



The Great God Pan

by Arthur Machen


Contents

 CHAPTER I. THE EXPERIMENT
 CHAPTER II. MR. CLARKE’S MEMOIRS
 CHAPTER III. THE CITY OF RESURRECTIONS
 CHAPTER IV. THE DISCOVERY IN PAUL STREET
 CHAPTER V. THE LETTER OF ADVICE
 CHAPTER VI. THE SUICIDES
 CHAPTER VII. THE ENCOUNTER IN SOHO
 CHAPTER VIII. THE FRAGMENTS




I
THE EXPERIMENT


“I am glad you came, Clarke; very glad indeed. I was not sure you could
spare the time.”

“I was able to make arrangements for a few days; things are not very
lively just now. But have you no misgivings, Raymond? Is it absolutely
safe?”

The two men were slowly pacing the terrace in front of Dr. Raymond’s
house. The sun still hung above the western mountain-line, but it shone
with a dull red glow that cast no shadows, and all the air was quiet; a
sweet breath came from the great wood on the hillside above, and with
it, at intervals, the soft murmuring call of the wild doves. Below, in
the long lovely valley, the river wound in and out between the lonely
hills, and, as the sun hovered and vanished into the west, a faint
mist, pure white, began to rise from the hills. Dr. Raymond turned
sharply to his friend. “Safe? Of course it is. In itself the operation is a perfectly simple
one; any surgeon could do it.”

“And there is no danger at any other stage?”

“None; absolutely no physical danger whatsoever, I give you my word. You are always timid, Clarke, always; but you know my history. I have
devoted myself to transcendental medicine for the last twenty years. I
have heard myself called quack and charlatan and impostor, but all the
while I knew I was on the right path. Five years ago I reached the
goal, and since then every day has been a preparation for what we shall
do tonight.”

“I should like to believe it is all true.” Clarke knit his brows, and
looked doubtfully at Dr. Raymond. “Are you perfectly sure, Raymond,
that your theory is not a phantasmagoria—a splendid vision, certainly,
but a mere vision after all?”

Dr. Raymond stopped in his walk and turned sharply. He was a
middle-aged man, gaunt and thin, of a pale yellow complexion, but as he
answered Clarke and faced him, there was a flush on his cheek. “Look about you, Clarke. You see the mountain, and hill following after
hill, as wave on wave, you see the woods and orchard, the fields of
ripe corn, and the meadows reaching to the reed-beds by the river. You
see me standing here beside you, and hear my voice; but I tell you that
all these things—yes, from that star that has just shone out in the sky
to the solid ground beneath our feet—I say that all these are but
dreams and shadows; the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes. There _is_ a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision,
beyond these ‘chases in Arras, dreams in a career,’ beyond them all as
beyond a veil. 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 this all
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 that I alluded to when I said
that ten years ago I reached the goal. After years of labour, after
years of toiling and groping in the dark, after days and nights of
disappointments 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 sight, 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
this all 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 lonely 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 today 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 voice 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.