The Jewel of Seven Stars/Chapter 16

The time wore away, wondrous slowly in some ways, wonderfully quickly 
in others. To-day, in the new-found joyous certainty of the return of 
my love, I should have liked to have had Margaret all to myself. But 
this day was not for love or for love-making. The shadow of fearful
expectation was over it. The more I thought over the coming experiment, 
the more strange it all seemed; and the more foolish were we who were 
deliberately entering upon it. It was all so stupendous, so mysterious, 
so unnecessary! The issues were so vast; the danger so strange, so 
unknown. Even if it should be successful, what new difficulties would 
it not raise. What changes might happen, did men know that the portals 
of the House of Death were not in very truth eternally fixed; and that 
the Dead could come forth again! Could we realize what it was for us 
modern mortals to be arrayed against the Gods of Old, with their 
mysterious powers gotten from natural forces, or begotten of them when 
the world was young. When land and water were forming themselves from 
out the primeval slime. When the very air was purifying itself from 
elemental dross. When the "dragons of the prime" were changing their 
forms and their powers, made only to combat with geologic forces, to 
grow in accord with the new vegetable life which was springing up 
around them. When animals, when even man himself and man's advance 
were growths as natural as the planetary movements, growths as 
natural as the planetary movements, or the shining of the stars. 
Ay! and further back still, when as yet the Spirit which moved on 
the face of the waters had not spoken the words commanding to come 
into existence Light and the Life which followed it.
Nay, even beyond this was a still more overwhelming conjecture. The 
whole possibility of the Great Experiment to which we were now pledged 
was based on the reality of the existence of the Old Forces which seemed 
to be coming in contact with the New Civilization. That there were, and 
are, such cosmic forces we cannot doubt, and that the Intelligence, 
which is behind them, was and is. Were those primal and elemental forces 
controlled at any time by other than that Final Cause which Christendom 
holds as its very essence? If there were truth at all in the belief of 
Ancient Egypt then their Gods had real existence, real power, real force. 
Godhead is not a quality subject to the ills of mortals: as in its 
essence it is creative and recreative, it cannot die. Any belief to the 
contrary would be antagonistic to reason; for it would hold that a part 
is greater than the whole. If then the Old Gods held their forces, wherein 
was the supremacy of the new? Of course, if the Old Gods had lost their 
power, or if they never had any, the Experiment could not succeed. But 
if it should indeed succeed, or if there were a possibility of success, 
then we should be face to face with an inference so overwhelming that 
one hardly dared to follow it to its conclusion. This would be: that the
struggle between Life and Death would no longer be a matter of the
earth, earthy; that the war of supra-elemental forces would be moved
from the tangible world of facts to the Mid-Region, wherever it may be, 
which is the home of the Gods. Did such a region exist? What was it that 
Milton saw with his blind eyes in the rays of poetic light falling
between him and Heaven? Whence came that stupendous vision of the 
Evangelist which has for eighteen centuries held spellbound the intelligence 
of Christendom? Was there room in the Universe for opposing Gods; or if 
such there were, would the stronger allow manifestations of power on the 
part of the opposing Force which would tend to the weakening of His own 
teaching and designs? Surely, surely if this supposition were correct 
there would be some strange and awful development--something unexpected 
and unpredictable--before the end should be allowed to come. . . !
The subject was too vast and, under the present conditions, too full of 
strange surmises. I dared not follow it! I set myself to wait in patience 
till the time should come.
Margaret remained divinely calm. I think I envied her, even whilst I 
admired and loved her for it. Mr Trelawny was nervously anxious, as 
indeed were the other men. With him it took the form of movement; 
movement both of body and mind. In both respects he was restless, going 
from one place to another with or without a cause, or even a pretext; 
and changing from one subject of thought to another. Now and again he 
would show glimpses of the harrowing anxiety which filled him, by his 
manifest expectation of finding a similar condition in myself. He would 
be ever explaining things. And in his explanations I could see the way 
in which he was turning over in his mind all the phenomena; all the 
possible causes; all the possible results. Once, in the midst of a most 
learned dissertation on the growth of Egyptian Astrology, he broke out 
on a different subject, or rather a branch or corollary of the same:
"I do not see why starlight may not have some subtle quality of its own! 
