Col’s Phantasm Speaks
By
Fiona Tanzer
Copyright 2011 Fiona Tanzer
Smashwords Edition
Smashwords Edition, Licence Notes
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Notes on Detained Above an Hour
Notes on Col’s Phantasm Speaks
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Preface
Col's Phantasm Speaks: Prose Version
Dedication
To Guy Tanzer, my beloved husband, for all your love and support over the years
To Rory Attwood, Allan Taylor and David le Feuvre with thanks
As related in his 1816 Preface to his poem, Coleridge originally saw Kubla Khan in a sublime vision brought on by an overdose of opium. However, his immediate attempt to capture his poetic vision on paper was fatefully interrupted by the visit of the famously unidentified Person from Porlock, causing him to lose irretrievably the rest of the poem. Despite many attempts during his lifetime, Coleridge never completed Kubla Khan.
This ebook is centred round the poem of the ebook's title, Col’s Phantasm Speaks, which is the first complete version of Coleridge's poem, Kubla Khan. However, the ebook begins with the related short story Detained Above an Hour. This is because while the story and the poem can be read as individual pieces, they stand in the same relation to one another as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1816 Preface to Kubla Khan and the poem Kubla Khan itself.
The prose version of Col’s Phantasm Speaks is an adjunct to the poem, rendering this lengthy poem into a format that most readers are more familiar with. The prose version closely follows the poem’s text.
In my notes to the story and poem, I distinguish between the historical Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the young fictitious Coleridge of my story, by referring to the historical Coleridge as Coleridge, and to the fictitious Coleridge as Col - the preferred nickname of the historical Coleridge. In a similar manner, I refer in my story and poem notes to the historical Khan as Kublai Khan, and to his namesake in Coleridge’s poem as Kubla Khan, following Coleridge’s own usage.
“There are two Temples, built before the Raigne of the Queene of Saba, one in honour of the Sunne, the other of the Moone, the most magnificent in all Ethiopia.”
A slight movement amongst the outer shadows of the room near the door obtruded itself into my attention which, mere moments ago, had been fully absorbed in the reading of Purchas. I lifted my head from the book, my mind still somewhat caught up in images of lost antiquities, and glanced vaguely in the direction whence the movement had seemed to have come. A second glance - more focused - confirmed the first.
There indeed, obscured in the deeper gloom of the doorframe’s recess, some person stood.
It was the work of a moment to ascertain from the height of the otherwise dark and indistinct figure that neither of the house's usual inhabitants - my wife, the housekeeper - stood at the door. But if a visitor, whom might it be? I had no expectation that evening that any friend of mine should call upon me - none of them would have been likely to venture abroad in such thoroughly miserable autumnal weather at so far advanced an hour of the evening, for the mere sake of idly passing the time.
Then it occurred to me that of course it was Dr Potter - for he was the only person who regularly ventured out at so late an hour despite the weather.
In the present instance a visit from my doctor would be a happy circumstance, and I was more than willing to have him interrupt my researches. For only this evening I had taken so large a dose of laudanum in order to quell my by now familiarly miserable enteric symptoms, that I had quite used up the last of my preparation, and the empty decanter still stood on the table beside my chair as a forlorn reminder that my present relief from pain could not be assured beyond tomorrow unless the “laudable anodyne” should be replenished before that time. In consequence of this sad state of affairs, I had mentally entertained at intervals during the evening a vague and wishful hope that Dr Potter might call upon me, bearing with him either a fresh supply of laudanum or at the very least a few grains of its indispensable ingredient - which is to say, opium.
Ah opium! What bounty and blessing to be found in its humble brown resin! How apt its ancient epithets - Milk of Paradise and Destroyer of Grief! For such was my present poor constitution that ever more frequently I resorted to laudanum to procure at once both release from pain and serenity of mind.
