Chapter II

WITH MESCALINE

In a state of great uneasiness, of anxiety, of inner solemnity.-The world retreating in the distance, an ever increasing distance.-Each word becoming more and more dense, too dense to be uttered from now on, word complete in itself, word in a nest, while the noise of the wood-fire in the fireplace becomes the only presence, becomes important,- strange and absorbing its movements. . . . In a state of expectancy, an expectancy that becomes with each minute more pregnant, more vigilant, more indescribable, more painful to endure . . . and to what point can it be endured?

Far away, like a soft whistling of the wind in the shrouds, harbinger of storms, a shiver, a shiver lacking flesh and skin, an abstract shiver, a shiver in the workshop of the brain, in a zone where shivering with shivers is impossible. Shivering with what then?

As if there were an opening, an opening which would be an assembling, which would be a world, which would be that something might happen, that many things might happen, that there is a crowd, a swarming of what is possible, that all the possibilities are seized with pricklings, that the person I vaguely hear walking outside might ring the bell, might enter, might set the place on fire, might climb up to the roof, might throw himself howling onto the pavement of the courtyard. Might everything, anything, without choosing, without any one of these actions having precedence over another. I am not particularly disturbed by it either. "Might" is what counts, this prodigious urgency of possibilities, which have become incalculable and continue to multiply.

(The sounds of the radio or of records - words or music -have no effect. Only reality sows and is productive.)

Suddenly, a knife - but first preceded by a vanguardword, a courier-word, a word launched by my language - center which receives the warning before I do, like those monkeys who feel earthquakes before men, suddenly a knife, preceded by the word "blinding," suddenly a thousand knives, suddenly a thousand dazzling scythes of light, scythes set in flashes of lightning, enormous, made to cut down whole forests, start furiously splitting space open from top to bottom with gigantic strokes, miraculously swift strokes which I am forced to accompany internally, painfully, at the same unendurable speed and up to the same impossible heights, then immediately afterwards down down into the same abysmal depths, with the ruptures ever more and more monstrous, dislocating, insane . . . and when is it going to end . . . if it is ever going to end?

Finished. It's finished.

Himálayas all at once spring up higher than the highest mountain, sharply pointed, but false peaks, diagrams of mountains, though not less high for all that, inordinate triangles with angles ever more acute, to the very edge of space, idiotic but immense.

While I am still occupied looking at these extraordinary mountains, the intense urgency that possesses me, having settled on the letters "m" of the word "immense" which I was mentally pronouncing, the double down strokes of these miserable "m's" begin stretching out into the fingers of gloves, into the nooses of lassos, and these in turn, becoming enormous, shoot up toward the heights - arches for unthinkable, baroque cathedrals, arches ridiculously elongated resting on their unchanged little bases. It is utterly grotesque.

Enough. I've understood. Don't think ! Don't think at all. Vacuity, lie low ! Don't give It ideas. Don't give the mad mechanism spare parts. But already the machine has resumed its movement at a hundred images a minute. The Himálaya-producing machine had stopped, now it starts again. Great plowshares plow up a stretch of space which doesn't give a damn. Enormous plowshares plow without any reason for plowing. Plowshares and again great scythes mowing empty space from top to bottom with enormous strokes that will be repeated fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty times. (Until the storage batteries have run down.)

Why bother, since nothing can be done about it. The stretchings are less painful. Would I be getting used to them.

And "White" appears. Absolute white. White whiter than all whiteness. White of the advent of white. White without compromise, by exclusion, by the total eradication of non-white. White, mad, exasperated, shrieking with whiteness. Fanatical, furious, riddling the eyeball. White, atrociously electric, implacable, murderous. White in blasts of white. God of "white." No, not a god, a howler monkey. (If only my cells don't burst!)

Cessation of white. I feel that for me white will have something immoderate about it for a long time to come.

*   *   *

On the edge of a tropical ocean, in a thousand reflections of the silver light of an invisible moon, among undulations of restless waters, ceaselessly changing....

