After Eating Hasheesh
During quite a good half hour I felt nothing in any way abnormal, but when the meal was drawing to its close a subtle warmth, which came, as it were, in gusts to my head and seemed to permeate my body with a singular emotion. Later on the conversation around me reached my understanding, charged with dull significance. The noise of a fork tapped against a glass struck my ear as a most harmonious vibration. The faces of my companions were transformed. The particular animal type, which, according to Lavater, is the basis of every human countenance, appeared to me strikingly clear. My right-hand neighbor became an eagle, he on my left became an owl, with full, projecting eyes; immediately in front of me the man was a lion, while the doctor himself was metamorphosed into a fox.
But the most extraordinary circumstance was that I read, or seemed to read, their thoughts and penetrate the depth of their intelligence as easily as one deciphers a page printed in large type. Like an experienced phrenologist, I could indicate accurately the force and quality of their endowments and the nature of their sentiments; in this analysis I discovered affinities and contrasts which would have escaped one in a normal state.
Objects around me seemed little by little to clothe themselves in fantastic garb; the arabesques on the walls revealed themselves to me in rich rhymes or attractive poesy, sometimes melancholy, but more generally rising to an exggerated lyrism, or to transcendant buffoonery. The porcelain vases, the bottles, the glasses sparkling on the table all took the most ludicrous forms. At the same time I felt creeping all around the region of my heart a tickling pressure, to squeeze out, as it were, with gentle force, a laugh which burst forth with noisy violence.
My neighbors, too, seemed subjected to an identical influence, for I saw their faces unfold like peoniee-victims of boisterous hilarity, holding their sides and rolling about from right to left, their countenances swollen like Titans. My voice seemed to have gained considerable strength, for when I spoke it was as if it were a discharge of cannon, and long after I had uttered a sentence I heard in my brain the reverberation, as it were, of distant thunder. – Cornhill Magazine
– Alexandria gazette, November 01, 1895
Alexandria gazette, November 01, 1895
