Mirrikh, or, A Woman from Mars/part 1

 

In 1870 I was at Panompin.

But for this—and it was only by accident that I chanced to be there—my part in the singular adventures which I am about to narrate would never have been played.

Not that there existed any reason why I should not be at Panompin in the year mentioned; still it seemed strange to be wandering alone about the streets of the Cambodian capital free from all responsibility, when only two short months before I had been loaded down with a burden of care which promised to be never-ending, and I would just as soon have thought then of going to the moon.

Permit me before proceeding any further to introduce myself.

I am George Wylde, ex-American Consul at Swatow. The addition of the prefix to my official title was purely of my own seeking. I felt that I had seen enough of Swatow, and of China too, for that matter. I resigned simply because I wanted to get away.

My reasons—well, I suppose they must be stated, and I may as well undertake the disagreeable task first as last. I had trouble with my wife, serious trouble which had been constantly increasing during the five years of our married life. This trouble had culminated in a way that would ​have wrecked the lives of most men. My wife appropriated as much of my personal property as she could readily lay her hands upon, and in company with an English adventurer left Swatow for parts unknown.

Thank God there were no motherless children left behind her, our only offspring had been taken from us before we left New York.

How she wept on that cold October afternoon when we laid the little fellow in Greenwood! How she clung to me, how—but there, I have no more to say about it. When she went I swore that I would tear her image alike from my heart and memory—that I would never raise my finger to find her. I simply let her go.

It was getting dark when I returned from my spin on the Mesap that evening, and in Cambodia the twilight does not last long. I remember I had considerable difficulty in making my way among the mass of native boats which lined the shore, and was not a little preplexed to find the particular float from which I had started, for the low, bamboo huts, with their sloping roofs of thatch all looked alike to my unaccustomed eyes, and it was difficult to tell one from the other. At last, however, I found it, and making fast, leaped ashore.

Lighting a cheroot I drew on my coat and soon found myself strolling leisurely along the principal street of Panompin, elbowed by Chinamen, Klings, Siamese, all easily distinguishable from the native Cambodians by their peculiar costumes and facial distinctions. I was intent upon my thoughts, which concerned chiefly the contents of the windows of the bamboo shops beside me, for just then I was contemplating a descriptive work upon the manners and customs of Farther India; and I had long since accustomed myself to habits of observation; for a traveller with a retentive memory even the most casual stroll is never taken in vain.

The main thoroughfare of the city runs north and south along the river, and I had proceeded for a considerable distance—was almost in sight of King Norodom’s palace, in fact, when a person brushed past me who certainly was neither Chinese, Kling nor Cambodian, and at the same time was as different from a European as an Englishman from a citizen of Timbuctoo.

A man dressed after the fashion of the wealthy native ​gentleman of Calcutta, half European, half Oriental. But for the somewhat exaggerated white turban which covered his head, there was nothing about his apparel which need have attracted attention in the streets of Panompin or any other city in the East, save in one particular—the whole lower portion of his face, from the nose down, was concealed behind a black silk covering that extended high up on the cheeks, being secured by cords passing around the ears. The cloth did not cover the ears, but fitted close beneath them; it also passed completely around the neck, concealing it from view, which left only the upper part of the face visible. This was yellowish—not yellow as a Chinaman’s face is yellow, but more like a Cuban’s, or Spanish American’s. The eyes were small, black and piercing, yet mild and full of intelligence. Certainly there was nothing disagreeable about the face—what was to be seen of it, at least—rather the reverse.

I was puzzled. Women with partially veiled features are no novelty to an old traveller like myself; but a man—well, here was something I had never seen before.

But my interest in this mysterious individual was not long enduring. In a moment or two I had dismissed him from my thoughts with the conclusion that he probably had excellent reasons for covering the lower part of his face. “Some dreadful disfigurement,” I reflected, for such things are common enough in the East; and I sauntered on.

My mind was in that peculiar frame which often seizes us after some great calamity. We know that the worst has happened; we comprehend that the long anticipated has at length been realized; that we are upon the other side of the mountain of awful possibilities conjured up during weeks, months, years, perhaps, of anxious expectation, and we say to ourselves that it is all over, it cannot be changed; if there is no hope at least no cause for further anxiety exists. There are states when the over-taxed brain demands rest and will have it. I was in such a state just then.

Positively I could not think connectedly for five minutes upon any subject without that sensation of tightness above the eyes which tired brain-workers know so well. Even to speculate upon the mystery of that covered face made my head ache, and I therefore dismissed the subject abruptly and turned my attention to the shop windows again, wandering on through the crowd until I found myself at last in the ​neighborhood of the pagoda, a ruinous old affair, that I had already visited, surrounded by image houses, in one of which is an immense gilded Buddha with mother of pearl finger nails and eyes.