Among silent breakers, the tremors of the shining surface, in the swift flux and reflux martyrizing the patches of light, in the rendings of luminous loops and arcs, and lines, in the occultations and reappearances of dancing bursts of light being decomposed, recomposed, contracted, spread out, only to be re-distributed once more before me, with me, within me, drowned, and unendurably buffeted, my calm violated a thousand times by the tongues of infinity, oscillating, sinusoidally overrun by the multitude of liquid lines. enormous with a thousand folds, I was and I was not, I was caught, I was lost, I was in a state of complete ubiquity. The thousands upon thousands of rustlings were my own thousand shatterings.

*   *   *

Sensation of a fissure. I hide my head in a scarf in order to know, to recognize my surroundings.

I see a furrow. A furrow with little, hurried, transversal sweepings. In it a fluid, its brightness mercurial, its behavior torrential, its speed electric. Seemingly elastic too. Swish, swish, swish it rushes along showing innumerable little tremors. I also see stripes.

Where is this furrow exactly? It is just as though it were crossing my skull from the forehead to the occiput. Yet I can see it. A furrow without beginning or end, as tall as I am and whose average breadth is appreciably the same above and below, a furrow that I'd say comes from one end of the earth, goes through me and on to the other end of the earth.

My body's envelope (if I think or try to think about it) floats freely around the furrow, (how can it?) enormous balloon containing this little river, for this great furrow when I try to see my body at the same time is only a rivulet, but still lively, untamed, champagne and spitting cat. An immense space between my body and the furrow, with the furrow running through the middle. Sometimes there is nothing in this space. (Strange, I thought I was full) Sometimes there are little dots all over it.

So then, I contain the furrow, except at its extremities which disappear in the distance, and yet it is myself, it is each of my instants, one after the other, flowing in its crystalline flux. In this flux my life advances. Fractured into a thousand fractures, through this rivulet I have continual prolongation in time. It might stop. Perhaps. Yet no one seeing it would believe that it could ever stop flowing, leaving me there.

Now I am in front of a rock. It splits. No, it is no longer split. It is as before. Again it is split in two. No it is not split at all. It splits once more. Once more no longer split, and this goes on indefinitely. Rock intact, then split, then rock intact, then split, then rock intact, then split, then rock intact, then split....

*   *   *

Cardboard now, cardboard sheets, cardboard boxes, factories of cardboard, truckloads of cardboard . . . and finally an avalanche of cardboard. (Documentary film or sonata ?)

Enormous -sheets of cardboard, bigger than screens, of a gray that is unpleasant to look at and a texture that must be unpleasant to touch, are being handled very briskly by hands I do not see.

To hell with all this cardboard ! I'm not interested !

Why all this cardboard? I have just noticed a certain numbness of my lip and upper jaw, the beginning of the well-known sensation (before the extraction of a tooth) of the "cardboard mouth."

Cessation.

"What, past noon already ! Is it possible? And I haven't seen any colors yet, no really brilliant colors. Perhaps I am not going to see any." Annoyed, I wrap up in my scarf again. Then, the result apparently of my reflection * released by the thought or by the switch-button word, I am submerged by thousands of little colored dots, a tidal wave, a deluge, but with each tiny globule perfectly distinct, isolated, detached.

Cessation of the deluge.

*   *   *

Return of the deluge....

What is happening? An enemy of these colors? No longer any colors at all. Yet they are not really absent either. Or are they vanishing too quickly now to be really perceptible? (like an electric current not sufficiently strong or prolonged). At moments it seems to me they are there. Certainly not much of a spectacle, or I might say that it is to a real spectacle what "noisily" is to "noise." Strange evasiveness.

At last equivocation ends. This time color abounds. A hundred Empire State Buildings at night, all windows lighted with all kinds of lights, would not fill my visual screen with as many splashes of distinct unbelievable colors. **

*Or the reverse : the thought was launched by an imperceptible sensation, a pre-sensation.

** I know now, and will know even better soon, that the teaming drawings, "bourrés" as Dr. Ferdiére calls them - of some of the insane, are not exaggerated but give a moderate view of their extraordinary universe.

On one of my frontiers (I had at first called it my "Spitsberg") an impossibly immense area of colored bulbs inundates me.

Cessation.

Not a single color. As if "It" no longer had the strength to be color.

It's come back, it's beginning again. The mechanism is once more running : Green!

