The Blindmans World | Page 2

of the coast of Kepler Land between Lagrange Peninsula and
Christie Bay, and it was to this spot that my observations were
particularly directed.
On the fourth night other work detained me from the observing-chair
till after midnight. When I had adjusted the instrument and took my
first look at Mars, I remember being unable to restrain a cry of
admiration. The planet was fairly dazzling. It seemed nearer and larger
than I had ever seen it before, and its peculiar ruddiness more striking.
In thirty years of observations, I recall, in fact, no occasion when the

absence of exhalations in our atmosphere has coincided with such
cloudlessness in that of Mars as on that night. I could plainly make out
the white masses of vapor at the opposite edges of the lighted disc,
which are the mists of its dawn and evening. The snowy mass of Mount
Hall over against Kepler Land stood out with wonderful clearness, and
I could unmistakably detect the blue tint of the ocean of De La Rue,
which washes its base,--a feat of vision often, indeed, accomplished by
star-gazers, though I had never done it to my complete satisfaction
before.
I was impressed with the idea that if I ever made an original discovery
in regard to Mars, it would be on that evening, and I believed that I
should do it. I trembled with mingled exultation and anxiety, and was
obliged to pause to recover my self-control. Finally, I placed my eye to
the eye-piece, and directed my gaze upon the portion of the planet in
which I was especially interested. My attention soon became fixed and
absorbed much beyond my wont, when observing, and that itself
implied no ordinary degree of abstraction. To all mental intents and
purposes I was on Mars. Every faculty, every susceptibility of sense
and intellect, seemed gradually to pass into the eye, and become
concentrated in the act of gazing. Every atom of nerve and will power
combined in the strain to see a little, and yet a little, and yet a little,
clearer, farther, deeper.
The next thing I knew I was on the bed that stood in a corner of the
observing-room, half raised on an elbow, and gazing intently at the
door. It was broad daylight. Half a dozen men, including several of the
professors and a doctor from the village, were around me. Some were
trying to make me lie down, others were asking me what I wanted,
while the doctor was urging me to drink some whiskey. Mechanically
repelling their offices, I pointed to the door and ejaculated, "President
Byxbee --coming," giving expression to the one idea which my dazed
mind at that moment contained. And sure enough, even as I spoke the
door opened, and the venerable head of the college, somewhat blown
with climbing the steep stairway, stood on the threshold. With a
sensation of prodigious relief, I fell back on my pillow.

It appeared that I had swooned while in the observing-chair, the night
before, and had been found by the janitor in the morning, my head
fallen forward on the telescope, as if still observing, but my body cold,
rigid, pulseless, and apparently dead.
In a couple of days I was all right again, and should soon have
forgotten the episode but for a very interesting conjecture which had
suggested itself in connection with it. This was nothing less than that,
while I lay in that swoon, I was in a conscious state outside and
independent of the body, and in that state received impressions and
exercised perceptive powers. For this extraordinary theory I had no
other evidence than the fact of my knowledge in the moment of
awaking that President Byxbee was coming up the stairs. But slight as
this clue was, it seemed to me unmistakable in its significance. That
knowledge was certainly in my mind on the instant of arousing from
the swoon. It certainly could not have been there before I fell into the
swoon. I must therefore have gained it in the mean time; that is to say, I
must have been in a conscious, percipient state while my body was
insensible.
If such had been the case, I reasoned that it was altogether unlikely that
the trivial impression as to President Byxbee had been the only one
which I had received in that state. It was far more probable that it had
remained over in my mind, on waking from the swoon, merely because
it was the latest of a series of impressions received while outside the
body. That these impressions were of a kind most strange and startling,
seeing that they were those of a disembodied soul exercising faculties
more spiritual than those of the body, I could not doubt. The desire to