to smoke opium?" said Ducie, interrogatively.

"I am going to smoke drashkil. Let me, for this once, persuade you to
follow my example."

"For this once I would rather be excused," said Ducie, laughingly.

Platzoff shrugged his shoulders. "I offer to open for you the golden
gates of a land full of more strange and wondrous things than were ever
dreamed of by any early voyager as being in that new world on whose
discovery he was bent; I offer to open up for you a set of experiences
so utterly fresh and startling that your matter-of-fact English
intellect cannot even conceive of such things. I offer you all this, and
you laugh me down with an air of superiority, as though I were about to
present you with something which, however precious it might be in my
eyes, in yours was utterly without value."

"If I sin at all," said Ducie, "it is through ignorance. The subject is
one respecting which I know next to nothing. But I must confess that
about experiences such as you speak of there is an intangibility--a
want of substance--that to me would make them seem singularly
valueless."

"And is not the thing we call life one tissue of intangibilities?" asked
the Russian. "You can touch neither the beginning nor the end of it. Do
not its most cherished pleasures fly you even as you are in the very act
of trying to grasp them? Do you know for certain that you--you
yourself--are really here?--that you do not merely dream that you are
here? What do you know?"

"Your theories are too far-fetched for me," said Ducie. "A dream can be
nothing more than itself--nothing can give it backbone or substance. To
me such things are of no more value than the shadow I cast behind me
when I walk in the sun."

"And yet without substance there could be no shadow," snarled the
Russian.

"Do your experiences in any way resemble those recorded by De Quincey?"

"They do and do not," answered Platzoff. "I can often trace, or fancy
that I can, a slight connecting likeness, arising probably from the fact
that in the case of both of us a similar, or nearly similar, agent was
employed for a similar purpose. But, as a rule, the intellectual
difference between any two men is sufficient to render their experiences
in this respect utterly dissimilar."

"It does not follow, I presume, that all the visions induced by the
imbibing of opium, or what you term drashkil, are pleasant ones?"

"By no means. You cannot have forgotten what De Quincey has to say o