Both the mound upon which it stands and the pagoda itself are built of curious little bricks, and from the summit of the former a splendid view of the city, and even as far as the great Makong river, can be had. Any one is at liberty to visit the pagoda; the prejudices of religion sit very lightly upon these Cambodians. I was just debating whether it would not be a good idea to climb the steps and look down upon Panompin by moonlight, when a sudden shouting behind aroused me from my reverie and set me on the alert at once.

There was some excitement further down the street; I could see an angry crowd surging, and almost in the same instant I caught sight of a tall figure running toward me. It was the man with the concealed face.

Off the main street lights were not plentiful. Looking back I now perceived that the mob was coming in my direction; but I had scarcely time to reflect upon this when the man was at my side and I saw that his face was no longer hidden.

As any attempt to describe my amazement when I looked upon that face would fail to do it justice, I will simply state that the object of the singular mask was now apparent. The lower part of the face was beardless and black.

“Friend, you are an Englishman—for God’s sake help me!” he exclaimed, pausing for an instant. “I met with an accident back there—they are chasing me—they may kill me unless I can manage to get out of their sight.”

What had happened to the man? His turban was gone as well as his mask, his clothing was torn and covered with dust. As he stood beside me I noticed that he carried a small hand bag—the kind that we Americans call a “grip sack”—on one side of which was a splash of blood.

Now, I thought I knew something about a Cambodian mob, for only the week before I had seen an unfortunate Chinaman chased through the streets of Panompin and almost torn limb from limb, though for what offense I did not learn, and I saw at a glance that unless something was done, and that pretty quickly, the man who had appealed to me would be beyond need of help.

As it happened, the residence of the American Consul was ​not far distant, and by good fortune the consul was my most valued friend. If I could contrive to get this man to the consulate he was safe for the time being at least.

“This way,” said I, without an instant’s hesitation, pointing toward a street leading off on our right. The next moment we were running side by side with the shouts of the mob ringing in our ears.

“Where are you taking me?” he demanded in excellent English.

“To the American consulate. It is but a few steps.”

“Good! I shall be safe there. It was only an accident, and I am sure no one can regret it more than I do.”

“What happened?” I asked, eyeing him curiously.

For a moment he made no answer but turned a pair of deep set, black eyes upon me with a persistence of gaze positively painful. In vain I tried to withdraw my own eyes from his, but it was quite impossible. I had heard of men who could fascinate by a look. Was I face to face with such a person now? Be that true or false, the face before me was certainly a puzzle—a wonder if it was natural, which I could scarcely credit then.

The line of demarcation was wavy, running just below the ears, half way toward the nose, and then striking obliquely downward to the corner of the mouth, being the same on both sides. Above the line the skin was yellowish white, lighter about the forehead than lower down; below the line the darkness suddenly became an intense black; this included the lower lip and chin, part of each cheek and the throat. I wondered if it extended to the body, but the fact that the hands were of the same shade of color as the forehead seemed to indicate that such could not be the case. Altogether the face was an enigma; yet there was nothing repulsive about it. Nothing could make that face repulsive, for the features were singularly perfect and beneath the heavy eyebrows beamed the intelligence of those peculiar eyes. Have I mentioned that the hair was long, straight and intensely black?

A moment passed and he removed his gaze, to my great relief.

“I have a defect of sight,” he said calmly. “In crossing the street back there I accidentally stumbled over a little girl whom I did not see. I fancy she was not much hurt, but as I stooped down to help her up two fellows set upon me ​and before I knew it I was down myself—the only wonder is they did not kill me. I thought they would. You can see with what effect I was forced to use my only weapon, this bag.”

“But surely the police—” I began, when he immediately interrupted me.

“The police? They would give me no help. You are an intelligent man. I need not call your attention to the fact that my face is peculiar. I usually hide it, but they tore off its covering, and nothing else was needed to set them upon me like a pack of wolves. Are we almost there?”

“We ought to be within a stone’s throw of it now,” I replied, when it suddenly dawned upon me that I had made a mistake. Instead of taking the street on which the consulate was situated, I had unwittingly turned down the next one, and now it seemed almost too late to repair my blunder, for the mob had turned the corner, and, catching sight of us, were rushing on like so many mad dogs, shouting as they came in a fashion that was anything but reassuring.

“This is a bad business. We are going wrong!” I burst out.

I could feel his hand tremble as he clutched my arm.

“Don’t tell me that,” he panted. “You don’t know what it is to be differently made from other men. My friend, I have been through this sort of thing before—one cannot always hope to escape.”

“Before matters come to a crisis they shall have the opportunity of looking down the muzzle of my revolver,” I answered. “Look, here we are on the wrong street—we must cut across somehow to the next.”

“And then?”

“Then we shall be directly in front of the consulate.”

“It must be done. Look behind there—you can see we have only a moment. Shall we try this alley? It may take us through.”

The alley was a narrow passage between two of the largest houses I ever remember observing in Panompin. It was dark at the entrance and barely wide enough for us both to walk abreast, but down at the further end a flickering light dimly burned.