God knows, I often took far more than the good doctor had ever prescribed for me or even dreamed that I took. For such was my anxiety that my symptoms should not overwhelm me and halt my labours, I had privately ensured more than one supplier of the soothing drug (though my sources were never entirely reliable in this part of the country). Moreover, I generally took care to add extra opium to Dr Potter’s recipe in order to concoct a stronger and more immediately effective preparation. And I confess that I was not overly particular as to precisely how many ounces of opium I would add to a pint of laudanum, caring only to mix the medication to such a strength that I might gain rapid relief from my symptoms. Then too, I had long since foresworn the doctor’s laughable injunction against using on any occasion more than his usually prescribed but trifling dose of twenty-five drops. Indeed, at times the force of my symptoms was such that only a goodly dose of laudanum would properly quell both symptoms and their attendant melancholia. At such times I would take, more often than not, a full (but small) wineglass three or four times a day.
To speak truth, I had felt sometimes a little shamefaced about keeping Dr Potter from any knowledge of the actual strength of my preparation and the dosage I consumed. However, I would comfort myself with the notion that I was after all a greater expert on my own ailments than any doctor, since it was I alone who inhabited my body and I alone who keenly felt its pains – and in consequence I felt that it was I alone who had come to know most efficiently how to procure relief from my bodily ills. And of course, I had found (like many another) that laudanum was not only anodyne, but conferred the added advantage of wonderfully soothing and concentrating the mental facilities, to the benefit of both my studies and composition.
But I digress. Here stood Dr Potter, hesitating just within the doorway (for how long now had he stood thus?), waiting silently for me to acknowledge his presence. Lowering my book then, I cordially waved him into the room.
However, even as I laid down my book and beckoned him amicably towards the armchair set at the other side of the fireplace, a fuller glance at him served at once to rectify my mistake. For no sooner had my visitor begun to move forward into the better light of the room’s interior than I saw at once that not only was this man nothing like Dr Potter at all, but that he resembled no other man of our current day. Indeed, rather than calling him a visitor, I saw now that I should more accurately identify him as a visitant. His appearance was so ancient and otherworldly that I knew him then to be yet another of those peculiar apparitions that have occasionally plagued me.
I have never been entirely settled as to whether such spectres are truly spirits drawn from another realm by the fervent - indeed at times feverish - intensity of my poetic rumination. The poet in me inclines towards this belief. On the other hand, the philosopher in me whispers that spectres are as likely to arise for more sadly prosaic reasons: in this particular case, from the combined effects of natural autumnal melancholy, the lateness of the evening, and too long a spell of reading on top of too large an intake of laudanum and too small a supper! Yet the poet in me reminds the philosopher that these apparitions generally behave too independently of my will to be mere ghosts of the mind, and so the philosopher falls silent – for a while.
Be that as it may, my phantasmal visitor of this evening drew forward and stood before me, declining in any event my prior wordless invitation that he seat himself. Instead, he gave me an exceedingly long look of appraisal and I appraised him in turn. As spectres go, he was impressive.
First, I must report that he was in truth larger than life. Superficially he appeared to be an elderly man, yet as an apparition he must have stood at over seven feet tall and more than two feet broad, so completely did he loom over me. My initial impression of him as a man of normal height had been due simply to the fact that when I had first made out his obscurely draped figure in the shadows just within the room at the door, he had been standing not on the floor but on some otherworldly surface a good deal below its level, so that I had unknowingly seen nothing of him below about mid-thigh. The invisible surface on which he stood must have been a firm one however, since he gave no impression of hovering. As he had moved towards me across the room, he had done so with the action of a man ascending a low flight of stairs. And true enough, he rose also as he walked, or rather climbed, so that by the time he had come to rest, a pace or two in front of me, he stood merely ankle deep in my floor. His sunken stance, as it were, struck me as mildly comical, and detracted somewhat from his otherwise impressive appearance.
From his overall demeanour I took him to be an antique scholar of sorts. For there is a scholarly look, as it were, that transcends time and civilisation and I recognised it in him at once. It must be admitted though that my spectral visitor exhibited little of the charming hesitancy that is the scholar’s finest quality, so indicative of an appropriate modesty in the face of the enormity of any scholar’s ultimate ignorance. By contrast, the features and bearing of my spectral visitant were suffused with an irritating assurance and grandiosity in larger than usual measure, common to that sort of academician who takes particular delight in holding forth at great length on his own scholarly attainments, to the ultimate stupefaction of those who have been pressed into being his listeners.