* * *

Green. Did I see it? Too fugitively seen. I know that there is green, that there is going to be green, that there is an expectation of green, that there is green frantically straining toward existence, a green that couldn't be greener. It does not exist, and there is any amount of it ( !).

*  * *

Here it comes ! It has emerged. Completely.

I am honeycombed with alveoli of green. Greens like bright dots on the back of a beetle. It is the zone in me that emits green. I am wrapped in green, immured. I end in green. (A kind of emerald green.)

*  * *

A large plaque, fairly circular and as though elastic. A spasm causes it successively and almost imperceptibly to contract, then to expand again.

It is also as though elastically pink. Pink, then not pink, then pink, then not pink, or barely pink, then very pink. Pink spreads. Innumerable pink bulbs appear. Pink spreads more and more. I generate it, I sparkle with it. I am sprouting pink. I suffocate with pinkness, with pinkening. The pecking of this pink disturbs me, is odious. -Cessation.

Thank heaven !

* * *

I hear my cleaning woman's step in the hall. She has come back. Why ! Does she want something? Is she going to knock on the door? I hope not.

At this moment I see (with inner sight) my fist suddenly strike out with violence in her direction, fifteen, twenty times in succession, at the end of my extended arm, but long, long, long, an arm three meters long, a skinny arm and, like my childish fist, unrecognizable, Stupefying sight. Anger? But I feel none. It has burned up feeling. It has caught, not even the dynamic, but the kinetic side of anger, with all feeling completely conjured away. That is the strange part of this mechanism. To express an emotion it excludes all consciousness of emotion.. That is why you watch like a stranger this unsuccessful mechanical gesture, wondering if you aren't really idiotic to want to interpret this ridiculous spectacle as a consequence of an anger which you don't know if you feel, and which at the very most corresponds to "If only no one opens the door!"

There is haste, there is urgency in me.*

I should like. I should like to be rid of all this. I should like to start from zero. I should like to get out of here. Not to go out through an exit. I should like a multiple exit, shaped like a fan. An exit that never ends, an ideal exit, an exit such that having gone out I should immediately start to go out again.

I should like to get up. No, I'd like to lie down, no, I'd like to get up immediately, no I'd like to lie down at once, I want to get up, I am going to telephone, no, I am not going to telephone. But I really must.-No, I am going to lie down. And thus, ten, twenty, fifty times in a few minutes, I decide, then decide the contrary, I come back to my first decision, go back to my second decision, return once more to the first, one moment as wholeheartedly, fanatically eager as for a crusade, and the next totally indifferent, uninterested, perfectly relaxed.

No question of saying, as in the case of the visual images, that I'm not fooled, that I understand the mechanism (which is the same). Twenty times I am on the point of getting up to telephone, as many times, indifferent, I give

* What would happen if this accelerator were administered to slowmotion animals, to the chameleon, to the lazy three-toed sloth, or to the marmot just coming out of hibernation?

up. I'm on the shuttle line. Current off, current on, current off, current on. I shall be like that as many times as "It" wishes, completely mobile and then completely at rest and tranquil and serene on the platform of a single second. (Or perhaps of a double or a triple second.)

Once more there is haste. Great haste. Intolerable haste. Haste is about to put on a show, short and repeated over and over again. Mesc. can only furnish stunts : I see an enormous restaurant. Numerous stories, and people eating on all the balconies (yes, there are balconies and with pillarets !), thousands of tables, thousands of people eating, thousands of waiters in blue jackets. Funny idea ! Dishes are served. Dishes are removed. Are served again. Are re-removed. No sooner is the dish served than the plate is taken away. No sooner is the plate set down than the dish is taken away. The speed is no longer even that of a comic gag, but of a metronome. It is not that of an alternating current either. Try to picture the details These diners are like manikins, the waiters too. No expression one can remember. No individuality in the movements either.

What possible explanation? Yet, this utterly idiotic spectacle is the translation of a prodigious mechanism. One must realize that mescaline provokes the most violent sensations of hunger. For mescaline instantaneously "images," and realizes sensation or ideas without the least participation of the will, and without any consciousness of desire a silly gag is the result of this perfect, automatic functioning.

