison? What? he has not confessed up to
now? This is surely very strange. But now we will
learn the truth in a few minutes! Let all keep silent!”
He then approached the Tehuktchene, and immediately
began his performance without so much as asking the
consent of the master of the place. The latter stood
rooted to the spot, as if petrified with horror, and unable
to articulate a word. The suggestion met with general
approbation, save from him ; and the police inspector,
Col. S-, especially approved of the idea.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the mesmerizer in soft
tones, “allow me for this once to proceed otherwise than
in my general fashion. I will employ the method of


78 NIGHTMARE TALES.
As the unknown words issued from his lips, the
flames of the candles and torches wavered and flickered,
until they began dancing in rhythm with the chant. A
cold wind came wheezing from the dark corridors be-
yond the water, leaving a plaintive echo in its trail.
Then a sort of nebulous vapour, seeming to ooze from
the rocky ground and walls, gathered about the Shaman
and the boy. Around the latter the aura was silvery and
transparent, but the cloud which enveloped the former
was red and sinister. Approaching nearer to the plat-
form the magician beat a louder roll upon the drum, and
this time the echo caught it up with terrific effect! It
reverberated near and far in incessant peals; one wail
followed another, louder and louder, until the thunder-
ing roar seemed the chorus of a thousand demon voices
rising from the fathomless depths of the lake. The
water itself, whose surface, illuminated by many lights,
had previously been smooth as a sheet of glass, became
suddenly agitated, as if a powerful gust of wind had
swept over its unruffled face.
Another chant, and a roll of the drum, and the moun-
tain trembled to its foundation with the cannon-like
peals which rolled through the dark and distant corri-
dors. The Shaman's body rose two yards in the air, and
nodding and swaying, Sat, self-suspended like an appari-
tion. But the transformation which now occurred in
the boy chilled everyone, as they speechlessly watched
the scene. The silvery cloud about the boy now seemed
to lift him, too, into the air; but, unlike the Shaman,
his feet never left the ground. The child began to grow,
as though the work of years was miraculously accom-
plished in a few seconds. He became tall and large,
and his senile features grew older with the ageing of his
body. A few more seconds, and the youthful form had


8O NIGHTMARE TALES.
on the water, and bending its extended finger, slowly
..beckoned him to come. Crouched in abject terror, the
wretched man shrieked until the cavern rang again and
again: “I did not . . . No, I did not murder you!”
Then came a splash, and now it was the boy who was
in the dark water, struggling for his life, in the middle
of the lake, with the same motionless stern apparition
brooding over him.
“Papa! papa! Save me. . . . . I am drowning!”
cried a piteous little voice amid the uproar of
the mocking echoes.
“My boy!” shrieked Nicolas, in the accents of a
maniac, springing to his feet. “My boy! Save him!
Oh, save him! . . . Yes, I confess. . . . I am
the murderer. . . . It is I who killed him l’”
Another splash, and the phantom disappeared. With
a cry of horror the company rushed towards the plat-
form; but their feet were suddenly rooted to the ground,
as they saw amid the swirling eddies a whitish shapeless
mass holding the murderer and the boy in tight embrace,
and slowly sinking into the bottomless lake.
On the morning after these occurrences, when, after a
sleepless night, some of the party visited the residence
of the Hungarian gentleman, they found it closed and
deserted. He and the Shaman had disappeared. Many
are among the old inhabitants of P who remember
him; the Police Inspector, Col. S-, dying a few years
ago in the full assurance that the noble traveller was .
the devil. To add to the general consternation the
Izvertzoff mansion took fire on that same night and was
completely destroyed. The Archbishop performed the
ceremony of exorcism, but the locality is considered
accursed to this day. The Government investigated the
facts, and—ordered silence.


THE LUMINOUS SHIELD.
E were a small and select party of light-
learted travellers. We had arrived at Con-
stantitiople a week before from Greece,
and had devoted fourteen hours a day
ever since to toiling up and down the steep
heights of Pera, visiting bazaars, climbing
to the tops of minarets and fighting our
way through armies of hungry dogs, the
- traditional masters of the streets of
º Stamboul. Nomadic life is infectious,
they say, and no civilization is strong enough to destroy
the charm of unrestrained freedom when it has once been
tasted. The gipsy cannot be tempted from his tent, and
even the common tramp finds a fascination in his com-
fortless and precarious existence, that prevents him taking
to any fixed abode and occupation. To guard my spaniel
Ralph from falling a victim to this infection, and joining
the canine Bedouins that infested the streets, was my
chief care during our stay in Constantinople. He was a
fine fellow, my constant companion and cherished friend.
Afraid of losing him, I kept a strict watch over his
Imovements; for the first three days, however, he be-
Haved like a tolerably well-educated quadruped, and
remained faithfully at my heels. At every impudent
attack from his Mahomedan cousins, whether intended
as a hostile demonstration or an overture of friendship,
his only reply would be to draw in his tail between his
o


82 NIGHTMARE TALES.
legs, and with an air of dignified modesty seek pro-
tection under the wing of one or other of our party.
As he had thus from the first shown so decided an
aversion to bad company, I began to feel assured of his
discretion, and by the end of the third day I had con-
siderably relaxed my vigilance. This carelessness on
my part, however, was soon punished, and I was made
to regret my misplaced confidence. In an unguarded
moment he listened to the voice of some four-footed
syren, and the last I saw of him was the end of his
bushy tail, vanishing round the corner of a dirty, wind-
ing little back street.
Greatly annoyed, I passed the remainder of the day in
a vain search after my dumb companion. I offered
twenty, thirty, forty francs reward for him. About as
many vagabond Maltese began a regular chase, and
towards evening we were invaded in our hotel by the
whole troop, every man of them with a more or less
mangy cur in his arms, which he tried to persuade me
was my lost dog. The more I denied, the more
solemnly they insisted, one of them actually going
down on his knees, snatching from his bosom an old
corroded metal image of the Virgin, and swearing a
solemn oath that the Queen of Heaven herself had
kindly appeared to him to point out the right animal.
The tumult had increased to such an extent that it
looked as if Ralph's disappearance was going to be the
cause of a small riot, and finally our landlord had to
send for a couple of Kavasses from the nearest police
station, and have this regiment of bipeds and quadru-
peds expelled by main force. I began to be convinced
that I should never see my dog again, and I was the
more despondent since the porter of the hotel, a semi-
respectable old brigand, who, to judge by appearances,


