The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories
"I must warn you, in the first place, as soon as you've got it down to
shut your eyes, and open them very cautiously in a minute or so's time.
One still sees. The sense of vision is a question of length of vibration,
and not of multitude of impacts; but there's a kind of shock to the
retina, a nasty giddy confusion just at the time if the eyes are open.
Keep 'em shut."
"Shut," I said. "Good!"
"And the next thing is, keep still. Don't begin to whack about. You may
fetch something a nasty rap if you do. Remember you will be going several
thousand times faster than you ever did before, heart, lungs, muscles,
brain--everything--and you will hit hard without knowing it. You won't
know it, you know. You'll feel just as you do now. Only everything in the
world will seem to be going ever so many thousand times slower than it
ever went before. That's what makes it so deuced queer."
"Lor," I said. "And you mean----"
"You'll see," said he, and took up a little measure. He glanced at the
material on his desk. "Glasses," he said, "water. All here. Mustn't take
too much for the first attempt."
The little phial glucked out its precious contents. "Don't forget what I
told you," he said, turning the contents of the measure into a glass in
the manner of an Italian waiter measuring whisky. "Sit with the eyes
tightly shut and in absolute stillness for two minutes," he said. "Then
you will hear me speak."
He added an inch or so of water to the little dose in each glass.
"By-the-by," he said, "don't put your glass down. Keep it in your hand and
rest your hand on your knee. Yes--so. And now----"
He raised his glass.
"The New Accelerator," I said.
"The New Accelerator," he answered, and we touched glasses and drank, and
instantly I closed my eyes.
You know that blank non-existence into which one drops when one has taken
"gas." For an indefinite interval it was like that. Then I heard Gibberne
telling me to wake up, and I stirred and opened my eyes. There he stood as
he had been standing, glass still in hand. It was empty, that was all the
difference.
"Well?" said I.
"Nothing out of the way?"
"Nothing. A slight feeling of exhilaration, perhaps. Nothing more."
"Sounds?"
"Things are still," I said. "By Jove! yes! They _are_ still. Except
the sort of faint pat, patter, like rain falling on different things. What
is it?"
"Analysed sounds," I think he said, but I am not sure. He glanced at the
window. "Have you ever seen a curtain before a window fixed in that way
before?"
I followed his eyes, and there was the end of the curtain, frozen, as it
were, corner high, in the act of flapping briskly in the breeze.
"No," said I; "that's odd."
"And here," he said, and opened the hand that held the glass. Naturally I
winced, expecting the glass to smash. But so far from smashing, it did not
even seem to stir; it hung in mid-air--motionless. "Roughly speaking,"
said Gibberne, "an object in these latitudes falls 16 feet in the first
second. This glass is falling 16 feet in a second now. Only, you see, it
hasn't been falling yet for the hundredth part of a second. That gives you
some idea of the pace of my Accelerator."
And he waved his hand round and round, over and under the slowly sinking
glass. Finally he took it by the bottom, pulled it down and placed it very
carefully on the table. "Eh?" he said to me, and laughed.
"That seems all right," I said, and began very gingerly to raise myself
from my chair. I felt perfectly well, very light and comfortable, and
quite confident in my mind. I was going fast all over. My heart, for
example, was beating a thousand times a second, but that caused me no
discomfort at all. I looked out of the window. An immovable cyclist, head
down and with a frozen puff of dust behind his driving-wheel, scorched to
overtake a galloping _char-à-banc_ that did not stir. I gaped in
amazement at this incredible spectacle. "Gibberne," I cried, "how long
will this confounded stuff last?"
"Heaven knows!" he answered. "Last time I took it I went to bed and slept
it off. I tell you, I was frightened. It must have lasted some minutes, I
think--it seemed like hours. But after a bit it slows down rather
suddenly, I believe."
I was proud to observe that I did not feel frightened--I suppose because
there were two of us. "Why shouldn't we go out?" I asked.
"Why not?"
"They'll see us."
"Not they. Goodness, no! Why, we shall be going a thousand times faster
than the quickest conjuring trick that was ever done. Come along! Which
way shall we go? Window, or door?"
And out by the window we went.
Assuredly of all the strange experiences that I have ever had, or
imagined, or read of other people having or imagining, that little raid I
made with Gibberne on the Folkestone Leas, under the influence of the New
Accelerator, was the strangest and maddest of all. We went out by his gate
into the road, and there we made a minute examination of the statuesque
passing traffic. The tops of the wheels and some of the legs of the horses
of this _char-à-banc,_ the end of the whip-lash and the lower jaw of
the conductor--who was just beginning to yawn--were perceptibly in motion,
but all the rest of the lumbering conveyance seemed still. And quite
noiseless except for a faint rattling that came from one man's throat. And
as parts of this frozen edifice there were a driver, you know, and a
conductor, and eleven people! The effect as we walked about the thing
began by being madly queer and ended by being--disagreeable. There they
were, people like ourselves and yet not like ourselves, frozen in careless
attitudes, caught in mid-gesture. A girl and a man smiled at one another,
a leering smile that threatened to last for evermore; a woman in a floppy
capelline rested her arm on the rail and stared at Gibberne's house with
the unwinking stare of eternity; a man stroked his moustache like a figure
of wax, and another stretched a tiresome stiff hand with extended fingers
towards his loosened hat. We stared at them, we laughed at them, we made
faces at them, and then a sort of disgust of them came upon us, and we
turned away and walked round in front of the cyclist towards the Leas.