Positively I can’t say whether I gave assent or not; I only remember that the next moment we were running along the alley and I was beginning to fancy that we had ​given our pursuers the slip, when my hopes were dashed by hearing their shouts behind us. Klings, Chinamen and Cambodians were pouring into the alley like sheep.

The situation had now grown desperate. My singular companion saw this as well as I.

“Too bad! too bad!” he muttered. “My plans are ruined. See, friend, we’ve made another blunder. Here’s a wall which neither of us can climb.”

I gave an exclamation of disgust, for directly in front of us stretched the wall, a good twelve feet high, cutting off our retreat completely. We had run into a veritable cul-de-sac.

“It means fight now!” I exclaimed. “I’ll stand by you. Are you armed?”

“No, no! If I was I would not shoot down one of those poor wretches for the world.”

“You must do something quickly.”

“And you?”

“I am not afraid of them.”

“I wish I could help you,” he said, eyeing me strangely. “If you do not fear for yourself, I fear for you. I am the taller. Perhaps I can spring up and catch the top of the wall and so pull you after me.”

He dropped the hand bag upon the ground and leaped up, missing the coping of the wall.

“No use!” he exclaimed. “They are here! May God help you my friend, I cannot—therefore I leave you. A thousand thanks for your kind intentions. Farewell!”

What ailed me—what ailed my man with the parti-colored face?

It would have been useless to ask me then, for at that time even the claims of the Buddhist adepts were unknown to me.

If any one had attempted to describe what happened as something actually having taken place, who would have been readier than I to set him down as a lying imposter or a fool; and yet—

But I find it quite impossible to speak as I could wish. Here is what occurred under the wall at the end of the alley, as I saw it—nothing less, nothing more.

Astonished at the words of my strange companion, knowing as I knew that the next moment must bring me face to face with the mob even then rushing down the alley, I was ​about to speak, when it suddenly struck me that the man's face had undergone a change.

It was growing thin and shadowy, his whole body also seemed to be assuming a certain vapory indistinctness, to become etherealized, so to speak.

As he stood there motionless before the wall, I gazed at him in speechless amazement. Was it actually as I saw it, or was the trouble with my own brain?

He seemed to be sinking slowly downward, his feet and legs disappeared, seemingly dissolving as he went, until nothing but the head rested on the ground.

I was horrified, amazed beyond all telling.

Meanwhile every surrounding object retained its distinctness—the lantern above the wall burned as brightly as before.

From that dreadful head I struggled to remove my gaze in vain. Thinner and still more shadowy it became, until suddenly, as a puff of wind wafts away the last flickering flame of a burnt-out candle, it vanished.

The man had faded away before my eyes, leaving me to face the mob alone.

The mists still hung thick above the forests when we reached a resting place on those seemingly interminable steps and leaned panting for breath against the embrasure of one of the little windows up near the top of the grand central pagoda of the Nagkon Wat. Far below us—two hundred and fifty feet is said to be the height of the pagoda—lay the tropical jungle, with its nodding atap palms alive with the screams of monkeys, the notes of peacocks, quails and parrots, a dense mass of green stretching off as far as the eye could reach. At our feet was the inner court of that strange old temple, the very name of whose builders is lost in the mists of ages, the sloping roofs, projecting cornices and crumbling columns gilded by the first rays of the rising sun.

“Too late!” exclaimed Maurice De Veber; “too late ​George; old Sol is up before us. Next time you arouse me from my peaceful slumbers to witness a Siamese sunrise, I shall know enough to refuse to lend myself to your mad schemes. Why there’s not a particle of breath left in my body, to say nothing of the condition of my legs.”

“Peaceful slumbers, indeed!” I replied, contemptuously. “For my part, what with the mosquitoes and the howling of the jackals I haven’t slept a wink all night. Who was it, pray, that insisted upon dragging me two hundred miles into the wilderness to visit those miserable ruins? And now you complain because I make you share my discomforts. Come, Maurice, that’s not fair.”

Maurice laughed.

“My friend,” he said, “I take it all back. It’s grand, it’s glorious! I am beginning to breathe now, and my legs are rapidly returning to their normal condition. It is worth two years of a man’s life to gaze upon this view ten minutes. I for one do not regret my climb.”

But as for myself, I was indifferent. Two months had elapsed since my singular adventure in the streets of Panompin. Two months more had been given me to forget my troubles, yet they had not been forgotten. I needed something besides the dreamy existence I had been leading in the society of my friend Maurice De Veber to drive them from my thoughts.

On that night my escape from the mob had been less difficult than might be supposed.

It was not me they were after; besides they took me for a Frenchman, I fancy, and to interfere with a Frenchman in Cambodia would be a very dangerous matter.

When at last I succeeded in pushing my way through the excited throng and found myself at the door of the American consulate, I discovered that I still held the little hand bag which had been dropped by the stranger and which I must have picked up, although I have no recollection of having done anything of the sort.