But quite apart from his imposing size and prideful scholarly look, the phantasm’s highly impressive appearance overall was also due in no little part to his clothing and manner of dress.
He wore an ornately decorated doublet and breeches from some era or country that I could not quite place, although at the time I felt sure that I had seen those very items of dress in several old illustrations. Both doublet and breeches were made up of some stuff that looked predominantly rusty black when viewed flat on, but which must have been shot through very finely with gold and colourful silken threads; for whenever he moved, no matter how slightly, his clothing shimmered and glinted and changed in hue as it caught the light at differing angles.
Over all he wore a full length gown of antique design, open at the front with an elaborately embroidered border all round. Oddly enough, the gown’s cloth seemed the inverse of that of his doublet and breeches. It appeared at first sight to be golden but I soon saw that it must have been closely shot all through with black – for as often as ever the phantasm moved, so the gold of his gown seemed to fade into the same overall gloom of the outer edges of my room. The design on the border of this extraordinary gown was difficult to make out clearly, given that it was embroidered in the same shifting black and gold of the gown itself. Moreover, perhaps as a trick of the light, any part of the embroidered design that I focused on seemed at once to whorl and unfold in elaborate and ever tinier detail, so that I soon gave up that pursuit!
A modestly small but intricate ruff around his neck would seem to have placed him as Elizabethan or perhaps Spanish in that same era. But on his head he wore such a strange and outlandish silver-grey turban that it clearly had no origin in European dress of any era, and I suspect little in the East either (unless in the fabulous lands of the Arabian Nights), so fiendishly piled, folded, draped and besprinkled with tiny glinting stones as it was.
I had a distinct impression that despite his curiously wrought clothing, the phantasm considered himself as very soberly dressed indeed, with his turban being his single indulgent concession to vanity.
However, as exotic as were his clothing and the stuff thereof, the phantasm himself was plainly English. His features had nothing of the Gallic, the Spaniard, or the Mediterranean in them, much less the Arab or Oriental, despite him having affected so luxurious and oriental a turban.
As I have already mentioned, my visitor had the overall form of an elderly gentleman. But what a robust and healthy old gentleman he was! His complexion was neither dry nor muddied with old age, nor eerily pallid as might be expected in a spectre, but had a pleasant and ruddy look as of one in healthy middle age. And though his beard and moustaches were nearly white with age, they were neatly (fashionably even) shaped and trimmed. His eyes were clear and bright, and as far as I could make out by candle-light, some shade of blue or grey. His gaze was steady, his expression complacently self-satisfied (though the lines of his countenance spoke of an acerbic and hasty temper).
Though I knew my visitor to be an apparition, I could detect no element of transparency or any other ghostly quality in him, other than his unusual size, his exotic and antiquated dress and his below floor level stance. Indeed, apart from the delicately shifting appearance of his clothing, no doubt in large part due to the uneven light cast by the fire, the phantasm looked more substantial - more solid as it were - than any real person of my prior acquaintance. I might even describe him as being supernaturally real, as much as it might appear a contradiction to state it thus. Even in the gentle lighting of my room (being only two candles and a gradually subsiding fire), my phantasmic visitor stood forth with an almost overwhelming visual intensity, both in his outer appearance and in what I might describe as his spiritual qualities, as it were.
Above all, (how might I otherwise state it?) - there exuded from his very being an extraordinary sense of urgent purpose combined with such will that I could not help but feel an immediate apprehension that his visit would be no idle one. In this apprehension, I was of course to be proven correct.
Knowing him now to be an apparition rather than a mortal human, I did not reiterate my initial invitation that the scholarly gentleman should sit with me. Instead, after having taken in his appearance, I continued to watch him with leisurely interest to see what he would do. And indeed, for quite some time he did nothing of greater import other than to stand and look sternly upon me. I gazed back at him steadily enough, despite feeling at length not a little discomforted at the thoroughly disapproving expression with which I began to imagine he regarded me.
