"Everything is in readiness now," he said. "When I press this button on the arm of my chair, the lights will go out. A moment later we shall be under the stimulus of the machine. I don't think anything can happen." He smiled. "If anything does, and you are conscious enough to know it, you can call my butler by means of an electrical device I have perfected simply by speaking his name, Peter, in an ordinary conversational voice. But I don't see how anything can go wrong."
We reached for each other's hands, and shook them quietly.
"Good luck," I said. "The outcome of this means almost as much to me as it does to you." With another smile, Melbourne answered:
At that moment the lights went off, and we sat there a few moments in total darkness....
Remembering this scene, as I bathed that morning when I came out of the lake, I began to understand more clearly what had happened to me. Evidently, then, it _had_ been last night that I saw Melbourne, and the strange other-life I had been recalling earlier had been the experience in the Chamber of Life.
But there was more yet. My mind raced back to the awakening on the hill, and to the landing in the city of Richmond. I remembered the conversation with Edvar in his apartment, the place where I had left off and gone back to my recollections of Melbourne.
Now, as I stepped out of the tub and dried myself and dressed, I returned mentally to the curious, mythical adventure in the mythical city. It was still impossible for me to feel that it was unreal, it had been so vivid, so clear.
I remember that I lived nearly two months--or so it seemed--in that other world. I was assigned an apartment near to Edvar's--Selda was between us. Edvar instructed me in the details of the life I was to lead. But he was a rather cold sort: his interests were ancient history and archeology, and he would spend his mornings at work in the Library of History or in his study, the rest of his time flying about the world on curious expeditions of discovery--examining the soil, I suppose, and investigating the customs and records of other cities.
Selda devoted most of her time to me. It was she who took me from place to place, showing me the natural beauties of that world. There were, you see, not only gentle slopes and hill-tops. There were mountainous crags as high and as wild as the Alps, forests as impenetrably deep and still as the jungles of the Amazon, and rivers that rushed and tumbled over rocks, or fell for thousands of feet from mountain cliffs.