I was dazed—absolutely confounded.

What I had seen I had seen. In one moment that man with his peculiar face had stood before me; his eyes had looked into my eyes; he had spoke; he had pressed my hand; and in the next he had disappeared as completely as if he had never been.

Where? How?

​Absolutely there was no explanation of the mystery; and the next day when I visited the alley, making a most critical examination, I found myself still further mystified.

At its end was the wall which the man had failed to climb. On the right rose the solid bamboo side of a Chinese merchant’s warehouse, while on the left was the side wall of another warehouse, and as both faced the other street with neither window or door opening on the alley, what conclusion was I to draw?

“Pshaw! The sun has affected your head George,” said Maurice when I told him about it. “You had better take a dose of quinine and keep indoors out of the night air. The fellow may have had a most extraordinary birth-mark, I’m willing to admit, but you may be sure he managed to scale the wall while you were looking back at that crowd. Probably he’ll turn up to-day and claim his bag, explaining the whole affair.”

But he did not.

Day after day elapsed and still nothing was heard of the man.

I fairly forced poor Maurice into making inquiries about him, and he, as American consul at Panompin, had every facility for gaining information if it was to be had.

A few persons had observed a tall, peculiar appearing man, with the lower part of his face concealed under a black cloth, walking along the main street of Panompin that night, but no one was able to furnish the slightest information as to who he was, or where he came from; nor could I convince myself that anyone had seen him after he left me at the end of the alley in that strange and altogether unaccountable fashion.

Meanwhile the days came and went. Maurice busy with his consular engagements grew tired of hearing me talk about the affair, and so I ceased to mention it. I hung the bag upon a nail in my sleeping room, but as it was locked, I made no attempt to open it, for I have a particular dislike to prying into other people’s business—besides it was very light and probably contained nothing but a change of clothing.

In fact the matter had begun to fade from my memory, and growing tired of the monotonous, idle life I was leading at Panompin, I was planning to go to Calcutta with the idea of engaging in business, when one afternoon Maurice burst into the room where I sat reading, blurting out:

​“Now then, old fellow, here’s something to make you forget your troubles. I have the promise of a passage in a steamer bound up to lake Thalaysap and the Siamrap river. I am going to take a month’s vacation and visit the world-famed ruins of Angkor—will you go along?

“Go!”

Why I would have gone to the South Pole with Maurice De Veber willingly, and yet he was only a chance aquaintance, after all.

We had met two years before on a steamer plying between Swatow and Hong Kong, to which latter port I was bound upon certain official business, I had been attracted by his manly figure, dark, handsome face, and regular features, from the moment I first laid eyes on him at the supper table, just after we left Swatow; and when I found he was an American and a New Yorker, of course an acquaintance sprang up at once.

Maurice was a splendid fellow; positively my ideal of young American manhood. What, therefore, did it matter that I had seen forty years and he not more than twenty-five?

You see there was a great void in my heart waiting to be filled by some one. It was the place my wife might have filled, should have filled, but at that time the very sight of womankind was disgusting to me. I execrated the sex; in my lonely hours of self-communion I had brought my mind into that condition where I looked upon every married man as one to be pitied; where I longed for my vanished youth and its opportunities, where I reversed the order of nature, and despising the affection of woman, sighed for that of the brother or the faithful friend. Positively my mental state, just then, must have bordered upon insanity, for I never had but one brother and he was a drunkard and a most precious rascal, and as for my early friends there was not one I could name who had not used me in a shameful way.

Long before we reached Hong Kong I stood ready to give Maurice De Veber my head if he had asked it, and I know that I made myself noticeable by the way I followed him about.

Still he seemed to like it without making the least pretence of returning the absurd affection which I could scarcely help displaying for him.

Possibly some one had said to him, “that old fellow ​Wylde is as rich as a Jew." I should not wonder, for there were those on board who knew me, and the snug little fortune left me by my father had been greatly exaggerated among my associates in China. Indeed, I often thought of that, and I found the thought making me so miserable that I was positively relieved when we reached Hong Kong and our intimacy was broken off.

“Good-bye,” said Maurice, as I took leave of him on the deck of the Singapore steamer, in which he had taken passage for Saigon, from there to proceed to Panompin, where he had just been appointed consul. “Good-bye! If you get tired of Swatow take a run down to Cambodia and pay me a visit. Bring Mrs. Wylde with you and I’ll promise to entertain you both as well as a poor bachelor can.”

Well, when the crisis came, I took the run down to Cambodia, but I did not bring Mrs. Wylde.

Of course I am morbid. I know it. Very likely if I had been different my wife would have been different. There are those who do not hesitate to say so, and doubtless they are right.

But I am what my hereditary tendencies have made me; or perhaps I should say, what, by a careful fostering of those tendencies, I have made myself. I had longed to be free from the chains which held me down, but now that freedom had actually come I found myself bound by chains still more powerful—regret for what had been, thoughts of what might have been, sad memories of the past.