THE LUMINous SHIELD. 83
had not passed more than half-a-dozen years at the
galleys, gravely assured me that all my pains were use-
less, as my spaniel was undoubtedly dead and devoured
too by this time, the Turkish dogs being very fond of
their more toothsome English brothers.
All this discussion had taken place in the street at the
door of the hotel, and I was about to give up the search
for that night at least, and enter the hotel, when an old
Greek lady, a Phanariote who had been hearing the
fracas from the steps of a door close by, approached our
disconsolate group and suggested to Miss H , one of
our party, that we should enquire of the dervishes con-
cerning the fate of Ralph.
“And what can the dervishes know about my dog?”
said I, in no mood to joke, ridiculous as the proposition
appeared.
“The holy men know all, Kyrea (Madam),” said she,
somewhat mysteriously. “Last week I was robbed of
my new satin pelisse, that my son had just brought me
from Broussa, and, as you all see, I have recovered it
and have it on my back now.”
“Indeed? Then the holy men have also managed to
metamorphose your new pelisse into an old one by all
appearances,” said one of the gentlemen who accom-
panied us, pointing as he spoke to a large rent in the
back, which had been clumsily repaired with pins.
“And that is just the most wonderful part of the whole
story,” quietly answered the Phanariote, not in the least
disconcerted. “They showed me in the shining circle
the quarter of the town, the house, and even the room
in which the Jew who had stolen my pelisse was just
about to rip it up and cut it into pieces. My son and I
had barely time to run over to the Kalindjikoulosek
quarter, and to save my property. We caught the thief


THE LUMINOUS SHIELD. 85
When we arrived we were shown into a vast and
gloomy hall that looked like a deserted stable. It was
long and narrow, the floor was thickly strewn with sand
as in a riding school, and it was lighted only by small
windows placed at some height from the ground. The
dervishes had finished their morning performances, and
were evidently resting from their exhausting labours.
They looked completely prostrated, some lying about in
corners, others sitting on their heels staring vacantly
into space, engaged, as we were informed, in meditation
on their invisible deity. They appeared to have lost all
power of sight and hearing, for none of them responded
to our questions until a great gaunt figure, wearing a tall
cap that made him look at least seven feet high, emerged
from an obscure corner. nforming us that he was their
chief, the giant gave us to understand that the saintly
brethren, being in the habit of receiving orders for addi-
tional ceremonies from Allah himself, must on no ac-
count be disturbed. But when our interpreter had
explained to him the object of our visit, which con-
cerned himself alone, as he was the sole custodian of the
“divining rod,” his objections vanished and he extended
his hand for alms. Upon being gratified, he intimated
that only two of our party could be admitted at one
time into the confidence of the future, and led the way,
followed by Miss H and myself.
Plunging ºfter him into what seemed to be a half sub-
terranean passage, we were led to the foot of a tall ladder
leading to a chamber under the roof. We scrambled up
after our guide, and at the top we found ourselves in a
wretched garret of moderate size, with bare walls and
destitute of furniture. The floor was carpeted with a
thick layer of dust, and cobwebs festooned the walls in
neglected confusion. In the corner we saw something


86 NIGHTMARE TALES.
/
that I at first mistook for a bundle of old rags; but the
heap presently moved and got on its legs, advanced to
the middle of the room and stood before us, the most
extraordinary looking creature that I ever beheld. Its
sex was female, but whether she was a woman or child
it was impossible to decide. She was a hideous-looking
dwarf, with an enormous head, the shoulders of a grena-
dier, with a waist in proportion; the whole supported by
two short, lean, spider-like legs that seemed unequal to
the task of bearing the weight of the monstrous body.
She had a grinning countenance like the face of a satyr,
and it was ornamented with letters and signs from the
Koran painted in bright yellow. On her forehead was
a blood-red crescent; her head was crowned with a
dusty tarbouche, or fez; her legs were arrayed in large
Turkish trousers, and some dirty white muslin wrapped
round her body barely sufficed to conceal its hideous
deformities. This creature rather let herself drop than
sat down in the middle of the floor, and as her weight
descended on the rickety boards it sent up a cloud of
dust that set us coughing and sneezing. This was the
famous Tatmos known as the Damascus oracle!
Without losing time in idle talk, the dervish produced
a piece of chalk, and traced around the girl a circle
about six feet in diameter. Fetching from behind the
door twelve small copper lamps which he filled with
some dark liquid from a small bottle which he drew
from his bosom, he placed them symmetrically around
the magic circle. He then broke a chip of wood from a
panel of the half ruined door, which bore the marks of
many a similar depredation, and, holding the chip be-
tween his thumb and finger he began blowing on it at
regular intervals, alternating the blowing with mutter-
ings of some kind of weird incantation, till suddenly,


THE LUMINOUS SHIELD. 89
darkness. The edge of the circle was not penumbrous,
but on the contrary sharply defined like that of a
silver shield.
All being now ready, the dervish without uttering a
word, or removing his gaze from the disk, stretched out
a hand, and taking hold of mine, he drew me to his side
and pointed to the luminous shield. Looking at the
place indicated, we saw large patches appear like those
on the moon. These gradually formed themselves into
figures that began moving about in high relief in their
natural colours. They neither appeared like a photo-
graph nor an engraving; still less like the reflection of
images on a mirror, but as if the disk were a cameo, and
they were raised above its surface and then endowed with
life and motion. To my astonishment and my friend's
consternation, we recognized the bridge leading from
Galata to Stamboul spanning the Golden Horn from the
new to the old city. There were the people hurrying
to and fro, steamers and gay caiques gliding on the blue
Bosphorus, the many coloured buildings, villas and
palaces reflected in the water; and the whole picture
illuminated by the noon-day sun. It passed like a
panorama, but so vivid was the impression that we could
not tell whether it or ourselves were in motion. All was
bustle and life, but not a sound broke the oppressive
stillness. It was noiseless as a dream. It was a phantom
picture. Street after street and quarter after quarter
succeeded one another; there was the bazaar, with its
narrow, roofed passages, the small shops on either side,
the coffee houses with gravely smoking Turks; and as
either they glided past us or we past them, one of the
Smokers upset the narghilé and coffee of another, and a
volley of soundless invectives caused us great amusement.
So we travelled with the picture until we came to a large


