degree approaching the supernatural had manifested itself.

Things were in this state when an incident took place so awful and
inexplicable in its character that my reason fairly reels at the bare
memory of the occurrence. It was the tenth of July. After dinner was
over I repaired, with my friend Dr. Hammond, to the garden to smoke my
evening pipe. Independent of certain mental sympathies which existed
between the doctor and myself, we were linked together by a vice. We
both smoked opium. We knew each other's secret and respected it. We
enjoyed together that wonderful expansion of thought, that marvellous
intensifying of the perceptive faculties, that boundless feeling of
existence when we seem to have points of contact with the whole
universe--in short, that unimaginable spiritual bliss, which I would not
surrender for a throne, and which I hope you, reader, will never--never
taste.

On the evening in question, the tenth of July, the doctor and myself
drifted into an unusually metaphysical mood. We lit our large
meerschaums, filled with fine Turkish tobacco, in the core of which
burned a little black nut of opium, that, like the nut in the fairy
tale, held within its narrow limits wonders beyond the reach of kings;
we paced to and fro, conversing. A strange perversity dominated the
currents of our thoughts. They would not flow through the sun-lit
channels into which we strove to divert them. For some unaccountable
reason, they constantly diverged into dark and lonesome beds, where a
continual gloom brooded. It was in vain that, after our old fashion, we
flung ourselves on the shores of the East, and talked of its gay
bazaars, of the splendors of the time of Haroun, of harems and golden
palaces. Black afreets continually arose from the depths of our talk,
and expanded, like the one the fisherman released from the copper
vessel, until they blotted everything bright from our vision.
Insensibly, we yielded to the occult force that swayed us, and indulged
in gloomy speculation. We had talked some time upon the proneness of the
human mind to mysticism, and the almost universal love of the terrible,
when Hammond suddenly said to me, "What do you consider to be the
greatest element of terror?"

The question puzzled me. That many things were terrible, I knew. But it
now struck me, for the first time, that there must be one great and
ruling embodiment of fear--a King of Terrors, to which all others must
succumb. What might it