"As I looked, and it lasted long, the tower became a fine mouse hue, and everywhere the vast pendent masses of ruby reds, and orange began to drip a slow rain of colors. All this while nothing was at rest for a moment. The balls of color moved tremulously. The tints became dull and at once past belief vivid; the architectural lines were all active with shifting tints. The figures moving shook the long, living lines of living light, and then, in an instant, all was dark.

"After an endless display of less beautiful marvels, I saw that which deeply impressed me. An edge of a huge cliff seemed to project over a gulf of unseen depth. My viewless enchanter set on the brink of a huge bird-claw of stone. Above, from the stem or leg, hung a fragment of some stuff. This began to unroll and float out at a distance which seemed to me to represent Time as well as immensity of Space. Here were miles of rippled purples, half transparent and of ineffable beauty. Now and then soft golden clouds floated from these folds, or a great shimmer went over the whole of the rolling purples, and things, like green birds, fell from it, fluttering down into the gulf below. Next I saw clusters of stones hanging in masses from the claw-toes, as it seemed to me miles of them, down far below into the underworld of the black gulf.

"This was the most distinct of my visions. Incautiously I opened my eyes and it was gone. A little later I saw interlaced and numberless hoops in the air all spinning swiftly and all loaded with threaded jewels or with masses of color in long ropes of clustered balls. I began to wonder why I saw no opals, and some minutes after, each of these circles, which looked like a boy's hoop, became huge opals; if I should say fluid opals it would best describe what was, however, like nothing earthly.

"On the left wall was pinned by the tail a brown worm of perhaps a hundred feet long. It was slowly rotating like a Catherine wheel, nor did it seem loathly. As it turned, long green and red tentacles fell this way and that. On a bench nearby two little dwarfs, made, it seemed, of leather, were blowing long glass pipes of green tint, which seemed to me to be alive, so intensely and vitally green were they. But it were vain to find in words what will describe these colors. Either they seemed strangely solid or to possess vitality. They still linger visibly in my memory and left the feeling that I had seen among them colors unknown to my experience.

"Their variety and strange juxtaposition were indeed fascinating for one to whom color is more than it is to most men; nor is it possible to describe the hundredth of what I saw. I was at last conscious of the fact that at that moment I was almost asleep and then wide awake. In one of these magic moments I saw my last vision and the strangest. I heard and then saw a beach, which I knew to be that of Newport. On this, with a great noise, which lasted but a moment, rolled in out of darkness, wave on wave. These as they came were liquid splendors, huge and threatening, of wonderfully pure green, or red or deep purple, only once deep orange, and with no trace of foam. These water hills of color broke on the beach with myriads of lights of the same tint as the wave. This lasted some time, and while it did so I got back to more distinct consciousness, and wished the beautiful terror of these huge mounds would continue.

"A knock at my door caused me to open my eyes, and I lost whatever of wonder might come after."

Hashish, or Indian Hemp (Cannabis Indica), is a narcotic to which time and knowledge have given a cloak of horror and mystery. The preparation is obtained from the dried flowers of the hemp and the word hashish is derived from the Arabic term signifying "dried herb." Its introduction into Europe was due to the Crusaders, who needed the dreamy lethargy that the drug produces at the first in order to soothe them into forgetting the turmoil in which they found their homes.

Numerous preparations of the drug are presented under the collective name of hashish, some of these are merely narcotics, others contain important admixtures, such as stramonium, camphor, nux vomica, cantharides, musk, alcohol, opium and tobacco; these of course produce various effects. Garas, ghanja and bhang are the natural products of Indian hemp, the last named product, bhang, being especially popular in India.

Less harmful to the functional organs than either opium or morphia, hashish is more insidious and the habit far more difficult to overcome. The first dreams are vague extravaganzas, fantastically colorful and pleasing to the senses; sounds lift the soul to ecstasy. The waking is comfortable, the enfeeblement of the mental and physical power is as stealthy as the padded step of the tiger in the jungle. The sapping of the will and of the brain goes on without recognition as the dreamer dreams. Prophecy comes afterwards, vaguely unpleasant forecasts, but they bring no discomfort to the sleeper who has grown impersonal, and whose body seems far away, the property of another. Brain and body finally become weakened to the point of discomfort; the physical makes a final effort to warn the enfeebled psyche, perils are hinted at in the dreams, discomforts, love adventures attended by dangers that leave the dreamer in a cold sweat on awakening, morbidly anxious to return to his world of nowhere. Nightmare follows after a time, fury and somnambulistic frenzy that beggar waking imagination and send the hashish victim forth to murder and to rapine. It is said that the English word "assassin" is derived from the Arabic word "hashishin" or hemp-eater.

The Hop (Lupulus), which belongs to the same family as cannabis indica, has a contrary effect. Gentle slumber is induced from the hop pillow recommended so earnestly by old herbalists, with purely commonplace and soothing dreams from quiet surface of the conventional consciousness.

Hemlock, according to Herring's "Materia Medica," gives rise to hideous dreams fraught with superstitious horror and uneasiness, probably a subconscious warning to the sleeper of the physical danger wrought upon his body by the administration of this drug. It was a favorite remedy of the middle ages.