90 - NIGHTMARE TALES.
building that I recognized as the palace of the Minister
of Finance. In a ditch behind the house, and close to a
mosque, lying in a pool of mud with his silken coat all
bedraggled, lay my poor Ralph Panting and crouching
down as if exhausted, he seemed to be in a dying condi-
tion; and near him were gathered some sorry-looking
curs who lay blinking in the sun and snapping at the
flies! -
I had seen all that I desired, although I had not
breathed a word about the dog to the dervish, and had
come more out of curiosity than with the idea of any
success. I was impatient to leave at once and recover
Ralph, but as my companion besought me to remain a
little while longer, I reluctantly consented. The scene
faded away and Miss H- placed herself in turn by
the side of the dervish.
“I will think of him,” she whispered in my ear with
the eager tone that young ladies generally assume when
talking of the worshipped him.
There is a long stretch of sand and a blue sea with
white waves dancing in the stºn, and a great steamer is
ploughing her way along past a desolate shore, leaving
a milky track behind her. The deck is full of life, the
men are busy forward, the cook with white cap and
apron is coming out of the galley, uniformed officers are
moving about, passengers fill the quarter-deck, loung-
ing, flirting or reading, and a young man we both recog-
nize comes forward and leans over the taffrail. It is—
him.
Miss H- gives a little gasp, blushes and smiles,
and concentrates her thoughts again. The picture of
the steamer vanishes; the magic moon remains for a
few moments blank. But new spots appear on its lumi-
nous face, we see a library slowly emerging from its


THE LUMINOUS SHIELD. 9I
depths—a library with green carpet and hangings, and
book-shelves round the sides of the room. Seated in
an arm-chair at a table under a hanging lamp, is an old
gentleman writing. His gray hair is brushed back from
his forehead, his face is smooth-shaven and his coun-
tenance has an expression of benignity.
The dervish made a hasty motion to enjoin silence;
the light on the disk quivers, but resumes its steady
brilliancy, and again its surface is imageless for a
second.
We are back in Constantinople now and out of the
pearly depths of the shield forms our own apartment in
the hotel. There are our papers and books on the
bureau, my friend's travelling hat in a corner, her
ribbons hanging on the glass, and lying on the bed the
very dress she had changed when starting out on our
expedition. No detail was lacking to make the identifi-
cation complete; and as if to prove that we were not
seeing something conjured up in our own imagination,
there lay upon the dressing-table two unopened letters,
the handwriting on which was clearly recognized by my
friend. They were from a very dear relative of hers,
from whom she had expected to hear when in Athens,
but had been disappointed. The scene faded away and
we now saw her brother's room with himself lying upon
the lounge, and a servant bathing his head, whence, to
our horror, blood was trickling. We had left the boy in
perfect health but an hour before; and upon seeing this
picture my companion uttered a cry of alarm, and seiz-
ing me by the hand dragged me to the door. We re-
joined our guide and friends in the long hall and hurried
back to the hotel.
Young H– had fallen downstairs and cut his fore-
head rather badly; in our room, on the dressing-table


FROM THE POLAR LANDS.
(A Christmas Story.)
UST a year ago, during the Christ-
mas holidays, a numerous Society had
gathered in the country house, or rather
the old hereditary castle, of a wealthy
* landowner in Finland. Many were the
remains in it of our forefathers' hospit-
able way of living; and many the me-
diaeval customs preserved, founded on
traditions and superstitions, semi-Finnish
* and semi-Russian, the latter imported into
- it by its female proprietors from the shores
of the Neva. Christmas trees were being prepared and
implements for divination were being made ready. For,
in that old castle there were grim worm-eaten portraits of
famous ancestors and knights and ladies, old deserted
turrets, with bastions and Gothic windows; mysterious
sombre alleys, and dark and endless cellars, easily trans-
formed into subterranean passages and caves, ghostly
- prison cells, haunted by the restless phantoms of the
heroes of local legends. In short, the old Manor offered
every commodity for romantic horrors. But alas! this
once they serve for nought; in the present narrative these
dear old horrors play no such part as they otherwise might.
Its chief hero is a very commonplace, prosaical man
—let us call him Erkler. Yes; Dr. Erkler, professor of
º
º
º º
º


FROM THE POLAR LANDS. 95
Mussel, and we found ourselves cut off for eight long
months from the rest of the living world. . . . . I
confess I, for one, felt it terribly at first. We became
especially discouraged when one stormy night the snow
hurricane scattered a mass of materials prepared for our
winter buildings, and deprived us of over forty deer from
our herd. Starvation in prospect is no incentive to good
humour; and with the deer we had lost the best plat de
résistance against polar frosts, human organisms demand-
ing in that climate an increase of heating and solid food.
However, we were finally reconciled to our loss, and
even got accustomed to the local and in reality more
nutritious food—seals, and seal-grease. Our men from
the remnants of our lumber built a house neatly divided
into two compartments, one for our three professors and
myself, and the other for themselves; and, a few wooden
sheds being constructed for meteorological, astronomical
and magnetic purposes, we even added a protecting
stable for the few remaining deer. And then began the
monotonous series of dawnless nights and days, hardly
distinguishable one from the other, except through
dark-grey shadows. At times, the “blues” we got into,
were fearful! We had contemplated sending two of our
three steamers home, in September, but the premature
and unforeseen formation of ice walls round them had
thwarted our plans; and now, with the entire crews on
our hands, we had to economize still more with our
meagre provisions, fuel and light. Lamps were used
only for scientific purposes: the rest of the time we
had to content ourselves with God's light—the moon
and the Aurora Borealis. . . . But how describe
these glorious, incomparable northern lights! Rings,
arrows, gigantic conflagrations of accurately divided rays
of the most vivid and varied colours. The November


