542 mescal: a new artificial paradise. 



were scattered all sorts of odds and ends, all doubt was over. I saw 

 an intensely vivid blue light begin to play around every object. A 

 square cigarette box, violet in color, shone like an amethyst. I turned 

 my eyes away and beheld this time, on the back of a polished chair, a 

 bar of color glowing like a ruby. Although I was expecting some such 

 manifestation as one of the first systems of the intoxication, I was 

 nevertheless somewhat alarmed when this phenomenon took place. 

 Such a silent and sudden illumination of all things around, where a 

 moment before I had seen nothing uncommon, seemed like a kind of 

 madness beginning from outside me, and its strangeness affected me 

 more than its beauty. A desire to escape from it led me to the door, 

 and the act of moving had, I noticed, the effect of dispelling the colors. 

 But a sudden difficulty in breathing and a sensation of numbness at 

 the heart brought* me back to the arm-chair from which I had risen. 

 From this moment I had a series of attacks or paroxysms, which I can 

 only describe by saying that I felt as though I were dying. It was 

 impossible to move, and it seemed almost impossible to breathe. My 

 sj)eedy dissolution, I half imagined, was about to take place, and the 

 power of making any resistance to the violent sensations that were 

 arising within was going, I felt, with every second. 



"The first paroxysms were the most violent. They would come on 

 with tinglings in the lower limbs, and with the sensation of a nauseous 

 and suffocating gas mounting up into my head. Two or three times 

 this was accompanied by a color vision of the gas bursting into flame 

 as it passed up my throat. But I seldom had visions during the 

 paroxysms; these would apiDear in the intervals. They began with a 

 spurting up of colors; once, of a flood of brightly illuminated green 

 water covering the field of vision, and effervescing in parts, just as 

 when fresh water with all the air bubbles is pumped into a swimming- 

 bath. At another time my eye seemed to be turning into a vast drop 

 of dirty water in which millions of minute creatures resembling tad- 

 poles were in motion. But the early visions consisted mostly of a 

 furious succession of colored arabesques, arising and descending or 

 sliding at every possible angle into the field of view. It would be as 

 difficult as to give a description of the whirl of water at the bottom of 

 a waterfall as to describe the chaos of color and design which marked 

 this period. 



" Now also began another series of extraordinary sensations. They 

 set in with bewildering suddenness and followed one another in rapid 

 succession. These I now record as they occur to my mind at haphaz- 

 ard: (1) My right leg became suddenly heavy and solid; it seemed, 

 indeed, as if the entire weight of my body had shifted into one part, 

 about the thigh and knee, and that the rest of my body had lost all 

 substantiality. (2) With the suddenness of a neuralgic pang, the back 

 of my head seemed to open and emit streams of bright color; this was 

 immediately followed by the feeling as of a draft blowing like a gale 

 through the hair in the same region. (3) At one moment the color, 