The rest of the show, what I detest the most : exhibitionism. That of clothes, that of the "pleasures of the table". The festive air and the balconies with colors to give the impression of gaiety, have not been forgotton.

Pause.

Several pauses. Some colored plains. Another pause.

This time it must surely be the end.

It was only the end of something, the end of the tremors. The celluler brushings have ceased. Tickling is about to begin. And what will the cells do, not knowing how to respond to tickling with tickling.

I was soon to find out. Something I should never have expected.

After a long blank period and in a kind of lull after battle (or was it my capitulation that was in preparation), the rapid motions were still there, not so violent, not lacerating at all, yet still master . . . as I was to have occasion to discover.

Without any particular reason, except-and it was sufficient-that I had been astonished not to hear any music (inner music) although the outside noises and even the distant strains of a band penetrated intact, I see, after a great many different blues, a good fifty trumpet players with raised trumpets dressed in blue and pink* costumes, whose name I don't know or care to know, but very operetta-looking, who begin to play, or at least to go through the motions at an incredible speed, with half a city such as Orléans listening to them, also grotesquely dressed, and as conspicuous as a necktie. There were, I'd swear, at least forty rows of balconies one above the other (and, so that nothing should be lacking, little columns ridiculously elongated). And all of this, of course, colored like children's candies or little girls' ribbons. Perfectly nauseating.

Ludicrous, all that ! Intolerable ! Why, after such reflections, did the word "recruit" occur to me? And who would ever have thought it could be so "recruiting"? Normally it

*We think it wonderful to see colors appear when we recall some piece of music. It would be, if one had them in addition !

But the first thing one notices, and with much annoyance, is that one can no longer evoke any sounds. The circuit is closed. Why?

Does one center inhibit another? Excessive attention fixed on one side (optic) preventing attention on the other (acoustic)?

It is a law I have remarked in normal life and it is flagrant under the influence of mescaline. Here is always a closing to create an

opening. A new opening automatically starts the closing of another side.... Sensibility on one side calls for insensibility on the other.

It is what graphologists find it so hard to understand.

What an absurdity a total man would be with all parts of him equally present, important, accentuated.

means nothing to me and departs without a trace, without creating a ripple.

But now, hardly arrived, irresistibly it drags after it its brothers and cousins (and in the most superficial way) its distant cousins that are barely connected, (I choose the least farfetched), irremediable, inexhaustible, inexorable, indestructible, indefinable, ineradicable, indefatigable, incredible innumerable, irrevocable, incurable, insuperable, incontestable, to say nothing of incompressible, inacceptable, indomitable, and a whole string of others which I really must interrupt, now that I can, for at the time, not only was I unable to interrupt the stupid enumeration but I had to repeat all the words, pronouncing them in my mind rapidly and emphatically and very unpleasantly. (A strange elastic bridge in fact connected me with each one of them.)

Impossible to stop them. The adverbs, the long adjectives in able, and the prefixes, and the "ins"-"in" for mescaline - irresistible, of course.

(After all, Mescaline, in its own way was expressing itself. Expressing me. In these words, launched haphazardly, spasmodically, one recognized "obliquely" the unhappy situation.)

Cessation ! At last !

Pause. Long pause. A final volley. Another pause....

Could it be finished?*

And now, at this idea of finished, here he is, the bad composer I have become, because of my weakened condition (?), because of the speed of the brain waves I have to conform to, because of the unwonted pace I am

* At about this moment, in the semi-darkness I am about to get up when one of my companions who, I thought, wanted a glass of water, says, "Don't leave." "Leave where?" I rejoin laughingly in order, among other things, to dispel the idea that I am attempting more than they are, exposing myself to certain mishaps. They laugh. But the word coming back to me begins to function, combining with finish in an overlapping series. To finish and to leave becoming inexhaustible.

forced to keep up, here he is - here I am - beginning to employ the tritest topics for amplification and, in the silliest, most systematic way to draw up the easiest antitheses, even easier enumerations, everything that is finish, final, exit (and not only the images but, as final idiocy, even the words "saying themselves" headlong in me) signs with the directions "exit," ship moored "at the end of the quay," panorama, viewpoint at the end of the path ! all this - stupid school-boy stuff - begins filing past me to my utter bewilderment.

