Haroun here suddenly roused himself as from
a reverie. He drew from under his robe a small
phial, from which he let fall a single drop into
a cup of water, and said, "Drink this. Send to
me to-morrow for such medicaments as I may
prescribe. Return hither yourself in three days;
not before!"

When Grayle was gone, Sir Philip, moved to
pity, asked Haroun if, indeed, it were within the
compass of his art to preserve life in a frame
that appeared so thoroughly exhausted. Haroun
answered, "A fever may so waste the lamp of life
that one ruder gust of air could extinguish the
flame, yet the sick man recovers. This sick man's
existence has been one long fever; this sick man
can recover."

"You will aid him to do so?"

"Three days hence I will tell you."

On the third day Grayle revisited Haroun, and,
at Haroun's request, Sir Philip came also. Grayle
declared that he had already derived unspeakable
relief from the remedies administered; he was
lavish in expressions of gratitude; pressed large
gifts on Haroun, and seemed pained when they
were refused. This time, Haroun conversed
freely, drawing forth Grayle's own irregular,
perverted, stormy, but powerful intellect.

I can best convey the general nature of Grayle's
share in the dialogue between himself, Haroun,
and Derval—recorded in the narrative in words
which I cannot trust my memory to repeat in
detail—by stating the effect it produced on my own
mind. It seemed, while I read, as if there passed
before me some convulsion of Nature—a storm,
an earthquake. Outcries of rage, of scorn, of
despair; a despot's vehemence of will; a rebel's
scoff at authority. Yet, ever and anon, some
swell of lofty thought, some burst of passionate
genius abrupt variations from the vaunt of
superb defiance to the wail of intense remorse.

The whole had in it, I know not what, of
uncouth but colossal—like the chant, in the old lyrical
tragedy, of one of those mythical giants,
who, proud of descent from Night and Chaos,
had held sway over the elements, while still crude
and conflicting, to be crushed under the rocks,
upheaved in their struggle, as Order and Harmony
subjected a brightening Creation to the milder
Influences personified and throned in Olympus.
But it was not till the later passages of the
dialogue in which my interest was now absorbed,
that the language ascribed to this sinister
personage lost a gloomy pathos, not the less impressive
for the awe with which it was mingled. For, till
then, it seemed to me as if in that tempestuous
nature there were still broken glimpses of
starry light; that a character originally lofty,
if irregular and fierce, had been embittered
by early and continuous war with the social
world, and had, in that war, become maimed
and distorted; that, under happier circumstances,
its fiery strength might have been disciplined to
good; that even now, where remorse was so
evidently poignant, evil could not be irredeemably
confirmed.

At length all the dreary compassion previously
inspired vanished in one unqualified abhorrence.

The subjects discussed changed from those
which, relating to the common world of men,
were within the scope of my reason. Haroun
led his wild guest to boast of his own proficiency
in magic, and, despite my incredulity,  I could
not overcome the shudder with which fictions,
however extravagant, that deal with that dark
Unknown abandoned to the chimeras of poets,
will, at night and in solitude, send through the
veins of men the least accessible to imaginary
terrors.

Grayle spoke of the power he had exercised
through the agency of evil spirits—a power to
fascinate and to destroy. He spoke of the aid
revealed to him, now too late, which such direful
allies could afford, not only to a private revenge,
but to a kingly ambition. Had he acquired the
knowledge he declared himself to possess, before
the feebleness of the decaying body made it valueless,
how he could have triumphed over that
world, which had expelled his youth from its pale!
He spoke of means by which his influence could
work undetected on the minds of others, control
agencies that could never betray, defy laws that
could never discover. He spoke vaguely of a
power by which a spectral reflexion of the
material body could be cast, like a shadow, to
a distance; glide through the walls of a prison,
elude the sentinels of a camp—a power that he
aserted to be—when enforced by concentred will,
and acting on the mind, where, in each individual,
temptation found mind the weakest—almost infallible
in its effect to seduce or to appal. And he closed
these and similar boasts of demoniacal arts,
which I remember too obscurely to repeat, with
a tumultuous imprecation on their nothingness to
avail against the gripe of death. All this lore
he would communicate to Haroun, in return for
what? A boon shared by the meanest peasant—
life, common life; to breathe yet a while the air,
feel yet a while the sun.

Then Haroun replied. He said, with a quiet
disdain, that the dark art to which Grayle made
such boastful pretence, was the meanest of all
abuses of knowledge, rightly abandoned, in all
ages, to the vilest natures. And then, suddenly
changing his tone, he spoke, so far as I can
remember the words assigned to him in the
manuscript, to this effect:

"Fallen and unhappy wretch, and you ask me
for prolonged life!—a prolonged curse to the
world and to yourself. Shall I employ spells to
lengthen the term of the Pestilence, or profane
the secrets of Nature to restore vigour and youth
to the failing energies of Crime?"

Grayle, as if stunned by the rebuke, fell on his
knees with despairing entreaties that strangely
contrasted his previous arrogance. "And it
was," he said, "because his life had been evil
that he dreaded death. If life could be renewed
he would repent, he would change; he retracted
his vaunts, he would forsake the arts he had