For Lucian this was a spectacle that enchanted many hours; leaning on one hand, he would gaze at the city glowing in the sunlight till the purple shadows grew down the slopes and the long melodious trumpet sounded for the evening watch.  Then, as he strolled beneath the trellises, he would see all the radiant facets glimmering out, and the city faded into haze, a white wall shining here and there, and the gardens veiled in a dim glow of color.  On such an evening he would go home with the sense that he had truly lived a day, having received for many hours the most acute impressions of beautiful color.

Often he spent the night in the cool court of his villa, lying amidst soft cushions heaped upon the marble bench.  A lamp stood on the table at his elbow, its light making the water in the cistern twinkle.  There was no sound in the court except the soft continual plashing of the fountain.  Throughout these still hours he would meditate, and he became more than ever convinced that man could, if he pleased, become lord of his own sensations.  This, surely, was the true meaning concealed under the beautiful symbolism of alchemy.  Some years before he had read many of the wonderful alchemical books of the later Middle Ages, and had suspected that something other than the turning of lead into gold was intended.  This impression was deepened when he looked into Lumen de Lumine by Vaughan, the brother of the Silurist, and he had long puzzled himself in the endeavor to find a reasonable interpretation of the hermetic mystery, and of the red powder, “glistening and glorious in the sun.”  And the solution shone out at last, bright and amazing, as he lay quiet in the court of Avallaunius.  He knew that he himself had solved the riddle, that he held in his hand the powder of projection, the philosopher’s stone transmuting all it touched to fine gold; the gold of exquisite impressions.  He understood now something of the alchemical symbolism; the crucible and the furnace, the “Green Dragon,” and the “Son Blessed of the Fire” had, he saw, a peculiar meaning.  He understood, too, why the uninitiated were warned of the terror and danger through which they must pass; and the vehemence with which the adepts disclaimed all desire for material riches no longer struck him as singular.  The wise man does not endure the torture of the furnace in order that he may be able to compete with operators in pork and company promoters; neither a steam yacht, nor a grouse-moor, nor three liveried footmen would add at all to his gratifications.  Again Lucian said to himself: 

“Only in the court of Avallaunius is the true science of the exquisite to be found.”

He saw the true gold into which the beggarly matter of existence may be transmuted by spagyric art; a succession of delicious moments, all the rare flavors of life concentrated, purged of their lees, and preserved in a beautiful vessel.  The moonlight fell green on the fountain and on the curious pavements, and in the long sweet silence of the night he lay still and felt that thought itself was an acute pleasure, to be expressed perhaps in terms of odor or color by the true artist.