Ridiculous, outrageous, and unavoidable, and which I could never possibly have imagined.

Yet what counts, what is prodigious, is this mad, indefatigable urgency, this ever recurring urgency which is such that even at the very end, when it is all over, one is still in a hurry, in a hurry to go on to the finish, a finish which is never final enough.*

At the top of the acute angle of a mad triangle, the final point will become the starting point for the base of another triangle whose final point will beget still another triangle which in turn . . . and so on indefinitely. The urgency is in no way abated by a third final point, or by a fourth, or by a tenth, or by a branch, simultaneously developing collateral images, or by the image of an ocean liner leaving the dock, or by an airplane taking off, or by a sudden rocket, or by an intercontinental rocket passing through the stratosphere, or by an interplanetary rocket passing beyond the bounds of terrestrial gravitation. No matter how far away it is, it has to launch another rocket, which in turn, pausing, launches another rocket, which in turn, pausing, launches another rocket, perpetual forward spurts to give free scope to the craving for departure, craving for going beyond, false rockets in fact, all of them, abstract, diagrammatic, but no less eager to reach, by successive stages, an ever receding infinity.

Into my inner visions I try to introduce an image from

" Gasoline, ether, the carbon tetrachloride used by René Daumal -who from it derived an . . . astonishing belief - all products which violently eliminate fat and sugar from the brain, induce this same phenomenon.

outside. With this intention, I begin turning over the pages of a lavishly illustrated book of zoology open beside me, looking at the pictures of different animals. Nothing happens. When I close my eyes they are not there. They are frankly excluded. No sign of any after-image. As soon as they are out of my sight they seem to have been cut out by a knife. For all that, I once more look at the giraffes and ostriches, elongated animals which ought to tempt mescaline's elongating propensity. But even while I am looking at them I know very well that I am not "detaining" them. I close my eyes -not the slightest image. I pick up the book again, but tired of pictures (more than tired, I have no contact with them at all), I begin to glance at the text and in the flickering light of the wood fire with difficulty making out a few words : "the giraffe a ruminant, between the antelope and the ... by its shape . . ." Wait ! At these words something seems to stir. I close my eyes and, already responding to the mention of their name, two dozen giraffes are galloping in the distance, rhythmically raising their slender legs and their interminable necks. True, they have nothing in common with the muscular, beautifully colored animals of the photographs I have just been looking at, and which were unable to create any "inner" giraffe. These are moving diagrams of the idea "giraffe," drawings formed by reflection, not reproduction.

But tall they certainly were. High as houses of seven stories but with bases not proportionately larger. In order to enter into the mescalinian world they had been forced to become these slender giants, these ridiculous, vertiginous manikins that a mild mistral could have toppled over with their legs broken.

Cessation.

* * *

By means of zigzag strokes, by means of transversal flights, by means of flashing furrows, by means of I don't know what all, always beginning again, asserting itself, recovering itself, steadying itself, by means of punctuations, of repetitions, of hesitant jerks, by slow cantings, by fissurations, by indiscernable slidings, I see, being formed, unformed, re-formed, a jerking building, a building in abeyance, in perpetual metamorphosis and transubstantiation, sometimes appearing to be the rough draft of an immense and almost orogenic tapir, or the still quivering pagne of a negro dancer who has collapsed and is about to fall asleep. But out of the sleep, and even before it occurs, the building magically rises.

And here it is again just as it was before, with more stories* than you can count, with a thousand rows of spasmodic bricks, a trembling, oscillating ruin, crammed, stuttering Bourouboudour....

Like the sensitive tip of the tongue at the height of its enjoyment, if this tip of the tongue became instantaneously a big, fat pink hippopotamus replete with that enjoyment, and not only one, but a hundred big-bellied hippos, and ten thousand sows, suckling already biggish little pigs snuggling against their swollen flanks, and all this huddled together one against the other, and if the height of the enjoyment thus spread out and multiplied were solely the fact of being pink, pink, pink, stupidly, deliriously, paradisiacally pink, pink enough to make you howl,- unless you had the soul of a whore and took a flabby pleasure in yielding to it,-that was the way I was seeing pink. I was up to my eyes in pink, pink besieged me, licked me, wanted to confound me with itself. But I refused to fall for it. I'd have been ashamed.

