"rslcm10" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yeats William Butler)

side, to escape the driving foam and the wind, which threatened every
moment to lift us off our feet, we made our way in silence to the
door of the square building. Michael Robartes opened it with a key,
on which I saw the rust of many salt winds, and led me along a bare
passage and up an uncarpeted stair to a little room surrounded with
bookshelves. A meal would be brought, but only of fruit, for I must
submit to a tempered fast before the ceremony, he explained, and with
it a book on the doctrine and method of the Order, over which I was
to spend what remained of the winter daylight. He then left me,
promising to return an hour before the ceremony. I began searching
among the bookshelves, and found one of the most exhaustive
alchemical libraries I have ever seen. There were the works of
Morienus, who hid his immortal body under a shirt of hair-cloth; of
Avicenna, who was a drunkard and yet controlled numberless legions of
spirits; of Alfarabi, who put so many spirits into his lute that he
could make men laugh, or weep, or fall in deadly trance as he would;
of Lully, who transformed himself into the likeness of a red cock; of
Flamel, who with his wife Parnella achieved the elixir many hundreds
of years ago, and is fabled to live still in Arabia among the
Dervishes; and of many of less fame. There were very few mystics but
alchemical mystics, and because, I had little doubt, of the devotion
to one god of the greater number and of the limited sense of beauty,
which Robartes would hold an inevitable consequence; but I did notice
a complete set of facsimiles of the prophetical writings of William
Blake, and probably because of the multitudes that thronged his
illumination and were 'like the gay fishes on the wave when the moon
sucks up the dew.' I noted also many poets and prose writers of every
age, but only those who were a little weary of life, as indeed the
greatest have been everywhere, and who cast their imagination to us,
as a something they needed no longer now that they were going up in
their fiery chariots.

Presently I heard a tap at the door, and a woman came in and laid a
little fruit upon the table. I judged that she had once been
handsome, but her cheeks were hollowed by what I would have held, had
I seen her anywhere else, an excitement of the flesh and a thirst for
pleasure, instead of which it doubtless was an excitement of the
imagination and a thirst for beauty. I asked her some question
concerning the ceremony, but getting no answer except a shake of the
head, saw that I must await initiation in silence. When I had eaten,
she came again, and having laid a curiously wrought bronze box on the
table, lighted the candles, and took away the plates and the
remnants. So soon as I was alone, I turned to the box, and found that
the peacocks of Hera spread out their tails over the sides and lid,
against a background, on which were wrought great stars, as though to
affirm that the heavens were a part of their glory. In the box was a
book bound in vellum, and having upon the vellum and in very delicate
colours, and in gold, the alchemical rose with many spears thrusting
against it, but in vain, as was shown by the shattered points of
those nearest to the petals. The book was written upon vellum, and in