I took off my clothes, and wrapped my inside blanket about me, till my
things were dry. The night was very still, and I made a roaring fire;
so I soon got warm, and at last could put my clothes on again. Then I
strapped my blanket round me, and went to sleep as near the fire as I
could.
I dreamed that there was an organ placed in my master’s wool-shed: the
wool-shed faded away, and the organ seemed to grow and grow amid a
blaze of brilliant light, till it became like a golden city upon the
side of a mountain, with rows upon rows of pipes set in cliffs and
precipices, one above the other, and in mysterious caverns, like that
of Fingal, within whose depths I could see the burnished pillars
gleaming. In the front there was a flight of lofty terraces, at the top
of which I could see a man with his head buried forward towards a
key-board, and his body swaying from side to side amid the storm of
huge arpeggioed harmonies that came crashing overhead and round. Then
there was one who touched me on the shoulder, and said, “Do you not
see? it is Handel”;—but I had hardly apprehended, and was trying to
scale the terraces, and get near him, when I awoke, dazzled with the
vividness and distinctness of the dream.
A piece of wood had burned through, and the ends had fallen into the
ashes with a blaze: this, I supposed, had both given me my dream and
robbed me of it. I was bitterly disappointed, and sitting up on my
elbow, came back to reality and my strange surroundings as best I
could.
I was thoroughly aroused—moreover, I felt a foreshadowing as though my
attention were arrested by something more than the dream, although no
sense in particular was as yet appealed to. I held my breath and
waited, and then I heard—was it fancy? Nay; I listened again and again,
and I _did_ hear a faint and extremely distant sound of music, like
that of an AEolian harp, borne upon the wind which was blowing fresh
and chill from the opposite mountains.
The roots of my hair thrilled. I listened, but the wind had died; and,
fancying that it must have been the wind itself—no; on a sudden I
remembered the noise which Chowbok had made in the wool-shed. Yes; it
was that.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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