*   *   *

From island to island, greater and greater slackening of speed. Calmer too. For the first time a face appears, if it is a face. Two or three hundred alternate rows of eyes and lips, blubber lips that is -blubber lips, blubber lips, blubber lips - and eyes slightly mongoloid - eyes, eyes, eyes, eyes - composed this face which kept gliding ceaslessly downward, each lower row disappearing, replaced by other rows appearing, of slanting eyes, of slanting eyes, of slanting eyes, or of great blubber lips, blubber lips with fleshy ridges like a rooster's comb, but not nearly so red.

* Endless, but never vertiginous. That would require a sense of distance and depth I don't have, of which I am totally lacking.

And they were undecipherable, the eyes, very narrow under immense heavy lids, slightly tremulous. And all this enormously rectangular, in fact like a moving carpet with the thickness and volume totally imperceptible, or rather seeming to be of the same thickness all over, the thickness of a comfortable carpet in which the eyes and lips were not so much in relief as excrescences, wasps' bellies, innumerable bellies, pinned there and still quivering. And the endless-belt kept rolling with its enigmatic eyes, and you couldn't decide which one to watch more than another. There was a slight incline and the width of the face that kept sliding by was that of a moderately wide street, its height in proportion. A curious thing about it was that you had no more difficulty seeing the top than the bottom or the middle. And this great intent face, so exaggerated and devoid of any other part, visibly incapable of detaching itself from the others, I was able to watch without fear and even without repugnance. I felt hardly any curiosity either. Like the other spectacles, it didn't seem to be there for me. Mescaline soon to be spent, had now become more subdued. Though the faces when I try to describe them, seem monstrous, they really were not, having no expression at all. The colors showed hundreds of different tints and the subtle tones of autumn woods and forests. Instead of a carpet it might also have been a landscape or a mountain of faces. It was simply that they were juxtaposed, and their parellelism more mechanical than deliberate. Obviously mescaline did not know how to compose. The superabundance o o ors that covered the entire space and refused to be suppressed disturbed both of us, mescaline and me. What was lacking in this huge spectacle was a gravity in proportion to its apparent extent. Immense without grandeur. Everything was growing indistinct. The storm of white lights was over and would not return.

The anopodokotolotopadnodrome was about to close.

J. P. in five words expressed what each of us was thinking. "It's nothing to brag about." Not one of the three of us who were present had taken it seriously, regarded it rather as a sort of prestidigitators act. And we rose with the joyous sensation of having come from the destruction of a glassworks for which no one would hold us responsible.*

However. it was not all over as I had thought. Late in the evening, my head once more wrapped in a scarf, protected from the light, I began seeing visions again, certainly. more colorful than any I am normally capable of, more blurred than they had been earlier, fainter yet characteristic - mescaline's not mine.

All evening I followed with delight the delicacy of this progressive decline. In slow imperceptible degradations, the images now passing so slowly as to become pictures, but still enormous (notably a rug, and a beautiful one, as large as the Place de la Concorde), underwent an attenuation of coloring, in the end becoming lovely and "human," an attenuation of such delicacy I felt I should like to share it with some one ... This attenuated tone, a marvel of extreme tenuousness, at the very limit of perceptibility, seen half an hour later had undergone a new infinitesimal softening, final caress of the stranger who was departing. And thus, through diminishing stages that were subtly moving, the visions became memory-images. There was a moment when they were no longer ordinary apparitions, when everything was memory. You couldn't tell. You were always making mistakes, or you saw that previously you had been mistaken, so exact the superposition always became. Images and memory-images always eventually coinciding, something which never happens except at this stage. Time passed in the contemplation of these minute details. Now and then magnificent greens returned. I was never altogether asleep.

Thus the night wore on, shot through from time .to time by wonderful images.