THE ENSOULED VIOLIN.
I.
N the year 1828, an old German, a music
teacher, came to Paris with his pupil
and settled unostentatiously in one of
the quiet faubourgs of the metropolis.
The first rejoiced in the name of
Samuel Klaus; the second answered to
the more poetical appellation of Franz
* Stenio. The youngerman was a violin-
ist, gifted, as rumour went, with extra-
* ordinary, almost miraculous talent.
3. Yet as he was poor and had not hitherto
made a name for himself in Europe, he
remained for several years in the capi-
tal of France—the heart and pulse of
capricious continental fashion—un-
--- known and unappreciated. Franz was
al Styrian by birth, and, at the time of the event to be pre-
sently described, he was a young man considerably under
thirty. A philosopher and a dreamer by nature, imbued
with all the mystic oddities of true genius, he reminded
one of some of the heroes in Hoffmann's Contes Fan-
tastiques. His earlier existence had been a very unusual, in
fact, quite an eccentric one, and its history must be briefly
told—for the better understanding of the present story.
Born of very pious country people, in a quiet burg
among the Styrian Alps; nursed “by the native gnomes
who watched over his cradle”; growing up in the weird
atmosphere of the ghouls and vampires who play such a
prominent part in the household of every Styrian and
Slavonian in Southern Austria; educated later, as a


THE ENSOULED VIOLIN. 99
student, in the shadow of the old Rhenish castles of
Germany; Franz from his childhood had passed through
every emotional stage on the plane of the so-called
“supernatural.” He had also studied at one time the
“occult arts” with an enthusiastic disciple of Paracelsus
and Kunrath; alchemy had few theoretical secrets for
him; and he had dabbled in “ceremonial magic” and
“Sorcery” with some Hungarian Tziganes. Yet he
loved above all else music, and above music—his violin.
At the age of twenty-two he suddenly gave up his
practical studies in the occult, and from that day,
though as devoted as ever in thought to the beautiful
Grecian Gods, he surrendered himself entirely to his art.
Of his classic studies he had retained only that which
related to the muses—Euterpe especially, at whose altar
he worshipped—and Orpheus whose magic lyre he tried
to emulate with his violin. Except his dreamy belief in
the nymphs and the sirens, on account probably of the
double relationship of the latter to the muses through
Calliope and Orpheus, he was interested but little in the
matters of this sublunary world. All his aspirations
mounted, like incense, with the wave of the heavenly
harmony that he drew from his instrument, to a higher
and a nobler sphere. He dreamed awake, and lived a real
though an enchanted life only during those hours when
his magic bow carried him along the wave of sound to
the Pagan Olympus, to the feet of Euterpe. A strange
child he had ever been in his own home, where tales of
magic and witchcraft grow out of every inch of the soil;
a still stranger boy he had become, until finally he had
blossomed into manhood, without one single character-
istic of youth. Never had a fair face attracted his atten-
tion; not for one moment had his thoughts turned from
his solitary studies to a life beyond that of a mystic


IOO NIGHTMARE TALES.
Bohemian. Content with his own company, he had
thus passed the best years of his youth and manhood
with his violin for his chief idol, and with the Gods and
Goddesses of old Greece for his audience, in perfect
ignorance of practical life. His whole existence had
been one long day of dreams, of melody and sunlight,
and he had never felt any other aspirations.
How useless, but oh, how glorious those dreams! how
vivid! and why should he desire any better fate? Was
he not all that he wanted to be, transformed in a second
of thought into one or another hero; from Orpheus, who
held all nature breathless, to the urchin who piped away
under the plane tree to the naiads of Calirrhoë's crystal
fountain? Did not the swift-footed nymphs frolic at
liis beck and call to the sound of the magic flute of the
Arcadian shepherd—who was himself? Behold, the
Goddess of Love and Beauty herself descending from on
high, attracted by the sweet-voiced notes of his violin!
Yet there came a time when he preferred Syrinx
to Aphrodite—not as the fair nymph pursued by Pan,
but after her transformation by the merciful Gods into
the reed out of which the frustrated God of the Shepherds
had made his magic pipe. For also, with time, ambition
grows and is rarely satisfied. When he tried to emulate
on his violin the enchanting sounds that resounded in
his mind, the whole of Parnassus kept silent under the
spell, or joined in heavenly chorus; but the audience he
finally craved was composed of more than the Gods
sung by Hesiod, verily of the most appreciative me?omanes
of European capitals. He felt jealous of the magic pipe,
and would fain have had it at his command.
“Oh ! that I could allure a nymph into my beloved
violin!”—he often cried, after awakening from one of his
day-dreams. “Oh, that I could only span in spirit flight


THE ENSOULED VIOLIN. IOI
the abyss of Time! Oh, that I could find myself for one
short day a partaker of the secret arts of the Gods, a
God myself, in the sight and hearing of enraptured
humanity; and, having learned the mystery of the lyre of
Orpheus, or secured within my violin a siren, thereby
benefit mortals to my own glory!”
Thus, having for long years dreamed in the company
of the Gods of his fancy, he now took to dreaming of
the transitory glories of fame upon this earth. But at
this time he was suddenly called home by his widowed
mother from one of the German universities where he
had lived for the last year or two. This was an event
which brought his plans to an end, at least so far as the
immediate future was concerned, for he had hitherto
drawn upon her alone for his meagre pittance, and his
means were not sufficient for an independent life outside
his native place.
His return had a very unexpected result. His mother,
whose only love he was on earth, died soon after she
had welcomed her Benjamin back; and the good wives
of the burg exercised their swift tongues for many a
month after as to the real causes of that death.
Frau Stenio, before Franz's return, was a healthy,
buxom, middle-aged body, strong and hearty. She was
a pious and a God-fearing soul too, who had never
failed in saying her prayers, nor had missed an early
mass for years during his absence. On the first Sunday
after her son had settled at home—a day that she had
been longing for and had anticipated for months in
joyous visions, in which she saw him kneeling by her
side in the little church on the hill—she called him from
the foot of the stairs. The hour had come when her
pious dream was to be realized, and she was waiting for
him, carefully wiping the dust from the prayer-book he


