The Touch-Stone

by Clark Ashton Smith

[December 18, 1929]


Nasiphra the philosopher had sought through many years and in many lands for the
fabled touch-stone, which was said to reveal the true nature of all things. He
had found all manner of stones, from the single boulders that have been carven
into the pyramids of monarchs, to the tiny gems that are visible only through a
magnifying-glass, but since none of them had effected any change or manifest
alteration in the materials with which they were brought in contact, Nasiphra
knew that they were not the thing he desired. But the real existence of a
touch-stone had been affirmed by all the ancient writers and thinkers, and so,
he was loath to abandon his quest, in spite of the appalling number of mineral
substances which had been proven to lack the requisite qualities,

	One day Nasiphra saw a large oval pebble lying in the gutter, and picked
it up through force of habit, though he had no idea that it could be the
touch-stone. Its color was an ordinary grey, and the form was no less
commonplace than the color. But when Nasiphra took the pebble in his hand, he
was startled out of his philosophic calm by the curious results: the fingers
that held the pebble had suddenly become those of a skeleton, gleaming white and
thin and fleshless in the sunlight; and Nasiphra knew by this token that he had
found the touch-stone. He proceeded to make many tests of its add properties,
all with truly singular results; it revealed to him the fact that his house was
a mouldy sepulchre, that his library was a collection of worm eaten rubbish,
that his friends were skeletons, mummies, jackdaws and hyenas, that his wife was
a cheap and meretricious trull, that the city in which he lived was an ant-heat,
and the world itself a gulf of shadow and emptiness. In truth there was no limit
to the disconserting and terrible disclosures that were made by this
ordinary-looking pebble. So after a time, Nasiphra threw it away, preferring to
share with other men the common illusions, the friendly and benign mirages that
made our existence possible.