After what seemed several minutes of this silent and mutual appraisal of one another, my visitor addressed me at last. He may have been elderly, but his voice sounded firm and deep as he pronounced solemnly and impressively, “Sam!” (he slurred somewhat over the name so that it emerged from his mouth as “Sham”), “Sham, my boy! It will never do.”
Now, my entire acquaintance other than my wife know to address me by my surname rather than my Christian name, of which I am not fond, and even my wife knows not to call me Sam, which I cannot abide. But to have my name both shortened and mispronounced by an uninvited apparition struck me in this instance as ridiculous and it broke the spell that his sombre and impressive appearance had hitherto conjured in me (his invisible feet notwithstanding).
“No indeed, sir! I too find that “Sam” will never do!” I said good humouredly by way of a mildly jesting rejoinder. Then I asked him, a little facetiously for he was a phantasm after all and therefore in both senses quite literally the larger “Sham’ of the two of us, “And how might I address you, my dear Sir?”
Perhaps apprehending my meaning, he made no response either to my poor attempt at humour or to my question, other than to give me a long and haughty look. And how very long and how excessively haughty a look it was! Indeed it seemed to last another several minutes. At the precise point at which I began to feel wholly uncomfortable and was casting around in my mind for another more successful pleasantry, the phantasm shifted his gaze from my face to the impedimenta on the side table next to my chair. Over what seemed an interminable age and yet without appearing to move at all, my strange guest now glided almost imperceptibly slowly across the small space from his previous position in front of me until he stood looking down at my side table. His interest seemed most taken by my notebook. Or more precisely, by the writing therein.
Now, at that time I was engaged in constructing a series of notes and images suitable to my forthcoming poetic work, being an allegorical hymn to the Moon. Into this notebook I would jot down harmonious conjunctions of words and phrases, as well as useful ideas and images as they occurred to me in the course of my reading of accounts, both old and new, of travels in distant and legendary lands. This notebook currently lay casually open on the table in such a way that my visitor could easily view its content. At last, he thoughtfully read aloud my latest, rather scrambled, entry:
“Image of a Medieval damsel – in a convent? – singing wistfully of the holy montane temple she has left (depict journey over mountains and seas?). First image? Damsel – let her hold a similar role to Christian (that is, a pilgrim) ? … or perhaps better as a guide? As per Virgil… or Beatrice? NB. Metre to reflect musical sense of a hymn - damsel accompanies her singing by playing on a psaltery / dulcimer / mandolin / lute – something medieval. Suitable instrument would have action that suggests and informs the flow and metre of lines. Lute (mute fruit flute astute). Maiden with a mandolin (din djinn sin win begin maiden).”
The apparition turned to me.
“Convent damsel with a lute?” he remarked with some asperity, “Maiden with a mandolin!” He positively snorted. “Medieval psaltery?…It will never do, Sham! Never do!”
He turned slowly and thoughtfully aside so that he stood in profile to me (I noted now that he carried a slight paunch), while he drew inspiration from the view outside the window. At least, I had an over-riding impression that that was his intention. However, since he was in fact gazing towards a large country dresser standing against an otherwise blank wall, it must have been some other-worldly window seen only by himself that he sought to look out of for inspiration.
“Now, a damsel with a dulcimer….” He said to himself, “That is euphonious! Euphonious indeed!” He viewed his imaginary window with satisfaction. “A damsel with a dulcimer…” he repeated in a lower tone, drawing out the words and savouring his phrase.
Then he turned to look directly at me once more. Both his features and carriage were expressive of a peculiar combination of smugness (directed at himself) and disparagement (directed at me). He struck what he no doubt believed to be a dignified attitude, pulling himself up to his full height, so much so that he finally stood at floor level and I saw him at last in his entirety. He extended his right leg elegantly to the front of him with the foot turned out in a courtly manner. With his left hand, he grasped the lapel of his gown, and he raised his right hand as if about to lecture or remonstrate with me. I could not help thinking though that he resembled nothing so much as a provincial actor about to launch into a pretentious soliloquy.