IO2 NIGHTMARE TALES.
had used in his boyhood. But instead of Franz, it was
his violin that responded to her call, mixing its sonorous
voice with the rather cracked tones of the peal of the
merry Sunday bells. The fond mother was somewhat
shocked at hearing the prayer-inspiring sounds drowned
by the weird, fantastic notes of the “Dance of the
Witches”; they seemed to her so unearthly and mock-
ing. But she almost fainted upon hearing the definite
refusal of her well-beloved son to go to church. He
never went to church, he coolly remarked. It was loss
of time; besides which, the loud peals of the old church
organ jarred on his nerves. Nothing should induce him
to submit to the torture of listening to that cracked
organ. He was firm, and nothing could move him. To
Her supplications and remonstrances he put an end by
offering to play for her a “Hymn to the Sun” he had
just composed.
From that memorable Sunday morning, Frau Stenio
1ost her usual serenity of mind. She hastened to lay
her Sorrows and seek for consolation at the foot of the
confessional; but that which she heard in response from
the stern priest filled her gentle and unsophisticated
soul with dismay and almost with despair. A feeling of
fear, a sense of profound terror, which soon became a
chronic state with her, pursued her from that moment;
ner nights became disturbed and sleepless, her days
passed in prayer and lamentations. In her maternal
anxiety for the salvation of her beloved son's soul, and
for his post mortem welfare, she made a series of rash
vows. Finding that neither the Latin petition to the
Mother of God written for her by her spiritual adviser,
nor yet the humble supplications in German, addressed
by herself to every saint she had reason to believe was
residing in Paradise, worked the desired effect, she took


THE ENSOULED VIOLIN. IO3
to pilgrimages to distant shrines. During one of these
journeys to a holy chapel situated high up in the moun-
tains, she caught cold, amidst the glaciers of the Tyrol,
and redescended only to take to a sick bed, from which
she arose no more. Frau Stenio's vow had led her, in -
one sense, to the desired result. The poor woman was
now given an opportunity of seeking out in propriá per-
soná the Saints she had believed in so well, and of
pleading face to face for the recreant son, who refused
adherence to them and to the Church, scoffed at monk
and confessional, and held the organ in such horror.
Franz sincerely lamented his mother's death. Un-
aware of being the indirect cause of it, he felt no re-
morse; but selling the modest household goods and
chattels, light in purse and heart, he resolved to travel
on foot for a year or two, before settling down to any
definite profession.
A hazy desire to see the great cities of Europe, and to
try his luck in France, lurked at the bottom of this
travelling project, but his Bohemian habits of life were
too strong to be abruptly abandoned. He placed his
small capital with a banker for a rainy day, and started
on his pedestrian journey vid Germany and Austria.
His violin paid for his board and lodging in the inns
and farms on his way, and he passed his days in the
green fields and in the solemn silent woods, face to face
with Nature, dreaming all the time as usual with his
eyes open. During the three months of his pleasant
travels to and fro, he never descended for one moment
from Parnassus; but, as an alchemist transmutes lead
into gold, so he transformed everything on his way into
a song of Hesiod or Anacreon. Every evening, while
fiddling for his supper and bed, whether on a green
1awn or in the hall of a rustic inn, his fancy changed


IO4 NIGHTMARE TALES.
the whole scene for him. Village swains and maidens
became transfigured into Arcadian shepherds and
nymphs. The sand-covered floor was now a green
sward; the uncouth couples spinning round in a
measured waltz with the wild grace of tamed bears be-
came priests and priestesses of Terpsichore; the bulky,
cherry-cheeked and blue-eyed daughters of rural Ger-
many were the Hesperides circling around the trees
laden with the golden apples. Nor did the melodious
strains of the Arcadian demi-gods piping on their
syrinxes, and audible but to his own enchanted ear,
vanish with the dawn. For no sooner was the curtain
of sleep raised from his eyes than he would sally forth
into a new magic realm of day-dreams. On his way to
Some dark and solemn pine-forest, he played incessantly,
to himself and to everything else. He fiddled to the
green hill, and forthwith the mountain and the moss-
covered rocks moved forward to hear him the better, as
they had done at the sound of the Orphean lyre. He
fiddled to the merry-voiced brook, to the hurrying river,
and both slackened their speed and stopped their waves,
and, becoming silent, seemed to listen to him in an en-
tranced rapture. Even the long-legged stork who stood
meditatively on one leg on the thatched top of the rustic
mill, gravely resolving unto himself the problem of his
too-long existence, sent out after him a long and strident
cry, screeching, “Art thou Orpheus himself, O Stenio?”
It was a period of full bliss, of a daily and almost
hourly exaltation. The last words of his dying mother,
whispering to him of the horrors of eternal condemnation,
had left him unaffected, and the only vision her warning
evoked in him was that of Pluto. By a ready association
of ideas, he saw the lord of the dark nether kingdom
greeting him as he had greeted the husband of Eurydice


IO8 NIGHTMARE TALES.
Cecilia, while others said she owed it to a demon who
watched over her cradle and sung the baby to sleep.
Finally, Paganini—the unrivalled performer, the mean
Italian, who like Dryden's Jubal striking on the
“chorded shell” forced the throngs that followed him to
worship the divine sounds produced, and made people
say that “less than a God could not dwell within the
hollow of his violin”—Paganini left a legend too.
The almost supernatural art of the greatest violin-
player that the world has ever known was often specu-
lated upon, never understood. The effect produced by
him on his audience was literally marvellous, overpower-
ing. The great Rossini is said to have wept like a
sentimental German maiden on hearing him play for
the first time. The Princess Elisa of Lucca, a sister of
the great Napoleon, in whose service Paganini was, as
director of her private orchestra, for a long time was
unable to hear him play without fainting. In women he
produced nervous fits and hysterics at his will; stout-
hearted men he drove to frenzy. He changed cowards
into heroes and made the bravest soldiers feel like so
many nervous school-girls. Is it to be wondered at, then,
that hundreds of weird tales circulated for long years
about and around the mysterious Genoese, that modern
Orpheus of Europe. One of these was especially ghastly.
It was rumoured, and was believed by more people than
would probably like to confess it, that the strings of his
violin were made of human intestines, according to all the
rules and requirements of the Black Art.
Exaggerated as this idea may seem to some, it has
nothing impossible in it; and it is more than probable
that it was this legend that led to the extraordinary
events which we are about to narrate. Human organs
are often used by the Eastern Black Magician, so-called,


