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"The dean saw everything as plain as plain could be, but his astonishment was so great that he tried to combat it, and would not believe the evidence of his own eyes. "'Such things cannot possibly happen! he thought. 'I have ridden much too long in the bleak forest. This is only an optical illusion.
The "mountain spirit," of course, is an optical illusion called up by the sorcerer, by means of which he frees his family and himself from the soldiers. Once upon a time, in the old days, there lived a young man by the name of Dschou Tschu. He was of more than ordinary strength, and no one could withstand him. He was also wild and undisciplined, and wherever he was, quarrels and brawls arose.
But, occasionally, he liked to read the small, relatively unimportant little stories about people who had done small, relatively unimportant things stories that didn't appear in the headlines or on the newscasts. The last important news story had come two nights before, when the Nipe had robbed an optical products company in Miami. The camera had shown the shop on the screen.
I rubbed my eyes, half expecting that I was the subject of mere optical illusion; but a second look only confirmed the first. Around me were solemn, go-to-meeting faces, smileless and awful; and close at hand were the delving, toiling, mud-begrimed laborers. Nobody seemed surprised at it; nobody noticed it as a thing out of the common course of events.
With a child's simple delight he allowed his instrument to rove, evening after evening, from the gorgeous glitter of Canopus to the hazy clouds of Magellan. Before he had well finished this optical prelude there floated over to him from the other side of the Equator the postscript to the epistle of his lost Viviette. It came in the vehicle of a common newspaper, under the head of 'Births:
"'If you drink nothing during the day, and have no nervous symptoms before evening, I think you may consider yourself safe," the doctor answered. A little fright would, he thought, do his patient good, so he made the most of the matter. "'What symptoms may I expect? asked Danebury. "'It generally takes the form of optical delusions. "'I see specks floating all about.
But as they dropped and the violet became bluer and bluer, they experienced the strange optical illusion of "flopping" of the scene. The bowl seemed to turn itself inside out, and they were looking down at its inner surface. They shot over a mountain range, and a vast plain spread out before them. Here and there, in the far distance, they could see darker spots caused by buckled geological strata.
The city seemed surrounded by a beautiful sheet of water, and so certain was his Greek interpreter, who was acquainted with the country, of this fact, that he was quite indignant at an Arab, who attempted to explain to him, that it was a mere optical delusion.
On mountain top observation posts, technicians turned unbelieving eyes north to the burgeoning pillar of smoke and dust, then yelped and swung optical and electronic instruments to bear on the fantastic column.
Think of such an organ as the eye, that most perfect of optical instruments, as so produced in the lower animals and perfected in the higher! A friend of ours, who accepts the new doctrine, confesses that for a long while a cold chill came over him whenever he thought of the eye.
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