*   *   *

Should a person become addicted to mescaline - though

* Several colors had been entirely absent for hours, as for example red, although red is a color I use often. On the other hand, green, which I never use was, with white, violently present and in superabundance. Theory of Ewald Herling (Theorie der Vorgange, 1890) according to which, if I am not mistaken, in drunkenness one sees only colors fitting one's mood, to the exclusion of all others. But I was against most of mescaline's colors. They made me either ashamed or furious.

it is more apt to be too frightening ("Grant that we do not go mad," was the prayer of Mexicans who, after fasting and continence, sought the god of the Peyotl)-it would certainly be for the periodic and ineffable shipwrecks one experiences. The exhaustion that follows the act of love is sometimes called the `Little death." Compared fo it, the extremely little death of mescaline is like the little death compared to the Great Death, so discreet and gentle but one suffers hundreds of them in the course of the day.

You go from little death to little death for hours on end, from shipwreck to rescue, succumbing every three or four minutes without the least apprehension, only to be gently, marvelously resuscitated once more. A deep sigh, which speaks volumes to those who know, is the only intimation of new rescues, but the voyage continues, a new death is preparing from which you will emerge in the same way. It is as though you had another heart whose systole and diastole occurred fifteen or twenty times an hour. Meanwhile, real or not, the indefatigable organ renews its strength and its drama; and though already weary, you are forced to take part and at the fourth minute of the cycle you give a sigh of relief which marks the end of the abstract coition.

And so it was with me the last time I delivered my body to it; and the instrument that is called my mind. It was also the time of the gaping fracture, and gaping for a long time just as it may happen with a woman you have possessed but from whom you have nevertheless remaind detached, until one day, through a wave of tenderness, grave by far than love, you surrender yourself and she enters you with the swiftness of a torrent, never to leave again.

And so that day was the day of the great opening. Forgetting the taudry images which as a matter of fact had disappeared, I gave up struggling and let myself be traversed by the fluid which, entering me through the furrow, seemed to be coming from the ends of the earth. .I myself was torrent, I was drowned man, I was navigation. My Hall of the Constitution, my Hall of the Ambassadors, my hall of gifts and of the interchange of gifts, where the stranger is introduced for a first inspection.

- I had lost all my halls and my retainers. I was alone, tumultuously shaken like a dirty thread in an energetic wash. I shone, I was shattered, I shouted to the ends of the earth. I shivered, my shivering was a barking. I pressed forward, I rushed down, I plunged into transparency, I lived crystallinely.

Sometimes a glass stairway, a stairway like a Jacob's ladder, a stairway with more steps than I could climb in three entire lifetimes, a stairway with ten million steps, a stairway without landings, a stairway up to the sky, the maddest, most monstrous feat since the tower of Babel, rose into the absolute. Suddenly, I could not see it any longer. The stairway had vanished like the bubbles of champagne, and I continued my navigation, struggling not to roll, struggling against suctions and pullings, against infinitely small jumping things, against stretched webs, and arching claws.

At times thousands of little ambulácral tentacles of a gigantic starfish fastened to me so compactly that I could not tell if I was becoming the starfish or if the starfish had become me. I shrank into myself, I made myself watertight and contracted, but everything here that contracts must promptly relax again, even the enemy dissolves like salt in water, and once more I was navigation, navigation first of all, shining with a pure white flame, responding to a thousand cascades, to foaming trenches and to gyratory gougings. What flows cannot inhabit.

The streaming torrents that on this extraordinary day rushed through me were so tremendous, so unforgettable, unique, that I thought -(I never stopped thinking) "A mountain, in spite of its lack of intelligence, a mountain with its cascades, its ravines, its streaming slopes would be in the same state I am in now, and better able to understand me than a man ..."

* * *

Many peyotleros, probably but little accustomed to dreaming, have no visions, or at least not visions strong enough to be interesting, and prefer to keep their eyes open and to observe the altogether novel, the irridescent and, as it were, vibrant beauty of familiar objects, especially the dullest ones, for they are the ones that are most transformed, becoming quite marvelous (in tone).

As for me, in the very dim light, curtains drawn, blinds half closed, I noticed very little difference in the things around me, except that I could not fix their position exactly. The distance from me to the walls, especially to the one opposite me no longer remained fixed. It wavered from being three meters away to three meters, fifty centimeters. It could not seem to make up its mind. I had, however paid little attention to this, either because it seemed hardly different from what I had experienced during a strong bout of fever, or because, as the sensation was rather disagreeable, I kept my eyes closed, interested only in the visions.

