The Great God Pan | Page 4

and Browne Faber's
discoveries. Theories and discoveries! Where they are standing now, I
stood fifteen years ago, and I need not tell you that I have not been
standing still for the last fifteen years. It will be enough if I say that five
years ago I made the discovery that I alluded to when I said that ten
years ago I reached the goal. After years of labour, after years of toiling
and groping in the dark, after days and nights of disappointments and
sometimes of despair, in which I used now and then to tremble and
grow cold with the thought that perhaps there were others seeking for
what I sought, at last, after so long, a pang of sudden joy thrilled my
soul, and I knew the long journey was at an end. By what seemed then
and still seems a chance, the suggestion of a moment's idle thought
followed up upon familiar lines and paths that I had tracked a hundred
times already, the great truth burst upon me, and I saw, mapped out in
lines of sight, a whole world, a sphere unknown; continents and islands,
and great oceans in which no ship has sailed (to my belief) since a Man

first lifted up his eyes and beheld the sun, and the stars of heaven, and
the quiet earth beneath. You will think this all high-flown language,
Clarke, but it is hard to be literal. And yet; I do not know whether what
I am hinting at cannot be set forth in plain and lonely terms. For
instance, this world of ours is pretty well girded now with the telegraph
wires and cables; thought, with something less than the speed of
thought, flashes from sunrise to sunset, from north to south, across the
floods and the desert places. Suppose that an electrician of today were
suddenly to perceive that he and his friends have merely been playing
with pebbles and mistaking them for the foundations of the world;
suppose that such a man saw uttermost space lie open before the
current, and words of men flash forth to the sun and beyond the sun
into the systems beyond, and the voice of articulate-speaking men echo
in the waste void that bounds our thought. As analogies go, that is a
pretty good analogy of what I have done; you can understand now a
little of what I felt as I stood here one evening; it was a summer
evening, and the valley looked much as it does now; I stood here, and
saw before me the unutterable, the unthinkable gulf that yawns
profound between two worlds, the world of matter and the world of
spirit; I saw the great empty deep stretch dim before me, and in that
instant a bridge of light leapt from the earth to the unknown shore, and
the abyss was spanned. You may look in Browne Faber's book, if you
like, and you will find that to the present day men of science are unable
to account for the presence, or to specify the functions of a certain
group of nerve-cells in the brain. That group is, as it were, land to let, a
mere waste place for fanciful theories. I am not in the position of
Browne Faber and the specialists, I am perfectly instructed as to the
possible functions of those nerve-centers in the scheme of things. With
a touch I can bring them into play, with a touch, I say, I can set free the
current, with a touch I can complete the communication between this
world of sense and--we shall be able to finish the sentence later on. Yes,
the knife is necessary; but think what that knife will effect. It will level
utterly the solid wall of sense, and probably, for the first time since
man was made, a spirit will gaze on a spirit-world. Clarke, Mary will
see the god Pan!"
"But you remember what you wrote to me? I thought it would be

requisite that she--"
He whispered the rest into the doctor's ear.
"Not at all, not at all. That is nonsense. I assure you. Indeed, it is better
as it is; I am quite certain of that."
"Consider the matter well, Raymond. It's a great responsibility.
Something might go wrong; you would be a miserable man for the rest
of your days."
"No, I think not, even if the worst happened. As you know, I rescued
Mary from the gutter, and from almost certain starvation, when she was
a child; I think her life is mine, to use as I see fit. Come, it's getting late;
we had better go in."
Dr. Raymond led the way into the house, through the hall, and down a
long dark passage. He took a key from his