of the scent of asphodel, which the Greeks called the flower of the underworld, and of the distinctive odour of the shrubs that grew over the hill. The only sound was the churning of the river. The mountain peaks reminded me of my first trip to the moon; they had the same detached, dead beauty.
Reich went into his tent; he was still brooding on Darga’s statistics. I walked up the hill, and into one of the chambers of the upper gate. Then I climbed the stairs to the top of the wall, and stood there looking out over the moonlit plain. I admit that my mood was romantic, and that I experienced a need to intensify it. So I stood there, hardly breathing, thinking of the dead sentries who had stood where I now stood, and of the days when only the Assyrians lay on the other side of those mountains.
All at once, my thoughts took a gloomy turn. I felt totally insignificant, meaningless, standing there. My life was the tiniest ripple on the sea of time. I felt the alienness of the world around me, the indifference of the universe, and a kind of wonder at the absurd persistency of human beings whose delusions of grandeur are incurable. Suddenly it seemed that life was no more than a dream. For human beings, it never became a reality.
The loneliness was unbearable. I wanted to go and talk to Reich, but the light in his tent had gone out. I felt in my upper pocket for a handkerchief, and my hand encountered a cigar that I had accepted from Dr. Fu’ad. I had taken it as a ritual gesture of friendliness, for I am almost a non-smoker. Now its smell seemed to take me back to the human world, and I decided to light it. I cut off its end with a penknife, and pierced the other end. As soon as I took the first mouthful of smoke, I regretted it. It tasted foul. I placed it on the wall beside me, and continued to stare out over the valley. After a few minutes, its pleasant smell led me to take it up again. This time I took several more deep pulls at it, swallowing the smoke. My forehead felt damp, and I had to lean on the wall. For a while I was afraid I was about to vomit and waste my excellent supper. Then the nausea passed, but the feeling of disembodiment persisted.
At this point, I looked at the moon again—and was suddenly overwhelmed with an inexpressible fear. I felt like a sleepwalker who wakes up and finds himself balancing on a ledge a thousand feet above the ground. The fear was so immense that I felt as if my mind would dissolve; it seemed impossible to bear. I tried hard to fight it, to understand its cause. It was connected with this world I was looking at—with the realization that I was a mere object in a landscape. This is extremely difficult to make clear. But I suddenly seemed to see that men manage to stay sane because they see the world from their own tiny, intensely personal view-point, from their worm’s eye view. Things impress them or frighten them, but they still see them from behind this wind-shield of personality. Fear makes them feel less important, but it does not negate them completely; in a strange way, it has the opposite effect, for it intensifies their feeling of personal existence. I suddenly seemed to be taken out of my personality, to see myself as a mere item in a universal landscape, as unimportant as a rock or fly.
This led to the second stage of the experience. I said to myself… ‘But you are far more than a rock or a fly. You are not a mere object. Whether it is an illusion or not, your mind contains knowledge of all the ages. Inside you, as you stand here, there is more knowledge than in the whole of the British Museum, with its thousand miles of bookshelves’.
This thought, in a sense, was new to me. It led me to forget the landscape, and to turn my eyes inside myself. And a question presented itself. If space is infinite, how about the space inside man? Blake said that eternity opens from the centre of an atom. My former terror vanished. Now I saw that I was mistaken in thinking of myself as an object in a dead landscape. I had been assuming that man is limited because his brain is limited, that only so much can be packed into the portmanteau. But the spaces of the mind are a new dimension. The body is a mere wall between two infinities. Space extends to infinity outwards; the mind stretches to infinity inwards.
It was a moment of revelation, of overwhelming insight. But as I stood there, totally oblivious of the outside world, straining all my powers to stare into those inner spaces, something happened that terrified me. This is almost impossible to describe. But it seemed that, out of the corner of my eye—the eye of attention that was turned inward—I caught a movement of some alien creature. It was a strange shock, the feeling you would get if you were relaxed in a warm bath, and you suddenly felt a slimy movement against your leg.
In a moment, the insight had passed. And as I looked at the mountain peaks above me, and at the moon sailing over them, I felt a thrill of pleasure, as if I had just returned home from the other end of the universe. I felt dizzy and very tired. All this had taken less than five minutes. I turned and walked back to my tent, and tried to look inside myself again. For a moment, I succeeded.
This time, I felt nothing.
But when I was wrapped up in my sleeping bag, I found that I no longer wanted to sleep. I would have preferred to talk to Reich, or to anyone. I had to express what I had suddenly realized. Man assumes that his inner world is private. ‘The grave’s a fine and private place’ said Marvell, and we have the same feeling about the mind. In the real world, our freedom is limited; in imagination, we can do anything we like; what is more, we can defy the world to penetrate the secret; the mind is the most private place in the universe—sometimes, perhaps, too private. ‘We each think of the key, each in his prison’. And the whole difficulty of treating madmen is to break into that prison.
Yet I could not forget that feeling of something alien inside my mind. Now I thought back on it, it did not seem so terrifying. After all, if you walk into your own room, expecting it to be empty, and you find someone there, your first response is fear: it could be a burglar. But this soon passes. Even if it is a burglar, you confront him as a reality, and that original flash of fear passes away. What was so alarming was that feeling of something—or someone—inside my own head, so to speak.
As my mind lost its fear, and became simply interested in the problem, I felt sleepy. One of my last thoughts before I fell asleep was to wonder if this was some kind of hallucination due to the Turkish coffee and the cigar.
When I woke at seven the next morning, I knew it wasn’t. The memory of that sensation was curiously clear. And yet, let me confess, it now aroused a kind of excitement in me rather than terror. This should be easy enough to understand. The everyday world demands our attention, and prevents us from ‘sinking into ourselves’. As a romantic, I have always resented this; I like to sink into myself. The problems and anxieties of living make it difficult. Well, now I had an anxiety that referred to something inside me, and it reminded me that my inner world was just as real and important as the world around me.
At breakfast, I was tempted to talk to Reich about it all. Something withheld me—the fear, I suppose, that he would simply fail to understand. He remarked that I seemed abstracted, and I said that I’d made the mistake of smoking Darga’s cigar—and that was all.
That morning, I supervised the moving of the electronic probe to a place further down the mound. Reich went back to his tent to try to devise some easier method for moving the thing—a cushion of air underneath, for example, on the hovercraft principle. The workmen shifted the probe to a position halfway down the mound, below the lower gate. Then, when it was ready, I took my seat, adjusted the controls on the screen, and pulled the starter.
Almost instantly, I knew I had struck something. The white line that ran from the top to the bottom of the screen showed a distinct bulge halfway down. When I cut the power, increasing the feedback, this immediately spread into parallel horizontal lines. I sent the foreman to fetch Reich, and proceeded to move the control cautiously, probing around the regular object in all directions. The screen showed that there were more of these objects to the left and right of it.
This, of course, was my first experience of discovering anything with the probe, so I had no idea of the size of the object I had found, or of its depth below the ground. But when Reich came running over a moment later, he took one look at the dial, another at the controls, and said: ‘Oh Christ, the bloody thing’s gone wrong.’
‘In what way?’
‘You must have twisted the control too far, and disconnected something. According to this, the object you’ve located is two miles below the ground and seventy feet high!’