The Blindmans World | Page 3

know what they had been grew upon me, till it became a longing which
left me no repose. It seemed intolerable that I should have secrets from
myself, that my soul should withhold its experiences from my intellect.
I would gladly have consented that the acquisitions of half my waking
lifetime should be blotted out, if so be in exchange I might be shown
the record of what I had seen and known during those hours of which
my waking memory showed no trace. None the less for the conviction
of its hopelessness, but rather all the more, as the perversity of our
human nature will have it, the longing for this forbidden lore grew on

me, till the hunger of Eve in the Garden was mine.
Constantly brooding over a desire that I felt to be vain, tantalized by the
possession of a clue which only mocked me, my physical condition
became at length affected. My health was disturbed and my rest at night
was broken. A habit of walking in my sleep, from which I had not
suffered since childhood, recurred, and caused me frequent
inconvenience. Such had been, in general, my condition for some time,
when I awoke one morning with the strangely weary sensation by
which my body usually betrayed the secret of the impositions put upon
it in sleep, of which otherwise I should often have suspected nothing. In
going into the study connected with my chamber, I found a number of
freshly written sheets on the desk. Astonished that any one should have
been in my rooms while I slept, I was astounded, on looking more
closely, to observe that the handwriting was my own. How much more
than astounded I was on reading the matter that had been set down, the
reader may judge if he shall peruse it. For these written sheets
apparently contained the longed-for but despaired-of record of those
hours when I was absent from the body. They were the lost chapter of
my life; or rather, not lost at all, for it had been no part of my waking
life, but a stolen chapter,--stolen from that sleep-memory on whose
mysterious tablets may well be inscribed tales as much more marvelous
than this as this is stranger than most stories.
It will be remembered that my last recollection before awaking in my
bed, on the morning after the swoon, was of contemplating the coast of
Kepler Land with an unusual concentration of attention. As well as I
can judge,--and that is no better than any one else,--it is with the
moment that my bodily powers succumbed and I became unconscious
that the narrative which I found on my desk begins.
Even had I not come as straight and swift as the beam of light that
made my path, a glance about would have told me to what part of the
universe I had fared. No earthly landscape could have been more
familiar. I stood on the high coast of Kepler Land where it trends
southward. A brisk westerly wind was blowing and the waves of the
ocean of De La Bue were thundering at my feet, while the broad blue

waters of Christie Bay stretched away to the southwest. Against the
northern horizon, rising out of the ocean like a summer thunder-head,
for which at first I mistook it, towered the far-distant, snowy summit of
Mount Hall.
Even had the configuration of land and sea been less familiar, I should
none the less have known that I stood on the planet whose ruddy hue is
at once the admiration and puzzle of astronomers. Its explanation I now
recognized in the tint of the atmosphere, a coloring comparable to the
haze of Indian summer, except that its hue was a faint rose instead of
purple. Like the Indian summer haze, it was impalpable, and without
impeding the view bathed all objects near and far in a glamour not to be
described. As the gaze turned upward, however, the deep blue of space
so far overcame the roseate tint that one might fancy he were still on
Earth.
As I looked about me I saw many men, women, and children. They
were in no respect dissimilar, so far as I could see, to the men, women,
and children of the Earth, save for something almost childlike in the
untroubled serenity of their faces, unfurrowed as they were by any trace
of care, of fear, or of anxiety. This extraordinary youthful-ness of
aspect made it difficult, indeed, save by careful scrutiny, to distinguish
the young from the middle-aged, maturity from advanced years. Time
seemed to have no tooth on Mars.
I was gazing about me, admiring this crimson-lighted world, and these
people who appeared to hold happiness by a tenure so much firmer than
men's,