We know that other lights have special forces. The Rontgen Ray is not 
the only discovery to be made in the world of light. Sunlight has its 
own forces, that are not given to other lights. It warms wine; it quickens 
fungoid growth. Men are often moonstruck. Why not, then, a more subtle, 
if less active or powerful, force in the light of the stars. It should 
be a pure light coming through such vastness of space, and may have a 
quality which a pure, unimpulsive force may have. The time may not be 
far off when Astrology shall be accepted on a scientific basis. In the 
recrudescence of the art, many new experiences will be brought to bear; 
many new phases of old wisdom will appear in the light of fresh discovery, 
and afford bases for new reasoning. Men may find that what seemed empiric 
deductions were in reality the results of a loftier intelligence and a 
learning greater than our own. We know already that the whole of the 
living world is full of microbes of varying powers and of methods of 
working quite antagonistic. We do not know yet whether they can lie latent 
until quickened by some ray of light as yet unidentified as a separate 
and peculiar force. As yet we know nothing of what goes to create or 
evoke the active spark of life. We have no knowledge of the methods of 
conception; of the laws which govern molecular or foetal growth, of the 
final influences which attend birth. Year by year, day by day, hour by 
hour, we are learning; but the end is far, far off. It seems to me that
we are now in that stage of intellectual progress in which the rough 
machinery for making discovery is being invented. Later on, we shall have 
enough of first principles to help us in the development of equipment 
for the true study of the inwardness of things. Then we may perhaps arrive 
at the perfection of means to an end which the scholars of Old Nile 
achieved at a time when Methuselah was beginning to brag about the number 
of his years, perhaps even when the great grandchildren of Adam were 
coming to regard the old man as what our Transatlantic friends call a 
'back number.' Is it possible, for instance, that the people who invented 
Astronomy did not finally use instruments of extraordinary precision; 
that applied optics was not a cult of some of the specialists in the 
Colleges of the Theban priesthood. The Egyptians were essentially 
specialists. It is true that, in so far as we can judge, the range of 
their study was limited to subjects connected with their aims of government 
on earth by controlling all that bore on the life to follow it. But can 
anyone imagine that by the eyes of men, unaided by lenses of wondrous 
excellence, Astronomy was brought to such a pitch that the true orientation 
of temples and pyramids and tombs followed for four thousand years the 
wanderings of the planetary systems in space. If an instance of their 
knowledge of microscopy is wanted let me hazard a conjecture. How was 
it that in their hieroglyphic writing they took as the symbol or 
determinative of 'flesh' the very form which the science of to-day, 
relying on the revelations of a microscope of a thousand powers, gives 
to protoplasm--that unit of living organism which has been differentiated
as Flagellula. If they could make analysis like this, why may they not 
have gone further? In that wonderful atmosphere of theirs, where sunlight 
fierce and clear is perpetually co-existent with day, where the dryness 
of earth and air gives perfect refraction, why may they not have learned 
secrets of light hidden from us in the density of our northern mists? 
May it not have been possible that they learned to store light, just as 
we have learned to store electricity. Nay more, is it not even possible 
that they did so. They must have had some form of artificial light which 
they used in the construction and adornment of those vast caverns hewn 
in the solid rock which became whole cemeteries of the dead. Why, some 
of these caverns, with their labyrinthine windings and endless passages 
and chambers, all sculptured and graven and painted with an elaboration 
of detail which absolutely bewilders one, must have taken years and years 
to complete. And yet in them is no mark of smoke, such as lamps or torches 
would have left behind them. Again, if they knew how to store light, is 
it not possible that they had learned to understand and separate its 
component elements? And if these men of old arrived at such a point, 
may not we too in the fullness of time? We shall see! We shall see!
"There is another matter, too, on which recent discoveries in science 
throw a light. It is only a glimmer at present; a glimmer sufficient to 
illuminate probabilities, rather than actualities, or even possibilities. 
The discoveries of the Curies and Laborde, of Sir William Crooks and 
Becquerel, may have far-reaching results on Egyptian investigation. This 
new metal, radium--or rather this old metal of which our knowledge is 
new--may have been known to the ancients. Indeed it may have been used 
thousands of years ago in greater degree than seems possible to-day. As 
yet Egypt has not been named as a place where the discovery of pitchblende, 
in which only as far as is known yet radium is contained, may be made. 
And yet it is more than probable that radium exists in Egypt. That country 
has perhaps the greatest masses of granite to be found in the world; and 
pitchblende is found as a vein in granitic rocks. In no place, at no 
time, has granite ever been quarried in such proportions as in Egypt 
during the earlier dynasties. Who may say what great veins of pitchblende 
may not have been found in the gigantic operations of hewing out columns
for the temples, or great stones for the pyramids. Why, veins of pitchblende, 
of a richness unknown in our recent mines in Cornwall, or Bohemia, or 
Saxony, or Hungary, or Turkey, or Colorado, may have been found by these 
old quarrymen of Aswan, or Turra, or Mokattam, or Elephantine.
"Beyond this again, it is possible that here and there amongst these vast 
granite quarries may have been found not merely veins but masses or 
pockets of pitchblende. In such case the power at the disposal of those 
who knew how to use it must have been wonderful. The learning of Egypt 
was kept amongst its priests, and in their vast colleges must have been 
men of great learning; men who knew well how to exercise to the best 
advantage, and in the direction they wished, the terrific forces at their 
command. And if pitchblende did and does exist in Egypt, do you not 
think that much of it must have been freed by the gradual attrition and 
wearing down of the granitic rocks? Time and weather bring in time all 
rocks to dust; the very sands of the desert, which in centuries have 
buried in this very land some of the greatest monuments of man's 
achievement, are the evidences of the fact. If, then, radium is divisible 
into such minute particles as the scientists tell us, it too must have 
been freed in time from its granite prison and left to work in the air. 
One might almost hazard a suggestion that the taking the scarab as the 
symbol of life may not have been without an empiric basis. Might it not 
be possible that Coprophagi have power or instinct to seize upon the 
minute particles of heat-giving, light-giving--perhaps life-giving--
radium, and enclosing them with their ova in those globes of matter 
which they roll so assiduously, and from which they take their early 
name, Pilulariae. In the billions of tons of the desert waste there is 
surely mingled some proportion of each of the earths and rocks and metals
of their zone; and, each to each, nature forms her living entities to
flourish on those without life.
"Travellers tell us that glass left in tropic deserts changes colour, 
and darkens in the fierce sunlight, just as it does under the influence
of the rays of radium. Does not this imply some sort of similarity 
between the two forces yet to be identified!"
These scientific, or quasi-scientific discussions soothed me. They took 
my mind from brooding on the mysteries of the occult, by attracting it 
to the wonders of nature.