I IO - NIGHTMARE TALES.
T. W. Hoffmann, the celebrated author of Die E/ixire des.
Teufels, Meister Martin, and other charming and mys-
tical tales, that Councillor Crespel, in the Violin of
Cremona, was taken from the legend about Paganini.
It is, as all who have read it know, the history of a
celebrated violin, into which the voice and the soul of a
famous diva, a woman whom Crespel had loved and
killed, had passed, and to which was added the voice
of his beloved daughter, Antonia.
Nor was this superstition utterly ungrounded, nor was
Hoffmann to be blamed for adopting it, after he had
heard Paganini's playing. The extraordinary facility
with which the artist drew out of his instrument, not
only the most unearthly sounds, but positively human
voices, justified the suspicion. Such effects might well
have startled an audience and thrown terror into many
a nervous heart. Add to this the impenetrable mystery
connected with a certain period of Paganini's youth, and
the most wild tales about him must be found in a mea-
sure justifiable, and even excusable; especially among a
nation whose ancestors knew the Borgias and the Medicis
of Black Art fame.
III.
IN those pre-telegraphic days, newspapers were limited,
and the wings of fame had a heavier flight than they
have now.
Franz had hardly heard of Paganini; and when he did,
he swore he would rival, if not eclipse, the Genoese
magician. Yes, he would either become the most famous
of all living violinists, or he would break his instrument
and put an end to his life at the same time.
Old Klaus rejoiced at such a determination. He rubbed
his hands in glee, and jumping about on his lame leg like


II 2 NIGHTMARE TALES.
they pawned their watches, and with the proceeds bought
two modest seats.
Who can describe the enthusiasm, the triumphs, of
this famous, and at the same time fatal night! The
audience was frantic; 1men wept and women screamed
and fainted; while both Klaus and Stenio sat looking
paler than two ghosts. At the first touch of Paganini's
magic bow, both Franz and Samuel felt as if the icy
hand of death had touched them. Carried away by an
irresistible enthusiasm, which turned into a violent, un-
earthly mental torture, they dared neither look into each
other's faces, nor exchange one word during the whole
performance.
At midnight, while the chosen delegates of the Musical
Societies and the Conservatory of Paris unhitched the
horses, and dragged the carriage of the grand artist home
in triumph, the two Germans returned to their modest
lodging, and it was a pitiful sight to see them. Mourn-
ful and desperate, they placed themselves in their usual
seats at the fire-corner, and neither for a while opened
his mouth.
“Samuel!” at last exclaimed Franz, pale as death
itself. “Samuel—it remains for us now but to die!
Do you hear me? . . . We are worthless!
We were two madmen to have ever hoped that any one
in this world would ever rival . . . him '''
The name of Paganini stuck in his throat, as in utter
despair he fell into his arm chair.
The old professor's wrinkles suddenly became purple.
His little greenish eyes gleamed phosphorescently as,
bending toward his pupil, he whispered to him in hoarse
and broken tones:
“Neim, mein / Thou art wrong, my Franz' I have
taught thee, and thou hast learned all of the great art


THE ENSOULED VIOLIN. II3
that a simple mortal, and a Christian by baptism, can
learn from another simple mortal. Am I to blame
because these accursed Italians, in order to reign un-
equalled in the domain of art, have recourse to Satan
and the diabolical effects of Black Magic?”
Franz turned his eyes upon his old master. There
was a sinister light burning in those glittering orbs; a
light telling plainly, that, to secure such a power, he,
too, would not scruple to sell himself, body and soul, to
the Evil One.
But he said not a word, and, turning his eyes from his
old master's face, gazed dreamily at the dying embers.
The same long-forgotten incoherent dreams, which,
after seeming such realities to him in his younger days,
had been given up entirely, and had gradually faded
from his mind, now crowded back into it with the same
force and vividness as of old. The grimacing shades of
Ixion, Sisyphus and Tantalus resurrected and stood
before him, saying:
“What matters hell—in which thou believest not.
And even if hell there be, it is the hell described by the
old Greeks, not that of the modern bigots—a locality
full of conscious shadows, to whom thou canst be a
second Orpheus.”
Franz felt that he was going mad, and, turning instinc-
tively, he looked his old master once more right in the
face. Then his bloodshot eye evaded the gaze of Klaus.
Whether Samuel understood the terrible state of mind
of his pupil, or whether he wanted to draw him out, to
make him speak, and thus to divert his thoughts, must
remain as hypothetical to the reader as it is to the
writer. Whatever may have been in his mind, the
German enthusiast went on, speaking with a feigned
calmness: - 8


II4 NIGHTMARE TALES.
“Franz, my dear boy, I tell you that the art of the
accursed Italian is not natural; that it is due neither to
study nor to genius. It never was acquired in the usual,
natural way. You need not stare at me in that wild
manner, for what I say is in the mouth of millions of
people. Listen to what I now tell you, and try to
understand. You have heard the strange tale whispered
about the famous Tartini? He died one fine Sabbath
night, strangled by his familiar demon, who had taught
him how to endow his violin with a human voice, by
shutting up in it, by means of incantations, the soul of
a young virgin. Paganini did more. In order to endow
his instrument with the faculty of emitting human
sounds, such as sobs, despairing cries, supplications,
moans of love and fury—in short, the most heart-rend-
ing notes of the human voice—Paganini became the
murderer not only of his wife and his mistress, but also
of a friend, who was more tenderly attached to him than
any other being on this earth. He then made the four
chords of his magic violin out of the intestines of his
last victim. This is the secret of his enchanting talent,
of that overpowering melody, that combination of
sounds, which you will never be able to master
unless .”
The old man could not finish the sentence. He stag-
gered back before the fiendish look of his pupil, and
covered his face with his hands.
Franz was breathing heavily, and his eyes had an
expression which reminded Klaus of those of a hyena.
His pallor was cadaverous. For some time he could not
speak, but only gasped for breath. At last he slowly
muttered:
“Are you in earnest?”
“I am, as I hope to help you.”