Meanwhile I had to get up to put a log on the fire. The noise seemed so formidable that I apologized to my companions for the earthquake I had provoked. They laughed in such a spontaneous and wholehearted manner that I realized their ears too, made supersensitive by mescaline, had heard the same unprecedented din as mine. I went into the next room where the light hurt my eyes. Finally I opened the bathroom door and turned on the switch. I stood aghast at what I saw in the washbasin : A foetus ! I was utterly flabbergasted. It is true that a woman had been there a short time before, a woman I hardly knew, but who seemed so correct. It was unbelievable ! I couldn't get over it ! She had stayed there for a considerable length of time - I remembered it now-but still, a woman as modest as she seemed to be ! An accident evidently. The effect of the emotional shock, the traumatism of the drug. Fascinated, I stood stock-still looking at it. I am not very active by nature, but now I felt I really had to find out if the foetus was whole or not, otherwise, poor woman, her suffering was not over. She would come back. That is why she had been suddenly so perturbed. Something had to be done. So, disgusted though I was, I touched the soft bluish head of the sticky bloodstained little thing. What a mess ! Whole or not whole? Finally, with a stick I found in one corner, I began energetically shoving the little body back and forth . . . it opened and fell apart. "Ah!" and I stood there overwhelmed as by another anomaly. The foetus no longer existed, yet it was still there, livid, bluish, blood-stained, with really delicate tones, almost irridescent, but which I failed to appreciate ... On the contrary, I was appalled. And what of the proof furnished by tearing it apart? Proof enough certainly, yet the existence of the foetus, perfectly evident and unquestionable a few seconds ago, refused to be suppressed by the appearance of this rag or wet paper, providential though it was. I was still aghast. True, the case of the foetus seemed settled, but I felt obscurely that if I were to discover another foetus or worse, in a basin, in a sink, or in an empty flower pot, it might not be explained away so happily and unexpectedly as at present. My behavior was not as childish as it appears. Feeling that I was in no state to resist the hallucination and preferring not to remain exposed to it, I quickly returned to the dim living room. There, in my inner visions, appeared and would keep on appearing, queer colored images, but no foetus, nothing resembling a foetus, nothing really dangerous. I was not worried on that score. Why? It would be hard to say. Perhaps because in the real world, where women, domestic animals, even turtles, are concerned I am always afraid of the consequences. Not very practical, I am afraid of anything that might become "material" and demand quick, rational decisions, I am afraid of being caught unprepared. All this is in fact evident, if not materialized, in this incident, which is not really a true hallucination since it did not happen without some support. But it has taught me more than dozens of pages on the subject, for it has made me realize how one might remain spellbound by an hallucination, unable to tear oneself away. As for a supporting agent, one can always be found. What surface is so smooth as not to show enough variations for the imagination to seize upon? What atmosphere so free from particles of dust that there is not one to catch and hold a chimerical object?

I used to have a kind of respect for people who saw apparitions. No longer ! I have no doubt they really see them, but in what a state ! (Certainly not a normal one, for then they would really be extraordinary.)

To the eye and the mind of someone who is, or has been, in another state, everything moves, everything is vibrant and teeming with reality.

In bed one evening about three weeks after my last dose of mescaline, I decided to read Quercy on Hallucination. Later, I tossed the book toward the, couch and missed my aim. It fell to the floor and opening, revealed a wonderful colored reproduction inserted in the volume. I immediately picked up the book again, eager to examine those marvelous colors and to find out who had painted the original of the reproduction which I had barely glimpsed, but which I should recognize among all others. I turn the pages : Nothing. I shake the volume trying to make the loose page fall out. Impossible. I go over the book once more, page by page, and again the next morning, even getting a friend to examine it too : Nothing.

At the word "Hallucination" I had had one.

Seeing the word on the cover I had functioned. Quick as thought it appeared. And, failing to understand I had kept on searching in vain for the admirable colored reproduction, more real than a real one, among the colorless pages of the book whose title had provoked it.

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