This skillful coloring of our train of thought produced in our subsequent visions a corresponding tone.  The splendors of Arabian fairyland dyed our dreams.  We paced the narrow strip of grass with the tread and port of kings.  The song of the rana arborea, while he clung to the bark of the ragged plum-tree, sounded like the strains of divine musicians.  Houses, walls, and streets melted like rain clouds, and vistas of unimaginable glory stretched away before us.  It was a rapturous companionship.  We enjoyed the vast delight more perfectly because, even in our most ecstatic moments, we were conscious of each other’s presence.  Our pleasures, while individual, were still twin, vibrating and moving in musical accord.

On the evening in question, the tenth of July, the Doctor and myself drifted into an unusually metaphysical mood.  We lit our large meerschaums, filled with fine Turkish tobacco, in the core of which burned a little black nut of opium, that, like the nut in the fairy tale, held within its narrow limits wonders beyond the reach of kings; we paced to and fro, conversing.  A strange perversity dominated the currents of our thought.  They would not flow through the sun-lit channels into which we strove to divert them.  For some unaccountable reason, they constantly diverged into dark and lonesome beds, where a continual gloom brooded.  It was in vain that, after our old fashion, we flung ourselves on the shores of the East, and talked of its gay bazaars, of the splendors of the time of Haroun, of harems and golden palaces.  Black afreets continually arose from the depths of our talk, and expanded, like the one the fisherman released from the copper vessel, until they blotted everything bright from our vision.  Insensibly, we yielded to the occult force that swayed us, and indulged in gloomy speculation.  We had talked some time upon the proneness of the human mind to mysticism, and the almost universal love of the terrible, when Hammond suddenly said to me.  “What do you consider to be the greatest element of terror?”

The question puzzled me.  That many things were terrible, I knew.  Stumbling over a corpse in the dark; beholding, as I once did, a woman floating down a deep and rapid river, with wildly lifted arms, and awful, upturned face, uttering, as she drifted, shrieks that rent one’s heart while we, spectators, stood frozen at a window which overhung the river at a height of sixty feet, unable to make the slightest effort to save her, but dumbly watching her last supreme agony and her disappearance.  A shattered wreck, with no life visible, encountered floating listlessly on the ocean, is a terrible object, for it suggests a huge terror, the proportions of which are veiled.  But it now struck me, for the first time, that there must be one great and ruling embodiment of fear,—­a King of Terrors, to which all others must succumb.  What might it be?  To what train of circumstances would it owe its existence?