THE ENSOULED VIOLIN. II5
“And . . . and do you really believe that had I
Only the means of obtaining human intestines for strings,
I could rival Paganini?” asked Franz, after a moment's
pause, and casting down his eyes. -
The old German unveiled his face, and, with a strange
look of determination upon it, softly answered:
“Human intestines alone are not sufficient for our
purpose; they must have belonged to some one who had
loved us well, with an unselfish, holy love. Tartini
endowed his violin with the life of a virgin; but that
virgin had died of unrequited love for him. The fiendish
artist had prepared beforehand a tube, in which he
managed to catch her last breath as she expired, pro-
nouncing his beloved name, and he then transferred
this breath to his violin. As to Paganini, I have just
told you his tale. It was with the consent of his victim,
though, that he murdered him to get possession of his
intestines.
“Oh, for the power of the human voice!” Samuel
went on, after a brief pause. “What can equal the
eloquence, the magic spell of the human voice? Do you
think, my poor boy, I would not have taught you this
great, this final secret, were it not that it throws one
right into the clutches of him . . . who must remain
unnamed at night?” he added, with a sudden return to
the superstitions of his youth.
Franz did not answer; but with a calmness awful to
behold, he left his place, took down his violin from the
wall where it was hanging, and, with one powerful grasp
of the chords, he tore them out and flung them into the
fire.
Samuel suppressed a cry of horror. The chords were
hissing upon the coals, where, among the blazing logs,
they wriggled and curled like so many living snakes.


THE ENSOULED VIOLIN. II9
such a horrible idea as the sacrifice of his old master to
his ambition had ever entered his mind? Hardly. The
only immediate result of his fatal illness was, that as, by
reason of his vow, his artistic passion could find no
issue, another passion awoke, which might avail to feed
his ambition and his insatiable fancy. He plunged
headlong into the study of the Occult Arts, of Alchemy
and of Magic. In the practice of Magic the young
dreamer sought to stifle the voice of his passionate
longing for his, as he thought, for ever lost violin. .
Weeks and months passed away, and the conversation
about Paganini was never resumed between the master
and the pupil. But a profound melancholy had taken
possession of Franz, the two hardly exchanged a word,
the violin hung mute, chordless, full of dust, in its
habitual place. It was as the presence of a soulless
corpse between them.
The young man had become gloomy and sarcastic,
even avoiding the mention of music. Once, as his old
professor, after long hesitation, took out his own violin
from its dust-covered case and prepared to play, Franz
gave a convulsive shudder, but said nothing. At the
first notes of the bow, however, he glared like a madman,
and rushing out of the house, remained for hours, wan-
dering in the streets. Then old Samuel in his turn
threw his instrument down, and locked himself up in his
room till the following morning.
One night as Franz sat, looking particularly pale and
gloomy, old Samuel suddenly jumped from his seat,
and after hopping about the room in a magpie fashion,
approached his pupil, imprinted a fond kiss upon the
young man's brow, and Squeaked at the top of his shrill
voice:
“Is it not time to put an end to all this?”


THE ENSOULED VIOLIN. I25
“Franz, my beloved boy. . . . . Franz, I cannot,
no, I cannot separate myself from . . . . them /*
And “they” twanged piteously inside the case.
Franz stood speechless, horror-bound. He felt his
blood actually freezing, and his hair moving and stand-
ing erect on his head.
“It’s but a dream, an empty dream!” he attempted
to formulate in his mind.
“I have tried my best, Franzchen. . . . I have
tried my best to sever myself from these accursed strings,
without pulling them to pieces . . .” pleaded the
same shrill, familiar voice. “Wilt thou help me to do
so? . . .”
Another twang, still more prolonged and dismal, re-
sounded within the case, now dragged about the table
in every direction, by some interior power, like some
living, wriggling thing, the twangs becoming sharper
and more jerky with every new pull.
It was not for the first time that Stenio heard those
sounds. He had often remarked them before—indeed,
ever since he had used his master's viscera as a foot-
stool for his own ambition. But on every occasion a
feeling of creeping horror had prevented him from in-
vestigating their cause, and he had tried to assure him-
self that the sounds were only a hallucination.
But now he stood face to face with the terrible fact,
whether in dream or in reality he knew not, nor did he
care, since the hallucination—if hallucination it were—
was far more real and vivid than any reality. He tried
to speak, to take a step forward; but, as often happens
in nightmares, he could neither utter a word nor move
a finger. . . . . He felt hopelessly paralyzed.
The pulls and jerks were becoming more desperate
with each moment, and at last something inside the


I26 NIGHTMARE TALES.
case snapped violently. The vision of his Stradivarius,
devoid of its magical strings, flashed before his eyes,
throwing him into a cold sweat of mute and unspeak-
able terror.
He made a superhuman effort to rid himself of the
incubus that held him spell-bound. But as the last
supplicating whisper of the invisible Presence repeated:
“Do, oh, do . . . . help me to cut myself off 22
Franz sprang to the case with one bound, like an
enraged tiger defending its prey, and with one frantic
effort breaking the spell.
“Leave the violin alone, you old fiend from hell!” he
cried, in hoarse and trembling tones.
He violently shut down the self-raising lid, and while
firmly pressing his left hand on it, he seized with the
right a piece of rosin from the table and drew on the
leather-covered top the sign of the six-pointed star—
the seal used by King Solomon to bottle up the rebel-
lious djins inside their prisons.
A wail, like the howl of a she-wolf moaning over her
dead little ones, came out of the violin-case:
“Thou art ungrateful . . . very ungrateful, my
Franzl” sobbed the blubbering “spirit-voice.” “But I
forgive . . . for I still love thee well. Yet thou
canst not shut me in . . . boy. Behold!”
And instantly a grayish mist spread over and covered
case and table, and rising upward formed itself first into
an indistinct shape. Then it began growing, and as it
grew, Franz felt himself gradually enfolded in cold and
damp coils, slimy as those of a huge snake. He gave a
terrible cry and—awoke; but, strangely enough, not on
his bed, but near the table, just as he had dreamed,
pressing the violin case desperately with both his hands.
“It was but a dream, . . after all,” he muttered,