What is more, while the phantasm was preparing himself to speak, his appearance of solid corporeality wavered severely so that he faded rapidly in and out of view over several long moments, and I held my breath in an obscure fear that at his most transparent I might inadvertently blow him out altogether. A twinge of anxiety and more than a twinge of irritation flitted across his features. Unworldly apparition as he was, I felt some sympathy for him. His inability to fully keep up appearances, so to speak, even as he sought to impose himself over me, together with his apparent vanity that his weakness should not be perceived by me, were touchingly human.
However, he seemed finally to regain control of his various parts and he firmed once more. He frowned fiercely, as if he had divined in me some inner levity at his expense. He really was a most prickly old gentleman. Once he had reassured himself to his liking that I was all respectful attention, he recited slowly and sonorously, and with great emphasis;
“It was an Abyssinian maid, and on her dulcimer she played, - singing of Mount Abora.”
He had got the name of the mountain wrong. Still, it struck me with pleasant surprise that my unworldly visitor had somehow perceived and delivered the very phrasing that I had been striving for myself. It would be moreover a beautiful line with which to begin my Hymn to the Moon.
The Phantasm continued to recite in magisterial tones. As the poem unfolded, the images he depicted, together with his evocative wording and the slow rich cadence of his recitation, excited in me a vision of great beauty and no little power. At the very first, I saw merely an image of the scene in my mind’s eye as a natural accompaniment to my visitor’s poetic utterance. However, almost as soon as I had envisaged the poem’s setting, I felt myself to be veritably transported into the utter reality of the scene itself; the verdant and sacred mountain of Amara and the ancient Aethiopean Temple of the Moon! And how much that vision lives with me still!
Mount Amara! Mighty Mountain of the Moon! Crouching like an eternally fallen idol amongst her attendant foothills. A verdigris of rough forest etches her corroded lower flanks, battening on the wealth of water that leaks from her in a plenitude of streams that nonetheless sink and dry before they can restore and cool the over-heated dying North African plain below. Only the twin rivers of Abola and Astaboras, emerging in great gushing flows from icy crevices in Amara’s monumental heights, are thrown forth with enough force to sustain their journey through the harsh plains.
I found myself gazing in fascination for what seemed an aeon at the impossibly high black granite cliffs rising naked and vertiginous from the holy mountain’s lower slopes. I lost myself in the endless seams and corrugations of the towering cliffs, and the longer I gazed, so the farther and higher the cliffs stretched out, rank upon rank. Yet, by a miracle, I saw those black and ancient cliffs at once in their vast entirety and in preternaturally fine detail.
At length, my attention was attracted to a great and jutting ledge. Set well above the mountain’s lower slopes, though far below her mountainous peaks, this ledge is of such a size that it might house a small city. Abola and Astaboras, the twin rivers, fall precipitously to either side of the ledge, and at its centre sits ancient Abora, the Temple of the Moon, immeasurably old even in Queen Sa'aba’s day.
Though dwarfed by the greater height of the cliffs above it, the Temple is vast by human reckoning, and has been most curiously and improbably wrought by long-dead masons. Its rounded contours and oddly undulating walls include a multitude of great and deeply curved indentations and enormous bulges. Yet the uniquely strange appearance of the Temple’s facade is due neither to errors of unskilled primitive masonry nor to the action of subsidence after careless construction. Instead, the ancient masons had purposefully built the Temple in such a way as to embody the essential changeability of the moon herself. At any time of day or night the play of available light over the sacred building throws shadows on its variously curved surfaces in such a way that each of the moon’s phases is recapitulated at any one time along the Temple walls. Moreover, as the light shifts during the course of the day or night, so too the cast shadows gradually change shape and position along the Temple’s surface, so that the myriad lunar images appear to wax and wane individually. The outer walls of the Temple are clad in white calcite, as befits a temple dedicated to the Moon’s worship. Immeasurable age has contributed also to the Temple of Abora’s selenic appearance; for the calcite cladding has become so eroded and pitted by aeons of passing time that it resembles the lunar surface itself, as it might be seen through a telescope.
