orror can obtain in each interval of
all the intervals between the notes of a quick jig played quickly on the
piano. I talk for an hour, elaborating that one phase of Hasheesh Land,
and at the end I have told them nothing. And when I cannot tell them
this one thing of all the vastness of terrible and wonderful things, I
know I have failed to give them the slightest concept of Hasheesh Land.

But let me talk with some other traveller in that weird region, and at
once am I understood. A phrase, a word, conveys instantly to his mind
what hours of words and phrases could not convey to the mind of the
non-traveller. So it is with John Barleycorn's realm where the White
Logic reigns. To those untravelled there, the traveller's account must
always seem unintelligible and fantastic. At the best, I may only beg of
the untravelled ones to strive to take on faith the narrative I shall
relate.

For there are fatal intuitions of truth that reside in alcohol. Philip
sober vouches for Philip drunk in this matter. There seem to be various
orders of truth in this world. Some sorts of truth are truer than
others. Some sorts of truth are lies, and these sorts are the very ones
that have the greatest use-value to life that desires to realise and
live. At once, O untravelled reader, you see how lunatic and blasphemous
is the realm I am trying to describe to you in the language of John
Barleycorn's tribe. It is not the language of your tribe, all of whose
members resolutely shun the roads that lead to death and tread only the
roads that lead to life. For there are roads and roads, and of truth
there are orders and orders. But have patience. At least, through what
seems no more than verbal yammerings, you may, perchance, glimpse faint
far vistas of other lands and tribes.

Alcohol tells truth, but its truth is not normal. What is normal is
healthful. What is healthful tends toward life. Normal truth is a
different order, and a lesser order, of truth. Take a dray horse.
Through all the vicissitudes of its life, from first to last, somehow, in
unguessably dim ways, it must believe that life is good; that the
drudgery in harness is good; that death, no matter how
blind-instinctively apprehended, is a dread giant; that life is
beneficent and worth while; that, in the end, with fading life, it will
not be knocked about and beaten and urged beyond its sprained and
spavined best; that old age, even, is decent, dignified, and val