Not but what Maurice tried to make life pleasant for me at Panompin.

He did everything that a man could do, and I honestly believe that by this time he had conceived as sincere an affection for me as it is possible for a young man to feel for a comparative stranger so much his senior.

Indeed, I believe that the trip to Angkor was arranged for my especial benefit, for it was I and not he who had expressed a desire to visit that wonderful city of the ancient Buddhists, which has lain buried in the dense forests of Cambodia for more years than man can count.

We were off within an hour, for the opportunity had presented itself suddenly and had to be embraced at once if at all. Indeed, our departure from Panompin was so hasty that we had barely time to throw together the necessary articles of clothing, leaving our heavier baggage to be ​brought up by Maurice’s Chinese servant, in a native boat, which was to go up to the lake on the following day.

This was the dawning of our fourth day at the ruins—the others had been spent in exploring the great temple, studying its bas-reliefs and unreadable inscriptions, silent memorials of a forgotten race.

Yes, the enjoyment should have been all mine, not his; and to a certain extent it was so. Even in my unhappy frame of mind I could not gaze down from that height unawed at the mighty monuments of a lost people which lay beneath us; nevertheless they had failed to amuse me as I had hoped.

“Hark!” exclaimed Maurice suddenly, as we stood there gazing off upon that ocean of green, tinged at the horizon with a broad dash of orange, deepening in its lower lines into crimson; “hark, George! Don’t you hear someone on the platform above us? I am certain I heard a step.”

“I thought I heard something a moment or two ago,” I replied, “but I hear nothing now.”

“Nor I, but I did as I spoke.”

“It is very unlikely that any of those lazy priests can have gone up before us,” said I, alluding to the dull-eyed old Cambodians, who, dwelling in the group of low thatched huts far below us, have charge of the temple. “Unless something special calls them they have shown no anxiety to leave their rice and betel since we’ve been at Angkor.”

“True, George; and yet I heard——”

“What my dear fellow?”

“Some one praying, I think—at least it sounded that way, though I couldn’t understand the words.”

“Then your hearing is a precious sight more acute than mine, Maurice,” I answered. “I thought I heard some one shuffling about on the platform above us, but praying—nonsense! Don’t fancy those fellows would climb that terrible stairway simply to mutter a prayer which could be just as well mumbled before the big statue of Buddha in the room below.”

Maurice laughed shortly and leaning forward attempted to look up to the next platform above. He was, however, able to distinguish nothing.

Understand the design of the three great towers of the Nagkon Wat; it is necessary for the full comprehension of that which is to follow. Briefly I may describe them as ​vast, circular stone terraces, platform placed upon platform, each slightly receding from the one beneath, until the apex of the cone is reached. The central and largest of these remarkable piles, Maurice, when he first caught a glimpse of it, compared to a huge Papal tiara—no inapt comparison, by the way, for it certainly looked more like that than anything else. In spite of the distance we had climbed, there still remained three of the platforms to be passed before the top could be reached.

“George, you don’t know these Buddhist priests,” Maurice said musingly. “Lazy and indifferent as they appear, they are the most inveterate fanatics on earth. If it were a part of their religion to witness the sunrise from the top of this tower on this particular day, they would move heaven and earth to get here—they would crawl up step by step on their knees, if they could gain their end in no other way.”

“I saw enough of them in China, to understand pretty well what they are like,” I replied.

“Indeed you did not. The Chinese Buddhists are different. With them religion has little or no meaning. Like some of our Christians they make it but a fetich; a bald formula of words and ceremonies which they are alike too ignorant and too indifferent to understand.”

“And are these people different?” I asked skeptically.

“Very different. I have made a study of them since I have been in Cambodia. Of course with the masses it is the same the world over. The Chinese are too practical, too worldly to make deep spiritual thinkers, but among the higher classes of Buddhists in Farther India there are minds capable of the deepest metaphysical reflection; minds stored with an accumulation of spiritual knowledge such as you and I are utterly unable to comprehend.”

“Bosh!” I exclaimed, lighting a cheroot. “Why to hear you talk, old fellow, one would think you were a convert to Buddhism. What are these Buddhists but a parcel of ignorant idolators, worshiping gods of wood and stone, which neither see nor hear nor think nor smell, as the Scripture says somewhere. Positively, Maurice, you surprise me—you do indeed.”

He sighed, gazing upon my face with a certain far-away look that I had often observed in his eyes, and had as often set down to a morbid dreaminess of character which he certainly possessed at times. Thrusting his hands into his ​vest pocket he pulled out a small silver coin, a piece a little smaller than our American quarter dollar, and passed it over to me. Upon one side it bore a representation of the zodiacal constellation pisces , on the other were Persian characters, the meaning of which I was, of course, unable to understand.

“George, what is that?” he asked in the same dreamy fashion.