All this was marvellous enough to my eye, yet the ingenious man-made multiple rendering of the lunar cycle over the walls of the sacred edifice is by no means the greatest wonder of Abora. That honour belongs to the Temple’s huge white crowning dome, which is as nearly spherical as it is possible to construct, so that the viewer is struck with an overwhelming sense that the full moon herself pauses eternally on Mount Amara, resting atop her own temple as she prepares to make the climb up and over Amara’s black granite heights that she may launch herself into the Aethiopic night sky.
Now although it had seemed at once an eternity and but an instant that I had been engrossed in the vision of the sacred Mountain and the Moonlike Temple of Abora (for such was the span of my fascination with the scene), the heated African day had nevertheless been progressing all the while. And so, even as I watched, the late afternoon sun lowered behind the mountain and a hasty but florid tropic sunset ensued. Then the sky darkened abruptly into night.
At once, a clear and ancient river of stars across the sky came rapidly into being. Mount Amara’s towering granite bulk, now otherwise darkly invisible against the night sky, cut blackly into the phosphorescent width of the starry river far above me. The stars seemed by agreement among themselves to bestow their faint collective light onto the Aboran Temple alone of all things on this Earth, so that for quite some time the only objects visible to my eye were the stars themselves and the faintly gleaming Temple dome. And yet I found myself content to observe the little that I could see. To say that I felt quietly and pleasurably at one with the night would be true, but it would only partly convey the fullness of what I actually experienced. For with the vanishing of the sun and the springing into being of the dark night, I felt a concomitant falling away of my own narrow individual being and its instantaneous and effortless replacement with a sense of experiencing and knowing all things at once within the warm dark night of that visionary world. Even now, I remain convinced that for a small eternity I lost myself completely and became the night incarnate. Timelessly, I observed with an impersonal calm satisfaction the starry points and patterns of light that moved with interminable slowness through the dark ether, and I meditated without thought on the star-glimmering Temple dome.
At long last however, the full moon rose; at first sight dust tinted and unnaturally large. Then, seemingly washed by the icy waters of Abola and Astaboras, she swung blindingly bright into the upper regions of the cooling night sky and the stars around her faded in deference to her greater light. Still within the vision, I returned to my self once more.
And now the montane scene reappeared before me nearly as though by day, but with its diurnal colour stripped and replaced with variegated tones of illuminated grey and silver.
For some time I surveyed the night scene, rendered bright but mysterious by moonlight. I admired afresh the Temple walls - now by the moon’s light shadowed - and listened to the tumultuous voices of the moon-silvered cascading waterfalls to either side of the Aboran ledge. Surely the full moon drew forth in tidal fashion hidden waters from the deepest recesses of the holy mountain so that the twin rivers swelled and deepened! For the chaos of bright crashing notes of the daytime’s splash and spray of the waterfalls was now by moonlight deadened, and the plunging waters surged with a greater and darker nocturnal power, striking and resounding against the underlying rock with a deeper and more purposeful boom and roar than ever could be heard by day.
Gradually I became aware of a new voice; not loud, but of such exquisite purity that it rose above the nocturnal waters’ black commotion. And like a night-silvering moonbeam, a new song, gentle and sweet, soothed the rivers’ deep rumble and softened the night-darkened Earth.
The vision’s focus shifted in line with my attention, and now I noticed a rounded and glassless window in the upper part of the temple, not far below the luminescent dome. Just within the window sat a solitary maiden. She was indeed an Abyssinian maid, slender and delicate in build and not yet grown to full womanhood. The moonlight caught her white gown, the sleeves of which had been carefully folded back so that they should not impede the movement of the girl’s hands as she lightly and dextrously plied a pair of long and delicately shaped musical hammers back and forth across the strings of a dulcimer, by which she accompanied her song.
I did not of course understand the words of her song, being as they were in a language that I had never heard before, but I deeply understood the song’s meaning. The gentle damsel sang her quiet song in praise of sacred Amara, in praise of Holy Abora, and in praise of her mother the Moon. The girl’s song rose soft above the tumult of the Twin Rivers of Amara, and led Abola and Astaboras on their journey across nocturnal African lands to meet at last and join with Alpheus, the sacred River of the Ancients, so that their combined waters surged over the plains before sinking together below the Earth’s surface to Erebus. The dulcimer’s plaintive note counterpointed the damsel’s hymn of praise as she foretold the building of a new Abora in the far off Northern lands; a still greater Temple that would be built in praise of a greater Power to come and to which the Moon herself would pay homage.
