Sentences

1

In the Italian quarter of London Ifound a group of clerks, waiters
and idealistic barbers calling itself The Rosicrucian Mysteries, Soho
Chapter, that met to read papers on the fabrication of gold and its
metaphysical implications, to elect from its number certain Arch
adepts and magistri bieraticorum, to correspond with the last of the
magi, Orzinda-mazda, on Mt. Sinai, and to retell, wide-eyed, their
stories of how some workmen near Rome, breaking by chance into
the tomb of Cicero's daughter, Tulliola, discovered an everburning
lamp suspended in mid-air, its wick feeding on Perpetual Principle;
of how Cleopatra's son Caesarion was preserved in a translucent liquid,
"oil of gold," and could be still seen in an underground shrine at
Vienna; and of how Virgil never died, but was alive still on the Island
of Patmos, eating the leaves of a peculiar tree.

2

In Rome I encountered a number ot people who for one reason or
another were unable to sleep between midnight and dawn, and when
I tossed sleepless, or when I returned late to my rooms through the
deserted streets-at the hour when the parricide feels a cat purring
about his teet in the darkness-I pictured to myselt old Baldassare in
the Borgo, former Bishop of Shantung and Apostolic Visitor to the
Far East, rising at two to study with streaming eyes the Fathers and
the Councils, marvelling, he said, at the continuous blooming of the
rose-tree of Doctrine; or of Stasia, a Russian refugee who had lost
the habit of sleeping after dark during her experience as nurse in the
War, Stasia playing solitaire through the night and brooding over the
jocose tortures to which her family had been subjected by the soldiers
ot Taganrog; and of Elizabeth Grier who, like some German
prince of the Eighteenth Century, owned her own band of musicians,
listening the length over her long shadowed room to some
new work that D'Indy had sent her, or bending over the score while
her little troupe revived the overture to Les Indes Galantes.