Don Rodriguez; Chronicles of Shadow ValleyDunsany, Lord
Science
Don Rodriguez; Chronicles of Shadow Valley
Dunsany, Lord
Fantasy fiction, English; Magicians -- Fiction; Spain -- Fiction
The Professor stood before them as he had stood when their spirits
left, with the table between him and the bodies, and the bowl on the
table which held the green flame, now low and flickering desperately,
which the Professor watched as it leaped and failed, with an air of
anxiety that seemed to pinch his thin features.
With an impatience strange to him he waved a swift hand towards each of
the two bodies where they sat stiff, illumined by the last of the green
light; and at those rapid gestures the travellers returned to their
habitations.
They seemed to be just awakening out of deep sleep. Again they saw the
Professor standing before them. But they saw him only with blinking
eyes, they saw him only as eyes can see, guessing at his mind from the
lines of his face, at his thoughts from the movements of his hands,
guessing as men guess, blindly: only a moment before they had known him
utterly. Now they were dazed and forgetting: slow blood began to creep
again to their toes and to come again to its place under fingernails:
it came with intense pain: they forgot their spirits. Then all the woes
of Earth crowded their minds at once, so that they wished to weep, as
infants weep.
The Professor gave this mood time to change, as change it presently
did. For the warm blood came back and lit their cheeks, and a tingling
succeeded the pain in their fingers and toes, and a mild warmth
succeeded the tingling: their thoughts came back to the things of every
day, to mundane things and the affairs of the body. Therein they
rejoiced, and Morano no less than Rodriguez; though it was a coarse and
common body that Morano's spirit inhabited. And when the Professor saw
that the first sorrow of Earth, which all spirits feel when they land
here, had passed away, and that they were feeling again the joy of
mundane things, only then did he speak.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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