The magician smiled. He persisted in his view, and I in mine. The contested question could not be decided, and it was laid aside. But along with my consciousness of belonging to a period of critical activity, my doubts had awakened--my vivid hope a moment ago of finding in magic the key of all secrets, was fast fading away.
I looked around in this home of the magician. On his writing-desk lay a parchment on which he had commenced to write down the horoscope of the following year. Beside the desk was a celestial globe with figures painted in various colors. In a window looking towards the south hung an astrolabe, to whose alidade a long telescope (of course without lenses) was attached. The book-case contained a not inconsiderable number of folios: Versio Vulgata, some volumes of the fathers, Virgil, Dionysius Areopagita, Ptolemy, the hymns of Orpheus, Hermes Trismegistus, Jamblichus, Pliny's Natural History, a large number of works partly in Arabic upon astrology and alchemy, also a few Hebrew manuscripts, and so on. These and other such things were to be found in his observatory, which was also his studio and sleeping-room. Next to the observatory was the alchemical laboratory with a strangely appointed oven filled with singular instruments reminding me again of Faust's complaint:--
=Ihr Instrumente freilich spottet mein, Mit Rad und Kämmen, Walz und Bügel. Ich stand am Thor, ihr solltet Schlüssel sein; Zwar euer Bart ist kraus, doch hebt Ihr nicht die Riegel.=
While we lingered here our host informed us that for the present he had suspended his experiments in alchemy. He hoped to find his _quinta essentia_ by a shorter process than the combination of substances and distillation, which had exhausted already so many investigators and led so few to success. He acknowledged that he had himself advanced no farther in the art of the adepts than the extraction from "philosophic earth" mixed with "philosophic water" of just so much, and no more, gold than he had employed at the beginning of the experiment.[29] In spite of this, however, he worked daily before his oven, melting and purifying such metals as he needed for his planet-medallions, amulets and magical rings, and above all in preparing that effective alloy which is called electrum.