“One of your Hindoo coins, of course,” I answered, wondering what he was driving at. “I think you told me it was one of a series called the Zodiac rupees.”

“Precisely. I told you so, and having faith in me you believe my assertion.”

“Certainly.”

“Would you have known that those seemingly unmeaning marks on the reverse were Persian letters if I had not told you?”

“No; but of course I should have known they were Oriental letters of some sort.”

“Very likely; because so far and no further has your education in such matters advanced. But suppose you were to take that coin and show it to a New York longshoreman who did not know you, and consequently had no faith in you; suppose you were to assure him that those marks were letters, what conclusion do you suppose he would draw?”

“Either that I was making sport of him or that I was a fool.”

“Then there you have it. As the longshoreman is to the coin so are we to the Buddhist philosophic acumen of the East. To our minds their doctrines are rubbish, absurd to the last degree. Why? Simply because we are incapable of comprehending them; because we are wholly unaccustomed to their methods of thought. Remember this much; when our forefathers were savages, these people were enjoying the height of a glorious civilization. When the naked Britons drove the hosts of Cæsar into the sea, Angkor was old, and, for all we know, even then deserted. George, it required a motive to build this massive pile, as well as unlimited treasure, architectural skill and physical strength. What was that motive? Religion! A profound sense of the littleness of man and the greatness of the God who constructed the mighty temple of the universe; call ​him Jehovah, call him Buddha, Brahma, or by whatever name you please."

“Bravo!” I cried. “Bravo! Positively I never imagined that I had in my friend so profound a thinker, an adept, a philosopher! Then you don’t regard the Buddhists as idolators, it seems?”

“No more than you are, no more than I am. I speak only of the educated. Long before I left America I entertained these views, and since my residence in the East I have seen much to confirm me in them; but—”

“But not enough to make you willing to credit the mysterious disappearance of my friend with the parti-colored face?” I answered, somewhat sneeringly. “You made game of that, you know.”

“I own that I did, but it was because I did not care to enter into a discussion upon these matters at the time. Your state of mind was not such as to make it desirable that I should do so. It is hardly otherwise now, and I regret— George, there certainly is some one on the platform above us. Hark!”

No need to call my attention. What Maurice heard I heard—could not help hearing. A deep voice had broken out above us, singing, or rather chanting the lines which follow.

Coming suddenly as it did, close upon Maurice’s learned disquisition on Buddhism, every word is as firmly graven on my memory as though heard only yesterday, instead of many long years ago. Let me add that the words were English, as perfectly pronounced as if chanted by myself.

“Lo! in the East comes a glow as of rubies;
⁠Jewels magnificent flash in the sky,
Heralding thee, O King of the morning,
⁠Golden hued sun to gladden the eye.

Hail to thee, Sun God, ruler omnipotent!
⁠Salute we thy coming in splendor and fire,
Low bow we down as thy glory illumes us,
⁠Lord of the earth, our ruler and sire.

Dark is the world when thou hast departed,
⁠Lonely and desolate lies the broad plain,
Mountain and valley awaiting in sadness,
⁠Smile when thy face beams upon them again.”

The song ceased. As the last echo died away, the shadowy mists which had hitherto hung over the horizon ​were suddenly dispelled and the sun shown forth in all its glory.

Turning my face upward, I, at the same instant, caught sight of a shadow upon the platform above.

It was but a glimpse—then it was drawn back and had vanished.

But that glimpse showed me a man bending over the balustrade.

Instantly I knew him.

It was my mysterious friend at Panompin-the man with the parti-colored face!

“Maurice!” I cried, grasping my friend’s arm. “Maurice, did you see?”

“See—what? I saw a man leaning over the balustrade up there. Some visitor at the ruins like ourselves.”

“Maurice!” I exclaimed in a hurried whisper, “it was that man.”

“What man?”

“My ‘levitating’ friend, as you call him.”

“No, George! Never!”

But it was though. Didn’t you see his face? It was uncovered—half yellow, half black.”

“The sun must have been in my eyes or yours. I saw nothing of the sort; but to tell the truth I didn’t see his face plainly. Just as I caught a glimpse of it, presto, it was gone.”

Strange sensations seized me. I trembled, though I knew not why.

“If it is actually your Panompin friend, George, by all means let us go up and interview him,” said Maurice lightly. “His song, though a trifle high flown, was not so bad. Do you know I like that idea of sun worship. God is omnipotent, omnipresent, but invisible. He made the earth, but the sun was his master mechanic. By all means let us be sun worshipers, old fellow, but for heaven’s sake, ​don’t drag me into any discussion with your friend upstairs. Such thoughts as I unfolded to you a few moments ago belong to certain frames of mind in which I seldom indulge. If you transgress, don’t be surprised to find me roughly repudiating all I said. I’m in no mood to argue with a Buddhist adept to-day.”

