I do not know whether any human being has ever lifted
that veil; but I do know, Clarke, that you and I shall see it lifted
this very night from before another's eyes. You may think all this
strange nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients
knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan.' Clarke shivered; the white mist gathering over the river was chilly. 'It is wonderful indeed,' he said. 'We are standing on the brink of a
strange world, Raymond, if what you say is true. I suppose the knife is
absolutely necessary?' 'Yes; a slight lesion in the grey matter, that is all; a trifling
rearrangement of certain cells, a microscopical alteration that would
escape the attention of ninety-nine brain specialists out of a hundred. I don't want to bother you with "shop," Clarke; I might give you a mass
of technical detail which would sound very imposing, and would leave you
as enlightened as you are now. But I suppose you have read, casually, in
out-of-the-way corners of your paper, that immense strides have been
made recently in the physiology of the brain. I saw a paragraph the
other day about Digby's theory, 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 to which I alluded when I said that then I reached the goal. After years of labour, after years of toiling and groping in the dark,
after days and nights of disappointment 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 light, 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 all this 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 homely 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 to-day 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 voices 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 is
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 pocket and opened a heavy
door, and motioned Clarke into his laboratory. It had once been a
billiard-room, and was lighted by a glass dome in the centre of the
ceiling, whence there still shone a sad grey light on the figure of the
doctor as he lit a lamp with a heavy shade and placed it on a table in
the middle of the room. Clarke looked about him. Scarcely a foot of wall remained bare; there
were shelves all around laden with bottles and phials of all shapes and
colours, and at one end stood a little Chippendale bookcase. Raymond
pointed to this. 'You see that parchment Oswald Crollius? He was one of the first to show
me the way, though I don't think he ever found it himself. That is a
strange saying of his: "In every grain of wheat there lies hidden the
soul of a star."' There was not much of furniture in the laboratory. The table in the
centre, a stone slab with a drain in one corner, the two armchairs on
which Raymond and Clarke were sitting; that was all, except an
odd-looking chair at the furthest end of the room. Clarke looked at it,
and raised his eyebrows. 'Yes, that is the chair,' said Raymond. 'We may as well place it in
position,' He got up and wheeled the chair to the light, and began
raising and lowering it, letting down the seat, setting the back at
various angles, and adjusting the foot-rest. It looked comfortable
enough, and Clarke passed his hand over the soft green velvet, as the
doctor manipulated the levers. 'Now, Clarke, make yourself quite comfortable. I have a couple of
hours' work before me; I was obliged to leave certain matters to the
last.'