ce; test it, and in the spirit."

And, as he spoke, his hand rested lightly on my head. Hitherto, amidst
a surprise not unmixed with awe, I had preserved a certain defiance, a
certain distrust. I had been, as it were, on my guard.

But as those words were spoken, as that hand rested on my head, as that
perfume arose from the lamp, all power of will deserted me. My first
sensation was that of passive subjugation; but soon I was aware of a
strange intoxicating effect from the odour of the lamp, round which
there now played a dazzling vapour. The room swam before me. Like a man
oppressed by a nightmare, I tried to move, to cry out, feeling that to
do so would suffice to burst the thrall that bound me: in vain.

A time that seemed to me inexorably long, but which, as I found
afterwards, could only have occupied a few seconds, elapsed in this
preliminary state, which, however powerless, was not without a vague
luxurious sense of delight. And then suddenly came pain,--pain, that in
rapid gradations passed into a rending agony. Every bone, sinew, nerve,
fibre of the body, seemed as if wrenched open, and as if some hitherto
unconjectured Presence in the vital organization were forcing itself
to light with all the pangs of travail. The veins seemed swollen to
bursting, the heart labouring to maintain its action by fierce spasms. I
feel in this description how language fails me. Enough that the anguish
I then endured surpassed all that I have ever experienced of physical
pain. This dreadful interval subsided as suddenly as it had commenced.
I felt as if a something undefinable by any name had rushed from me,
and in that rush that a struggle was over. I was sensible of the passive
bliss which attends the release from torture, and then there grew on
me a wonderful calm, and, in that calm, a consciousness of some lofty
intelligence immeasurably beyond that which human memory gathers from
earthly knowledge. I saw before me the still rigid form of Margrave, and
my sight seemed, with ease, to penetrate through its covering of flesh,
and to survey the mechanism of the whole interior being.

"View that tenement of clay which now seems so fair, as it was when I
last beheld it, three years ago, in the house of Haroun of Aleppo!"

I looked, and gradually, and as shade after shade falls on the mountain
side, while the clouds gather, and the sun vanishes at last, so the form
and face on which I looked changed from exuberant youth into infi