The old man held out his stiletto. The stranger took it and tried to cut the skin above the lettering; but when he had removed a thin shaving of leather from them, the characters still appeared below, so clear and so exactly like the surface impression, that for a moment he was not sure that he had cut anything away after all.
"The craftsmen of the Levant have secrets known only to themselves," he said, half in vexation, as he eyed the characters of this Oriental sentence.
"Yes," said the old man, "it is better to attribute it to man's agency than to God's."
The mysterious words were thus arranged: [Drawing of apparently Sanskrit characters omitted] Or, as it runs in English:
POSSESSING ME THOU SHALT POSSESS ALL THINGS.
BUT THY LIFE IS MINE, FOR GOD HAS SO WILLED IT.
WISH, AND THY WISHES SHALL BE FULFILLED;
BUT MEASURE THY DESIRES, ACCORDING TO THE LIFE THAT IS IN THEE.
THIS IS THY LIFE,
WITH EACH WISH I MUST SHRINK
EVEN AS THY OWN DAYS.
WILT THOU HAVE ME? TAKE ME.
GOD WILL HEARKEN UNTO THEE.
SO BE IT!
"So you read Sanskrit fluently," said the old man.
"You have been in Persia perhaps, or in Bengal?"
"No, sir," said the stranger, as he felt the emblematical skin curiously. It was almost as rigid as a sheet of metal.
The old merchant set the lamp back again upon the column, giving the other a look as he did so. "He has given up the notion of dying already," the glance said with phlegmatic irony.
"Is it a jest, or is it an enigma?" asked the younger man.
The other shook his head and said soberly:
"I don't know how to answer you.
I have offered this talisman with its terrible powers to men with more energy in them than you seem to me to have; but though they laughed at the questionable power it might exert over their futures, not one of them was ready to venture to conclude the fateful contract proposed by an unknown force.
I am of their opinion, I have doubted and refrained, and——"
"Have you never even tried its power?" interrupted the young stranger.
"Tried it!" exclaimed the old man.
"Suppose that you were on the column in the Place Vendome, would you try flinging yourself into space?
Is it possible to stay the course of life?
Has a man ever been known to die by halves?
Before you came here, you had made up your mind to kill yourself, but all at once a mystery fills your mind, and you think no more about death.
You child!
Does not any one day of your life afford mysteries more absorbing?
Listen to me.
I saw the licentious days of Regency.
I was like you, then, in poverty; I have begged my bread; but for all that, I am now a centenarian with a couple of years to spare, and a millionaire to boot. Misery was the making of me, ignorance has made me learned.
I will tell you in a few words the great secret of human life.
By two instinctive processes man exhausts the springs of life within him.
Two verbs cover all the forms which these two causes of death may take—To Will and To have your Will.
Between these two limits of human activity the wise have discovered an intermediate formula, to which I owe my good fortune and long life.
To Will consumes us, and To have our Will destroys us, but To Know steeps our feeble organisms in perpetual calm.
In me Thought has destroyed Will, so that Power is relegated to the ordinary functions of my economy.
In a word, it is not in the heart which can be broken, or in the senses that become deadened, but it is in the brain that cannot waste away and survives everything else, that I have set my life.
Moderation has kept mind and body unruffled.
Yet, I have seen the whole world.
I have learned all languages, lived after every manner.
I have lent a Chinaman money, taking his father's corpse as a pledge, slept in an Arab's tent on the security of his bare word, signed contracts in every capital of Europe, and left my gold without hesitation in savage wigwams.
I have attained everything, because I have known how to despise all things.
"My one ambition has been to see.
Is not Sight in a manner Insight?
And to have knowledge or insight, is not that to have instinctive possession?
To be able to discover the very substance of fact and to unite its essence to our essence?