Time and the Gods: An Omnibus by Lord Dunsany

Author:Lord Dunsany [Dunsany, Lord]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473219045
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2020-05-28T03:00:00+00:00

THE HASHISH MAN

I was at dinner in London the other day. The ladies had gone upstairs, and no one sat on my right; on my left there was a man I did not know, but he knew my name somehow apparently, for he turned to me after a while, and said, ‘I read a story of yours about Bethmoora in a review.’

Of course I remembered the tale. It was about a beautiful Oriental city that was suddenly deserted in a day – nobody quite knew why. I said, ‘Oh, yes,’ and slowly searched in my mind for some more fitting acknowledgement of the compliment that his memory had paid me.

I was greatly astonished when he said, ‘You were wrong about the gnousar sickness; it was not that at all.’

I said, ‘Why! Have you been there?’

And he said, ‘Yes; I do it with hashish. I know Bethmoora well.’ And he took out of his pocket a small box full of some black stuff that looked like tar, but had a stranger smell. He warned me not to touch it with my finger, as the stain remained for days. ‘I got it from a gipsy,’ he said. ‘He had a lot of it, as it had killed his father.’ But I interrupted him, for I wanted to know for certain what it was that had made desolate that beautiful city, Bethmoora, and why they fled from it swiftly in a day. ‘Was it because of the Desert’s curse?’ I asked. And he said, ‘Partly it was the fury of the Desert and partly the advice of the Emperor Thuba Mleen, for that fearful beast is in some way connected with the Desert on his mother’s side.’ And he told me this strange story: ‘You remember the sailor with the black scar, who was there on the day that you described when the messengers came on mules to the gate of Bethmoora, and all the people fled. I met this man in a tavern, drinking rum, and he told me all about the flight from Bethmoora, but knew no more than you did what the message was, or who had sent it. However, he said he would see Bethmoora once more whenever he touched again at an eastern port, even if he had to face the Devil. He often said that he would face the Devil to find out the mystery of that message that emptied Bethmoora in a day. And in the end he had to face Thuba Mleen, whose weak ferocity he had not imagined. For one day the sailor told me he had found a ship, and I met him no more after that in the tavern drinking rum. It was about that time that I got the hashish from the gipsy, who had a quantity that he did not want. It takes one literally out of oneself. It is like wings. You swoop over distant countries and into other worlds. Once I found out the secret of the universe.

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