“My lips are sealed,” I replied, “but first we have to ‘catch our hare,’ who knows that we may not find that my singular friend has levitated to parts unknown. Then the laugh will be on your side, and that’s a fact.”

“We’ll see! We’ll see!” exclaimed Maurice, pushing on ahead of me. “If he is still there I’m as eager to interview him as you can be, for—hark! He is there!”

It was true.

We had reached the level of the next platform now, and there, leaning against a sculptured column with arms folded across his breast, stood the object of our thoughts.

Involuntarily we paused and peered out through the doorway communicating with the platform.

As he stood gazing in deep meditation off upon the dense forest there was something grand and majestic in his very attitude.

To Maurice the sight of that face must have been a marvel; to me it now seemed so much a part of the man that I could no longer regard it as hideous, nor even strange.

“What’s his name?” breathed Maurice in my ear. “You want to introduce a fellow, you know.”

I made no answer, for that same cold shudder had come over me again. What could it mean? Could it be that I, the confirmed agnostic was wavering in my agnosticism? For I found myself wondering if I was about to address a being from another and unseen world.

Determined to divest myself of all such nonsense, I now strode forward with outstretched hand.

“Good morning!” I said boldly. “It strikes me we have had the pleasure of meeting before.”

He did not at first change his position—simply turned and surveyed me calmly. Then unfolding his arms he extended his hand and grasped mine just as I was about to withdraw it, pressing it in that hearty fashion that I have always made a point to adopt myself.

“Ah! my Panompin friend!” he exclaimed. “Positively this is a surprise and a pleasant one. How came you here?”

​It struck me very forcibly that mine was the right to ask that question, but I concealed my thoughts, and explained briefly the object of my visit to Angkor.

“It is a wonderful place,” he replied. “Few are aware of its existence and fewer still appreciate its beauties. But your friend here—introduce me please. By the way, our last interview was interrupted so abruptly that I had no opportunity to learn your name.”

My eye was full upon him when he made that allusion to our adventure in the alley, but he showed by no outward sign that he did not consider his strange departure the most natural thing in the world.

“I am George Wylde,” I replied, “and this is Mr. Maurice De Veber, American Consul at Panompin, to whose residence we were on our way when—when——”

“When I was forced to bid you farewell in a most summary manner,” he interrupted with perfect coolness. “Mr. Wylde, I am most happy to meet you again. Mr. De Veber, I trust that you are enjoying life in Cambodia. You are both Americans, I presume.”

“We are—and New Yorkers.”

“A fine city. Greatly improved of late I am told. It is some years since my last visit there. You Americans are an enterprising, practical people, but——”

“But what?”

“I was about to add that like all children you possess a somewhat exaggerated idea of your own intelligence,” he answered, smilingly, “but I had no intention of giving offense—let it pass.”

“You are quite right there, according to my friend’s views,” I laughed; “but pardon me, so far our introduction has been somewhat one-sided. May I ask your name?”

“My name! Well, strictly speaking, I have four names. Two are unpronouncable for you Americans. In Calcutta I am known as Mr. Mirrikh, and that must answer here.”

As he spoke he thrust his hand into one of the inner pockets of his coat, and producing a strip of black silk proceeded to adjust it about the lower part of his face.

He made neither explanation nor the least allusion to this act, and when the silk was in position, stood before us as calmly as ever, evidently waiting for me to speak.

It was Maurice, however, who began.

​“You speak of Calcutta; are you a Hindoo, Mr. Mirrikh?”

“No, sir.”

“Pardon me. You can scarcely be a Cambodian or Siamese. Persian, perhaps?”

“Neither one nor the other, sir. We will let that matter pass.”

Maurice turned slightly red. The dear fellow never could endure rebuff.

“Do you smoke?” he asked, producing his cigar case.

“Seldom, and I do not care to smoke now. Pardon me, Mr. De Veber, if I have given offense. I can assure you——”

“In refusing my vile cheroots, sir? Indeed no.”

“No, no; not that. In declining to disclose my nationality. Believe me the best of reasons exist why I should keep my secret. To all intents and purposes I am a citizen of Benares. I have resided there ‘off and on,’ as you Americans say, for some years.”

“No explanation is necessary, sir,” replied Maurice, lightly. “My question was an impertinent one, but you know I must maintain my reputation for Yankee curiosity. But to change the subject; when did you arrive at Angkor? We have been here four days and, but for the priests, thought we had the ruins to ourselves.”

“I arrived this morning, Mr. De Veber,” he answered, the curious shadow which passed over his face telling me that Maurice was treading on dangerous ground again.

“This morning! Why there was no party in this morning before we left. You could hardly have come up the lake, for I am expecting some one on the next boat due. Possibly you came over from Siamrap?”

“Mr. De Veber, I came from a different direction entirely.”

“Indeed! May I ask from where?”

“Yankee curiosity again?” he laughed. “Really it is too bad, but I am forced to disappoint you. My movements cannot possibly concern you. I prefer not to tell from which direction I came.”

