“Any one,—­even without magnetic influence being brought to bear upon him, might have visions such as mine!  Take an opium-eater, for instance, whose life is one long confused vista of visions,—­ suppose he were to accept all the wild suggestions offered to his drugged brain, and persist in following them out to some sort of definite conclusion,—­the only place for that man would be a lunatic asylum.  Even the most ordinary persons, whose minds are never excited in any abnormal way, are subject to very curious and inexplicable dreams,—­but for all that, they are not such fools as to believe in them.  True, there is my poem,—­I don’t know how I wrote it, yet written it is, and complete from beginning to end—­ an actual tangible result of my vision, and strange enough in its way, to say the least of it.  But what is stranger still is that I love the radiant phantom that I saw ... yes, actually love her with a love no mere woman, were she fair as Troy’s Helen, could ever arouse in me!  Of course,—­in spite of the contrary assertions made by that remarkably interesting Chaldean monk Heliobas,—­I feel I am the victim of a brain-delusion,—­therefore it is just as well I should see this ‘field of Ardath’ and satisfy myself that nothing comes of it—­in which case I shall be cured of my craze.”

He walked on for some time, and presently stopped a moment to examine his map by the light of the moon.  As he did so, he became aware of the extraordinary, almost terrible, stillness surrounding him.  He had thought the “Hermitage” silent as a closed tomb—­but it was nothing to the silence here.  He felt it inclosing him like a thick wall on all sides,—­he heard the regular pulsations of his own heart—­even the rushing of his own blood—­but no other sound was audible.  Earth and the air seemed breathless, as though with some pent-up mysterious excitement,—­the stars were like so many large living eyes eagerly gazing down on the solitary human being who thus wandered at night in the land of the prophets of old—­the moon itself appeared to stare at him in open wonderment.  He grew uncomfortably conscious of this speechless watchfulness of nature,—­he strained his ears to listen, as it were to the deepening dumbness of all existing things,—­and to conquer the strange sensations that were overcoming him, he proceeded at a more rapid pace,—­but in two or three minutes came again to an abrupt halt.  For there in front of him, right across his path, lay the fallen pillar which, according to Heliobas, marked the boundary to the field he sought!  Another glance at his map decided the position ... he had reached his journey’s end at last!  What was the time?  He looked—­it was just twenty minutes past eleven.