that laughter, my vision shifted into another scene. I had
laughed until my eyes overflowed profusely. Every drop that fell,
immediately became a large loaf of bread, and tumbled upon the shop-board
of a baker in the bazaar at Damascus. The more I laughed, the faster the
loaves fell, until such a pile was raised about the baker, that I could
hardly see the top of his head. "The man will be suffocated," I cried,
"but if he were to die, I cannot stop!"

My perceptions now became more dim and confused. I felt that I was in the
grasp of some giant force; and, in the glimmering of my fading reason,
grew earnestly alarmed, for the terrible stress under which my frame
labored increased every moment. A fierce and furious heat radiated from my
stomach throughout my system; my mouth and throat were as dry and hard as
if made of brass, and my tongue, it seemed to me, was a bar of rusty iron.
I seized a pitcher of water, and drank long and deeply; but I might as
well have drunk so much air, for not only did it impart no moisture, but
my palate and throat gave me no intelligence of having drunk at all. I
stood in the centre of the room, brandishing my arms convulsively, an
heaving sighs that seemed to shatter my whole being. "Will no one," I
cried in distress, "cast out this devil that has possession of me?" I no
longer saw the room nor my friends, but I heard one of them saying, "It
must be real; he could not counterfeit such an expression as that. But it
don't look much like pleasure." Immediately afterwards there was a scream
of the wildest laughter, and my countryman sprang upon the floor,
exclaiming, "O, ye gods! I am a locomotive!" This was his ruling
hallucination; and, for the space of two or three hours, he continued to
pace to and fro with a measured stride, exhaling his breath in violent
jets, and when he spoke, dividing his words into syllables, each of which
he brought out with a jerk, at the same time turning his hands at his
sides, as if they were the cranks of imaginary wheels, The Englishman, as
soon as he felt the dose beginning to take effect, prudently retreated to
his own room, and what the nature of his visions was, we never learned,
for he refused to tell, and, moreover, enjoined the strictest silence on
his wife.

By this time it was nearly midnight. I had passed through the Paradise of
Hasheesh, and was plunged at once into its fiercest Hell. In my ignorance
I had taken what, I have since learned, would have