Read Flying to Nowhere: A Tale for Free Online

by chance.
    And yet he still felt in pursuit of something, and the not finding it (or was it a suppressed fear that he might indeed unexpectedly find it?) sent him scurrying down the next staircase in the general direction of the parts of the house that he knew.
    Was the soul, he wondered, like this? A stranger in its own house?
    He woke each morning with these thoughts, and hastened from his offices at the earliest opportunity to conduct his researches. At the hour when Tetty rang on his bell he had descended to his library where he was conscious that no sound could disturb him through fathoms of stone. He had it in mind to consult the Arabic authorities on the nature and function of the pineal gland, an organ which had naturally for some years been at the centre of his quest for the precise physical seat of the human soul.
    The library was situated beneath his study, and was reached from a hidden staircase leading from behind a wooden panel in a small oratory adjacent to the study. He had converted the room to its present purposes many years before, to be secure from prying eyes. It had been a cellar, or some such. He could not remember. His tuns of Bordeaux lay elsewhere.
    Being a cellar, and being damp, kept the books from drying and cracking, which he knew was a hazard. But their softness, the musty aroma and the fine organic bloom upon some of them gave him now and then cause for concern. He would take down a volume from one of the top shelves, little used (as he now did with the learned Avicenna), and find it clammy to his touch, almost as though the pores of the long-dead hide opened again and sweated at his touch.
    The fear of the guardians of the word to yield their secrets!
    The seat of the soul had to obey several conditions. Firstly it must be one; to the end that action of the same object that at the same time strikes two organs of the same sense should make no more than one impression on the soul, as for example, she might not see two novices carrying a bucket of water where there was only one. Secondly, it must be very near the source of the animal spirits, that by their means she might easily move the members. And in the third place, it must be moveable; that the soul causing it to move immediately might be able to determine the animal spirits to glide towards some certain muscles rather than others.
    Conditions nowhere to be met with but in the little gland called pineal!
    The pineal gland (or conarium) was situated between all the concavities of the brain, supported and encompassed with arteries which made up the lacis choroides.
    ‘It is that lacis,’ reflected the Abbot, hitching up his habit and resting one foot on the lowest shelf, ‘that we may be assured is the source of the spirits which, ascending from the heart along the carotides receive the form of an animal spirit in that gland, disengaging themselves from the more gross parts of the blood.’
    He turned several pages, but found nothing further to prompt his cogitations.
    ‘From thence,’ he mused, returning the book to the shelf and scratching his nose, ‘they take their course towards the different muscles of our body, partly dependently, partly independently on the soul. As indeed the great author of nature has ordered it, with reference to the end he proposed to himself in the production of mankind.’
    He must examine this gland again, he decided.
    Before leaving his library he happened to place his hand against the rear wall, the only surface that was not filled with books. Usually a stone surface of this sort, in a room at this level, was cool and damp. But this was warm to his touch, like an oven at the very end of a baking day when the cinders could be raked out. And it was dry.
    The Abbot was surprised at such an effect of the weather. It was extraordinarily hot. Hotter than he had ever known it in his life. But to dry out a cellar! It was unheard-of.
    Yet the library was not in fact dry. Indeed it seemed even more humid than