and follow it with a cup of hot tea, which, if there were really any virtue in the preparation, could not fail to call it into action.  This was done, though not without some misgivings, as we were all ignorant of the precise quantity which constituted a dose, and the limits within which the drug could be taken with safety.  It was now ten o’clock; the streets of Damascus were gradually becoming silent, and the fair city was bathed in the yellow lustre of the Syrian moon.  Only in the marble court-yard below us, a few dragomen and mukkairee lingered under the lemon-trees, and beside the fountain in the centre.

I was seated alone, nearly in the middle of the room, talking with my friends, who were lounging upon a sofa placed in a sort of alcove, at the farther end, when the same fine nervous thrill, of which I have spoken, suddenly shot through me.  But this time it was accompanied with a burning sensation at the pit of the stomach; and, instead of growing upon me with the gradual pace of healthy slumber, and resolving me, as before, into air, it came with the intensity of a pang, and shot throbbing along the nerves to the extremities of my body.  The sense of limitation—–­of the confinement of our senses within the bounds of our own flesh and blood—­instantly fell away.  The walls of my frame were burst outward and tumbled into ruin; and, without thinking what form I wore—­losing sight even of all idea of form—­I felt that I existed throughout a vast extent of space.  The blood, pulsed from my heart, sped through uncounted leagues before it reached my extremities; the air drawn into my lungs expanded into seas of limpid ether, and the arch of my skull was broader than the vault of heaven.  Within the concave that held my brain, were the fathomless deeps of blue; clouds floated there, and the winds of heaven rolled them together, and there shone the orb of the sun.  It was—­though I thought not of that at the time—­like a revelation of the mystery of omnipresence.  It is difficult to describe this sensation, or the rapidity with which it mastered me.  In the state of mental exaltation in which I was then plunged, all sensations, as they rose, suggested more or less coherent images.  They presented themselves to me in a double form:  one physical, and therefore to a certain extent tangible; the other spiritual, and revealing itself in a succession of splendid metaphors.  The physical feeling of extended being was accompanied by the image of an exploding meteor, not subsiding into darkness, but continuing to shoot from its centre or nucleus—­which corresponded to the burning spot at the pit of my stomach—­incessant adumbrations of light that finally lost themselves in the infinity of space.  To my mind, even now, this image is still the best illustration of my sensations, as I recall them; but I greatly doubt whether the reader will find it equally clear.