Chapter XVI. Powers--Old and New

by Bram Stoker

　　The time wore away, wondrous slowly in some ways, wonderfullyquickly in others. Today, in the new-found joyous certainty of thereturn of my love, I should have liked to have had Margaret all tomyself. But this day was not for love or for lovemaking. The shadow offearful expectation was over it. The more I thought over the comingexperiment, the more strange it all seemed; and the more foolish werewe who were deliberately entering upon it. It was all so stupendous, somysterious, so unnecessary! The issues were so vast; the danger sostrange, so unknown. Even if it should be successful, what newdifficulties would it not raise. What changes might happen, did menknow that the portals of the House of Death were not in very trutheternally fixed; and that the Dead could come forth again! Could werealize what it was for us modern mortals to be arrayed against theGods of Old, with their mysterious powers gotten from natural forces,or begotten of them when the world was young. When land and water wereforming themselves from out the primeval slime. When the very air waspurifying itself from elemental dross. When the 'dragons of theprime' were changing their forms and their powers, made only to combatwith geologic forces, to grow in accord with the new vegetable lifewhich was springing up around them. When animals, when even man himselfand man's advance were growths as natural as the" planetary movements,or the shining of the stars. Ay! and further back still, when as yetthe Spirit which moved on the face of the waters had not spoken thewords commanding to come into existence Light and the Life whichfollowed it. Nay, even beyond this was a still more overwhelming conjecture. Thewhole possibility of the Great Experiment to which we were now pledgedwas based on the reality of the existence of the Old Forces whichseemed to be coming in contact with the New Civilization. That therewere, and are, such cosmic forces we cannot doubt, and that theIntelligence, which is behind them, was and is. Were those primal andelemental forces controlled at any time by other than that Final Causewhich Christendom holds as its very essence? If there were truth at allin the belief of Ancient Egypt then their Gods had real existence, realpower, real force. Godhead is not a quality subject to the ills ofmortals: as in its essence it is creative and recreative, it cannotdie. Any belief to the contrary would be antagonistic to reason; for itwould hold that a part is greater than the whole. If then the Old Godsheld their forces, wherein was the supremacy of the new? Of course, ifthe Old Gods had lost their power, or if they never had any, theExperiment could not succeed. But if it should indeed succeed, or ifthere were a possibility of success, then we should be face to facewith an inference so overwhelming that one hardly dared to follow it toits conclusion. This would be: that the struggle between Life and Deathwould no longer be a matter of the earth, earthy; that the war ofsupra-elemental forces would be moved from the tangible world of factsto the Mid-Region, wherever it may be, which is the home of the Gods.Did such a region exist? What was it that Milton saw with his blindeyes in the rays of poetic light falling between him and Heaven? Whencecame that stupendous vision of the Evangelist which has for eighteencenturies held spellbound the intelligence of Christendom. Was thereroom in the Universe for opposing Gods; or if such there were, wouldthe stronger allow manifestations of power on the part of the opposingForce which would tend to the weakening of His own teaching anddesigns? Surely, surely if this supposition were correct there would besome strange and awful development--something unexpected andunpredictable--before the end should be allowed to come!The subject was too vast and, under the present conditions, too fullof strange surmises. I dared not follow it! I set myself to wait inpatience till the time should come.Margaret remained divinely calm. I think I envied her, even whilst Iadmired and loved her for it. Mr. Trelawny was nervously anxious, asindeed were the other men. With him it took the form of movement;movement both of body and mind. In both respects he was restless, goingfrom one place to another with or without a cause, or even a pretext;and changing from one subject of thought to another. Now and again hewould show glimpses of the harrowing anxiety which filled him, by hismanifest expectation of finding a similar condition in myself. He wouldbe ever explaining things. And in his explanations I could see the way.in which he was turning over in his mind all the phenomena; all thepossible causes; all the possible results. Once, in the midst of a mostlearned dissertation on the growth of Egyptian Astrology, he broke puton a different subject, or rather a branch or corollary of the same:'I do not see why starlight may not have some subtle quality of itsown! We know that other lights have special forces. The Rontgen Ray isnot the only discovery to be made in the world of light. Sunlight hasits own forces, that are not given to other lights. It warms wine; itquickens fungoid growth. Men are often moonstruck. Why not, then, amore subtle, if less active or powerful, force in the light of thestars. It should be a pure light coming through such vastness of space,and may have a quality which a pure, unimpulsive force may have. Thetime may not be far off when Astrology shall be accepted on ascientific basis. In the recrudescence of the art, many new experienceswill be brought to bear; many new phases of old wisdom will appear inthe light of fresh discovery, and afford bases for new reasoning. Menmay find that what seemed empiric deductions were in reality theresults of a loftier intelligence and a learning greater than our own.We know already that the whole of the living world is full of microbesof varying powers and of methods of working quite antagonistic. We donot know yet whether they can lie latent until quickened by some ray oflight as yet unidentified as a separate and peculiar force. As yet weknow nothing of what goes to create or evoke the active spark of life.We have no knowledge of the methods of conception; of the laws whichgovern molecular or foetal growth, of the final influences which attendbirth. Year by year, day by day, hour by hour, we are learning; but theend is far, far off. It seems to me that we are