Overcome by an excess of poetic fervour, I too began to sing a song of praise so that our voices, while foreign to one another and each singing different parts, were yet joined in a single melody. The damsel seemed neither to be aware of me, nor was the flow of her singing influenced by my own ecstatic song, but in the same way that her gentle voice had drawn my song into hers, so she invisibly gathered to her the dreaming songs of all sleepers in all the night regions of the world. And I both sang and listened in rapture as all of sleeping humanity joined its endlessly varied voices and songs into a single dreaming symphony.
“Leave off opium, Sham.”
The vision shattered.
I was once again in my study and there was my elderly visitor – my apparition – standing before me still. He had not changed his previous position other than to clasp the lapels of his scholarly gown now with both hands. He was engaged in coolly and critically examining my face. It struck me that perhaps he had been doing so for the duration of my reverie, from the moment of my sudden transportation into the vision of Mount Amara to my rapturous joining with the maiden’s song in the Temple. The thought gave me some discomfort. Noticing that I had come to myself again, he raised his eyebrows at me in a disapproving manner while peering down at me over the rims of his eye-glasses (which I could swear had not been present when I had first examined him at such length. Perhaps he had kept them all the while in a concealed pocket). In examining me in this very particular manner he suddenly reminded me of no one so much as one of the school masters of my youth, whom for courtesy’s sake I will here leave anonymous, but whom my fellow pupils of old might however recognize at once if I were to give him his old nickname of “The Great Tartar Himself”! Indeed the phantasm’s expression and manner were at that moment was so uncannily like those of “The Great Tartar” that I was assailed by a sudden apprehension that the phantasm, for all his otherworldly and gorgeous appearance, might yet be a conjuration somehow of that far-off but still-feared figure. Accordingly I asked him once more, albeit somewhat tremulously now, whom he might be?
He ignored my question. “Sham, Sham!” He remonstrated, “Leave off opium! You’re going downhill, Sham.”
I rallied. He was but a spectre, no matter of whom. Even under the beneficent and soothing influence of laudanum, I felt that the phantasm was going beyond his ambit. I was happy for any spectre (from another world or from the depths of my mind, I cared not which) to interrupt my studies and make his contribution to poetic inspiration in the latter parts of the evening, but not that he should take liberties in disparaging me or my medical habits. I felt also a mild sense of grievance that my sublime vision of Amara had been so abruptly interrupted.
“Going downhill, sir? I’m sure I don’t know what you mean!”
He opened his mouth to speak, but I forestalled him. For one thing I had no desire to take up a quarrel with a mere apparition, not even with one who so freely took it upon himself to remonstrate with me. But more to the point, his recitation had after all been deeply inspiring and consequently I had less interest in arguing with him than of making use of him as a muse while he lasted, however crabbed and elderly a muse he might be. Therefore I spoke placatingly (ghost though he was) and sought to turn his attention back to poetic composition.
“Come now sir – put off those frowns and let us bend our thoughts to poetry! If you would be pleased to recite for me once more your poem on the Abyssinian maid, I am certain that I could usefully return to my vision of the Temple of the Moon. I have a mind to recapture and set down that maiden’s celestial song. Already I see my way clear to composing entire stanzas on her singing and those images you have inspired in me. Come sir – pray do not digress, but continue at once your delightful recitation!” And as I spoke, I looked at him in as pleasantly appealing a manner as I could compose my features.
The apparition turned again to face his beloved window and harrumphed and muttered to himself for quite some time, while I waited patiently for him to continue the poem that had so charmed me. At last he turned back to face me. He drew himself up as he had done before, wavering in and out of view, preparatory to recitation. But then, entirely contrary to my expectation (vexed spirit as he was!), he instead pronounced in a thundering tone: