Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/138

 without care or order, and covered with dust and cobwebs. Then he led me into a large laboratory, of which every part was crammed with bottles of chemicals, retorts, crucibles, papers, more old books and pictures, more strange instruments, and all kinds of learned litter. A small furnace was at one end of the room, and beside it a still.

"You see the nature of my employment," Mr. Volt began, when he had begged me to be seated in a tall old-fashioned chair. "My time is occupied in chemical research. It is a wide field, sir, a wide field. It is true we seekers have found neither the philosopher's stone, nor the elixir vitæ, nor the alcahest; but in seeking them through speculative chemistry, we have found the secrets of steam, gas, electricity. It is good still to keep before us the three old aims of the alchemists; the more so, I think, if they never be attained, since they stimulate search. When we give up dreaming of wonders yet unrealised, we shall give up seeking."

"Am I to suppose," I said, "that you have yourself contributed an important discovery to science?"

"I don't know. I can scarcely tell," replied Mr. Volt, hesitating. "I fear it is in advance of the age." The eyes of the old man assumed a singular look of fulness, and the pupils became dilated. "You will probably be sceptical when I tell you that I have discovered a certain solvent by which to resolve the being we call man, at will, into his primitive elements of body and spirit: allowing the spirit by itself to travel over the universe, free from the gross trammels of the fleshly element."

"You do not mean to imply that you can go out of your body at pleasure?" I asked, doubtful of Mr. Volt's sanity.

"I do mean no less, and probably more," he replied, with composure.

"Surely it is more easy to go out of your mind," I observed.

"A jest is but a poor answer to a fact proved by experience. Still I will accept your very retort as an evidence how plausible my position really is. If it be so easy as you suppose for a man to go out of his mind (which, to me, involves a contradiction in terms, since I hold the mind to be the man himself), it surely must be less difficult to suppose he can go out of his body; which, I take it, is but the external idea of the man. For my own part I have been a great traveller, although my external idea has not left Firvorth for many years. I explored Central Africa long before Livingstone. I am familiar with the whole tract of Abyssinia, and have investigated all the territory of Japan. Dreams, you say? The publishers say the same. Although I have written volumes on the subject of my travels, no one will print them, simply on the ground that I was not foolish enough to waste time and endanger my life on long sea voyages, when I could travel quicker without. I made the first step in my grand discovery," Mr. Volt went on, and I saw that argument was out of the question, "accidentally. Your friend, Mark Stedburn, who occasionally practises chemistry with me, was, at my suggestion, combining olefiant gas and iodine in a peculiar manner over the furnace, to produce a vapour of iodic ether at a high temperature with which to experiment. When heated to three hundred and eighty degrees, fumes of a pale violet colour and of a penetrating ethereal odour, rose from the crucible, dispersing themselves in wreathing clouds about the room. I remembered at this moment having made a very important omission in the directions I had given him, but feared to speak, as the operation on which he was engaged was of so delicate and absorbing a nature, that to disturb him even by a word would have involved his going through the whole process again. At the time I wished very strongly that he would take a certain book from a shelf beside him, and refer to section two hundred and seventeen, where he would find the omitted direction. His back was towards me at the moment, but I saw him reach down the book and refer to the place. When he had completed the experiment successfully, I inquired what had led him to take down that book? His reply was: 'I felt you had told me to do so.' Reflection convinced me that I had unknowingly projected my mind upon his; and I had reason to believe that the pale violet vapour had rendered this easier of accomplishment than under ordinary circumstances. I thereupon commenced a series of experiments with a view to ascertain how far it would be possible to carry out this principle of the projection of mind. I find it is first of all needful so to refine the body, by a course of low vegetable diet, succeeded by a day's fasting, that the spirit shall withdraw itself from its outposts and become gradually detached from the external idea, every part of which must be brought into abject subjugation to the will. Then, after inhaling the pale violet vapour for fifteen minutes, I take a small quantity of confection from this box, and, remaining in the heated fumes of the vapour, can distil the spirit from my body in a pure essence, as easily as we distil the spirit from any other earthly body. I thus obtain pure concentrated mind. In this state I can either travel—not involuntarily as in dreams, but consciously and under the direction of my own will—or I can project my mind on that of another person, and live in him and direct him for the time being, while my own body appears to sleep."

"May I ask of what this confection consists?" I said, very sceptically indeed. Mr. Volt placed in my hand a small tortoise-shell box, containing a dull greenish paste.

"That is the true 'hatchis,'" he explained; "it is made of many ingredients, but Indian hemp, and a peculiarly volatile preparation of opium, are two of its active principles."

"And the vapour?"

"No; that is my secret. But," he continued, dropping his voice almost to a whisper, "I meditate a still greater experiment in the projection of mind than any I have hitherto attempted. I propose for Mark Stedburn and