now in that stage ofintellectual progress in which the rough machinery for making discoveryis being invented. Later on, we shall have enough of first principlesto help us in the development of equipment for the true study of theinwardness of things. Then we may perhaps arrive at the perfection ofmeans to an end which the scholars of Old Nile achieved at a time whenMethuselah was beginning to brag about the number of his years, perhapseven when the great-grandchildren of Adam were coming to regard the oldman as what our Transatlantic friends call a "back number". Is itpossible, for instance, that the people who invented Astronomy did notfinally use instruments of extraordinary precision; that applied opticswas not a cult of some of the specialists in the Colleges of the Thebanpriesthood. The Egyptians were essentially specialists. It is truethat, in so far as we can judge, the range of their study was limitedto subjects connected with their aims of government on earth bycontrolling all that bore on the life to follow it. But can anyoneimagine that by the eyes of men, unaided by lenses of wondrousexcellence, Astronomy was brought to such a pitch that the trueorientation of temples and pyramids and tombs followed for fourthousand years the wanderings of the planetary systems in space. If aninstance of their knowledge of microscopy is wanted let me hazard aconjecture. How was it that in their hieroglyphic writing they took asthe symbol or determinative of "flesh" the very form which the scienceof today, relying on the revelations of a microscope of a thousandpowers, gives to protoplasm--that unit of living organism which hasbeen differentiated as Flagellula. If they could make analysis likethis, why may they not have gone further? In that wonderful atmosphereof theirs, where sunlight fierce and clear is perpetually coexistentwith day, where the dryness of earth and air gives perfect refraction,why may they not have learned secrets of light hidden from us in thedensity of our northern mists? May it not have been possible that theylearned to store light, just as we have learned to store electricity.Nay more, is it not even possible that they did so: They must have hadsome form of artificial light which they used in the construction andadornment of those vast caverns hewn in the solid rock which becamewhole cemeteries of the dead. Why, some of these caverns, with theirlabyrinthine windings and endless passages and chambers, all sculpturedand graven and painted with an elaboration of detail which absolutelybewilders one, must have taken years and years to complete. And yet inthem is no mark of smoke, such as lamps or torches would have leftbehind them. Again, if they knew how to store light, is it not possiblethat they had learned to understand and separate its componentelements? And if these men of old arrived at such a point, may not wetoo in the fullness of time? We shall see! We shall see!'There is another matter, too, on which recent discoveries inscience throw a light. It is only a glimmer at present; a glimmersufficient to illuminate probabilities, rather than actualities, oreven possibilities. The discoveries of the Curies and Laborde, of SirWilliam Crookes and Becquerel, may have far-reaching results onEgyptian investigation. This new metal, radium--or rather this oldmetal of which our knowledge is new--may have been known to theancients. Indeed it may have been used thousands of years ago ingreater degree than seems possible today. As yet Egypt has not beennamed as a place where the discovery of pitchblende, in which only asfar as is known yet radium is contained, may be made. And yet-it ismore than probable that radium exists in Egypt. That country hasperhaps the greatest masses of granite to be found in the world; andpitchblende is found as a vein in granitic rocks. In no place, at notime, has granite ever been quarried in such proportions as in Egyptduring the earlier dynasties. Who may say what great' veins ofpitchblende may not have been found in the gigantic operations ofhewing out columns for the temples, or great stones for the pyramids.Why, veins of pitchblende, of a richness unknown in our recent mines inCornwall, or Bohemia, or Saxony, or Hungary, or Turkey, or Colorado,may have been found by these old quarrymen of Aswan, or Turra, orMokattam, or Elephantine. 'Beyond this again, it is possible that here and there amongst thesevast granite quarries may have been found not merely veins but massesor pockets of pitchblende. In such case the power at the disposal ofthose who knew how to use it must have been wonderful. The learning ofEgypt was kept amongst its priests, and in their vast colleges musthave been men of great learning, men who knew well how to exercise tothe best advantage, and in the direction they wished, the terrificforces at their command. And if pitchblende did and does exist inEgypt, do you not think that much of it must have been freed by thegradual attrition and wearing down of the granitic rocks? Time andweather bring in time all rocks to dust; the very sands of the desert,which in centuries have buried in this very land some of the greatestmonuments of man's achievement, are the evidences of the fact. If,then, radium is divisible into such minute particles as the scientiststell us, it too must have been freed in time from its granite prisonand left to work in the air. One might almost hazard a suggestion thatthe taking the scarab as the symbol of life may not have been withoutan empiric basis. Might it not be possible that Co-prophagi have poweror instinct to seize upon the minute particles of heat-giving,light-giving--perhaps life-giving-- radium, and enclosing them withtheir ova in those globes of matter which they roll so assiduously, andfrom which they take their early name, Pilulariae. In the billions oftons of the desert waste there is surely mingled some proportion ofeach of the earths and rocks and metals of their zone; and, each toeach, nature forms her living entities to flourish on those withoutlife.'Travellers tell us that glass left in tropic deserts changescolour, and darkens in the fierce sunlight, just as it does under theinfluence of the rays of radium. Does not this imply some sort ofsimilarity between the two forces yet to be identified!'These scientific, or quasi-scientific discussions soothed me. Theytook my mind from brooding on the mysteries of the occult, byattracting it to the wonders of nature.