"Goodness!" cried Gibberne, suddenly; "look there!"
He pointed, and there at the tip of his finger and sliding down the air
with wings flapping slowly and at the speed of an exceptionally languid
snail--was a bee.
And so we came out upon the Leas. There the thing seemed madder than ever.
The band was playing in the upper stand, though all the sound it made for
us was a low-pitched, wheezy rattle, a sort of prolonged last sigh that
passed at times into a sound like the slow, muffled ticking of some
monstrous clock. Frozen people stood erect, strange, silent,
self-conscious-looking dummies hung unstably in mid-stride, promenading
upon the grass. I passed close to a little poodle dog suspended in the act
of leaping, and watched the slow movement of his legs as he sank to earth.
"Lord, look _here_!" cried Gibberne, and we halted for a moment
before a magnificent person in white faint--striped flannels, white shoes,
and a Panama hat, who turned back to wink at two gaily dressed ladies he
had passed. A wink, studied with such leisurely deliberation as we could
afford, is an unattractive thing. It loses any quality of alert gaiety,
and one remarks that the winking eye does not completely close, that under
its drooping lid appears the lower edge of an eyeball and a little line of
white. "Heaven give me memory," said I, "and I will never wink again."
"Or smile," said Gibberne, with his eye on the lady's answering teeth.
"It's infernally hot, somehow," said I, "Let's go slower."
"Oh, come along!" said Gibberne.
We picked our way among the bath-chairs in the path. Many of the people
sitting in the chairs seemed almost natural in their passive poses, but
the contorted scarlet of the bandsmen was not a restful thing to see. A
purple-faced little gentleman was frozen in the midst of a violent
struggle to refold his newspaper against the wind; there were many
evidences that all these people in their sluggish way were exposed to a
considerable breeze, a breeze that had no existence so far as our
sensations went. We came out and walked a little way from the crowd, and
turned and regarded it. To see all that multitude changed to a picture,
smitten rigid, as it were, into the semblance of realistic wax, was
impossibly wonderful. It was absurd, of course; but it filled me with an
irrational, an exultant sense of superior advantage. Consider the wonder
of it! All that I had said, and thought, and done since the stuff had
begun to work in my veins had happened, so far as those people, so far as
the world in general went, in the twinkling of an eye. "The New
Accelerator----" I began, but Gibberne interrupted me.
"There's that infernal old woman!" he said.
"What old woman?"
"Lives next door to me," said Gibberne. "Has a lapdog that yaps. Gods! The
temptation is strong!"
There is something very boyish and impulsive about Gibberne at times.
Before I could expostulate with him he had dashed forward, snatched the
unfortunate animal out of visible existence, and was running violently
with it towards the cliff of the Leas. It was most extraordinary. The
little brute, you know, didn't bark or wriggle or make the slightest sign
of vitality. It kept quite stiffly in an attitude of somnolent repose, and
Gibberne held it by the neck. It was like running about with a dog of
wood. "Gibberne," I cried, "put it down!" Then I said something else. "If
you run like that, Gibberne," I cried, "you'll set your clothes on fire.
Your linen trousers are going brown as it is!"
He clapped his hand on his thigh and stood hesitating on the verge.
"Gibberne," I cried, coming up, "put it down. This heat is too much! It's
our running so! Two or three miles a second! Friction of the air!"
"What?" he said, glancing at the dog.
"Friction of the air," I shouted. "Friction of the air. Going too fast.
Like meteorites and things. Too hot. And, Gibberne! Gibberne! I'm all over
pricking and a sort of perspiration. You can see people stirring slightly.
I believe the stuff's working off! Put that dog down."
"Eh?" he said.
"It's working off," I repeated. "We're too hot and the stuff's working
off! I'm wet through."
He stared at me, then at the band, the wheezy rattle of whose performance
was certainly going faster. Then with a tremendous sweep of the arm he
hurled the dog away from him and it went spinning upward, still inanimate,
and hung at last over the grouped parasols of a knot of chattering people.
Gibberne was gripping my elbow. "By Jove!" he cried, "I believe it
is! A sort of hot pricking and--yes. That man's moving his
pocket-handkerchief! Perceptibly. We must get out of this sharp."
But we could not get out of it sharply enough. Luckily, perhaps! For we
might have run, and if we had run we should, I believe, have burst into
flames. Almost certainly we should have burst into flames! You know we had
neither of us thought of that... But before we could even begin to run
the action of the drug had ceased. It was the business of a minute
fraction of a second. The effect of the New Accelerator passed like the
drawing of a curtain, vanished in the movement of a hand. I heard
Gibberne's voice in infinite alarm. "Sit down," he said, and flop, down
upon the turf at the edge of the Leas I sat--scorching as I sat. There is
a patch of burnt grass there still where I sat down. The whole stagnation
seemed to wake up as I did so, the disarticulated vibration of the band
rushed together into a blast of music, the promenaders put their feet down
and walked their ways, the papers and flags began flapping, smiles passed