I28 NIGHTMARE TALES.
the bow away. He had recognized the familiar laugh,
and would have no more of it. Dressing, he locked
the bedevilled violin securely in its case, and, taking it
with him to the dining-room, determined to await quietly
the hour of trial.
VI.
THE terrible hour of the struggle had come, and
Stenio was at his post—calm, resolute, almost smiling.
The theatre was crowded to suffocation, and there was
not even standing room to be got for any amount of hard
cash or favouritism. The singular challenge had reached
every quarter to which the post could carry it, and gold
flowed freely into Paganini's unfathomable pockets, to an
extent almost satisfying even to his insatiate and venal
Soul.
It was arranged that Paganini should begin. When
he appeared upon the stage, the thick walls of the
theatre shook to their foundations with the applause
that greeted him. He began and ended his famous
composition “The Witches” amid a storm of cheers.
The shouts of public enthusiasm lasted so long that
Franz began to think his turn would never come.
When, at last, Paganini, amid the roaring applause of a
frantic public, was allowed to retire behind the scenes,
his eye fell upon Stenio, who was tuning his violin, and
he felt amazed at the serene calmness, the air of assur-
ance, of the unknown German artist.
When Franz approached the footlights, he was re-
ceived with icy coldness. But for all that, he did not
feel in the least disconcerted. He looked very pale, but
his thin white lips wore a scornful smile as response to
this dumb unwelcome. He was sure of his triumph.


THE ENSOULEID VIOLIN. I29
At the first notes of the prelude of “The Witches” a
thrill of astonishment passed over the audience. It was
Paganini's touch, and—it was something more. Some—
and they were the majority—thought that never, in his
best moments of inspiration, had the Italian artist him-
Self, in executing that diabolical composition of his, ex-
hibited such an extraordinary diabolical power. Under
the pressure of the long muscular fingers of Franz, the
chords shivered like the palpitating intestines of a dis-
embowelled victim under the vivisector's knife. They
moaned melodiously, like a dying child. The large blue
eye of the artist, fixed with a satanic expression upon the
Sounding-board, seemed to summon forth Orpheus him-
self from the infernal regions, rather than the musical
notes supposed to be generated in the depths of the violin.
shapes, thickly and precipitately gathering as at the evo-
cation of a mighty magician, and to be whirling around
him, like a host of fantastic, infernal figures, dancing the
witches’ “goat dance.” In the empty depths of the
shadowy background of the stage, behind the artist, a
nameless phantasmagoria, produced by the concussion
of unearthly vibrations, seemed to form pictures of
shameless orgies, of the voluptuous hymens of a real
witches' Sabbat. . . . . A collective hallucination
took hold of the public. Panting for breath, ghastly, and
trickling with the icy perspiration of an inexpressible
horror, they sat spell-bound, and unable to break the
spell of the music by the slightest riotion. They ex-
perienced all the illicit enervating deſights of the paradise
of Mahommed, that come into the disordered fancy of
an opium-eating Mussulman, and felt at the same time
the abject terror, the agony of one who struggles against
an attack of deſirium tremens. . . . . Many ladies
9


I3O NIGHTMARE TALES.
shrieked aloud, others fainted, and strong inen gnashed
their teeth in a state of utter helplessness. . . .
Then came the finale. Thundering uninterrupted
applause delayed its beginning, expanding the momen-
tary pause to a duration of almost a quarter of an hour.
The bravos were furious, almost hysterical. At last, when
after a profound and last bow, Stenio, whose smile was
as sardonic as it was triumphant, lifted his bow to attack
the famous finale, his eye fell upon Paganini, who,
calmly seated in the manager's box, had been behind
none in zealous applause. The small and piercing black
eyes of the Genoese artist were riveted to the Stradi-
varius in the hands of Franz, but otherwise he seemed
quite cool and unconcerned. His rival's face troubled
bim for one short instant, but he regained his self-
possession and, lifting once more his bow, drew the first
11Ote.
Then the public enthusiasm reached its acme, and
soon knew no bounds. The listeners heard and saw
indeed. The witches' voices resounded in the air, and
beyond all the other voices, one voice was heard—
Discordant, and unlike to human sounds;
It seem'd of dogs the bark, of wolves the howl;
The doleful screechings of the midnight owl;
The hiss of snakes, the hungry lion's roar;
The sounds of billows beating on the shore;
The groan of winds among the leafy wood,
And burst of thunder from the rending cloud;—
'Twas these, all these in one.
The magic bow was drawing forth its last quivering
sounds—famous among prodigious musical feats—imita-
ting the precipitate flight of the witches before bright
dawn; of the unholy women saturated with the fumes of
their nocturnal Saturnalia, when—a strange thing came


THE ENSOULED VIOLIN. I31
to pass on the stage. Without the slightest transition,
the notes suddenly changed. In their aerial flight of
ascension and descent, their melody was unexpectedly
altered in character. The sounds became confused,
scattered, disconnected . . . . and then—it seemed
from the sounding-board of the violin—came out squeak-
ing, jarring tones, like those of a street Punch, scream-
ing at the top of a senile voice: -
“Art thou satisfied, Franz, my boy? . . . . Have
not I gloriously kept my promise, eh?”
The spell was broken. Though still unable to realize
the whole situation, those who heard the voice and the
Punchinello-like tones, were freed, as by enchantment,
from the terrible charm under which they had been
held. Loud roars of laughter, mocking exclamations of
half-anger and half-irritation were now heard from every
corner of the vast theatre. The musicians in the or-
chestra, with faces still blanched from weird emotion,
were now seen shaking with laughter, and the whole
audience rose, like one man, from their seats, unable yet
to solve the enigma; they felt, nevertheless, too dis-
gusted, too disposed to laugh to remain one moment
longer in the building.
But suddenly the sea of moving heads in the stalls
and the pit became once more motionless, and stood
petrified as though struck by lightning. What all saw
was terrible enough—the handsome though wild face of
the young artist suddenly aged, and his graceful, erect
figure bent down, as though under the weight of years;
but this was nothing to that which some of the most
sensitive clearly perceived. Franz Stenio's person was
now entirely enveloped in a semi-transparent mist,
cloud-like, creeping with serpentine motion, and gra-
dually tightening round the living form, as though ready


THE ENSOULED VIOLIN. I33
his proverbial meanness notwithstanding, settled the
hotel-bill and had poor Stenio buried at his own
expense.
He claimed, however, in exchange, the fragments of
the Stradivarius—as a memento of the strange event.
THE END.





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