It was too much for Maurice.

Biting his lip he moved toward the balustrade and remained looking down upon the temple roof below.

Scarcely was his back turned when Mr. Mirrikh—I adopt the name he gave us—moved to my side and drew me back toward the door.

​“I am sorry, very sorry,” he said in a low voice, “to have offended your friend a second time, but I assure you it was out of my power to answer his question.”

“Which should not have been asked,” I replied. “The fault is his. He is over sensitive. In a moment he will have forgotten—say no more.”

“Not upon that subject since you wish it; but I must speak with you upon another while opportunity offers. That little hand bag of mine—you recollect. Have you it with you here at Angkor?”

“Unfortunately no;” I took it in charge that night, but it was left behind us at Panompin. Of course I never dreamed—?”

“Of meeting me—certainly not. Why should you? I was engaged in a peculiar mission at Panompin and was particularly anxious not to—that is to say not to leave hurriedly. But tell me—and you must think me very rude for not inquiring sooner—how did you manage to escape?”

“Now it is you who are asking questions. If I answer, I must take the liberty of asserting my Yankee prerogative of asking you the same question in return.”

He smiled strangely—you can scarcely fancy what a singular sensation it is to see a man smile only with his eyes.

“I am dumb,” he said, “but one question I must ask—were you harmed?”

“Not in the least.”

“Good! I am thankful for it. I have many times thought of you—but to return to the bag.”

“It’s at your disposal,” I interposed. “If you are going to Panompin—”

“But I am not. It is doubtful if I ever visit the place again. When you return will you oblige me by addressing a label to Mr. Radma Gungeet, at Benares, and forwarding the bag by express?”

“Certainly. It shall be done if you wish it.”

“One question more. Do not be offended. Did you open the bag, thinking you would never see me again?”

“The bag has remained precisely as you left it, sir,” I replied with dignity.

He gave a slight sigh of relief and turned away just in time to meet Maurice coming toward us from the balustrade.

“Come, George, let’s go down,” he said abruptly. “Mr. Mirrikh, I bid you good day.”

​“Stay—one moment. We part friends?”

He extended his hand which Maurice took.

“Certainly. There is no reason why we should not. I can’t help being a Yankee anymore than you a—well, whatever you are. Come and join us at dinner. We are in the last room of the north wing, and have as fine a Chinese cook as Cambodia can afford.”

“I should be most happy, but it will be quite impossible. Frankly, gentlemen, I am something of a Buddhist. My visit to the Nagkon Wat is for a religious purpose which renders it necessary for me to fast.”

“In which case we shall have to excuse you,” said Maurice lightly. “At all events promise to see us before you leave.”

“I promise that. You shall certainly see me.”

“When?”

“That is more than I can say. Hark! Do I hear someone singing? Gentlemen, I must leave you. As you may easily imagine, my peculiar deformity,” he pronounced the word with an emphasis almost sarcastic, “makes me shy of strangers. Good day.”

Yes, there was some one coming, we could hear the sound of footsteps ascending the stone stairs within the tower, and a rich baritone voice singing—not an ode to the sun god this time, though certainly something akin to it—the good old fisherman’s chorus from Auber’s pleasing, but well-nigh forgotten, opera, Masaniello.

“More visitors!” cried Mauii

“Evidently, and I am off. I cannot meet them,” said Mr. Mirrikh.

Waving his hand politely, he drew back through the doorway, disappearing in the dark shadow beyond.

“Why, the man will run right into this newcomer, whoever he is,” cried Maurice. He started to follow, but I caught his arm and drew him back.

“Don’t,” I whispered. “Whoever he is, or whatever he is, he is certainly a gentleman. Respect his wishes and let him go.”

“Bother!” said Maurice, pulling himself away. “He called me a Yankee, let me show him I’ve got my share of Yankee curiosity. Come on George, I intend to find out where he goes.”

And he stepped through the door, leaving me to follow or not, as I pleased.

​I chose to follow, for I confess that my curiosity had gained the better of my politeness.

Was the strange episode at Panompin about to be repeated, and in broad daylight? Meanwhile, the singing continued, though the sound of footsteps had ceased, and we knew that the new comer must have paused on the platform below.

There were still two platforms above us. We listened, but could hear no footsteps on the stairs.

“He must have gone up,” whispered Maurice; “Yes, by gracious! there he goes now."

Even as he spoke, we caught sight of Mr. Mirrikh’s back vanishing around a turn in the winding stairs.

“Stop!” I whispered. “Maurice, at least let us be decent.”

“I won’t! If he don’t want to meet strangers, neither do we. Come on.”

He crept up the stairs, and I followed him. When we turned the corner there was nothing to be seen of Mirrikh; nor was he on the first platform when we gained it, nor yet on the second and last. Now nothing but a huge cylindrical stone remained above us—nothing save that and the sky.

“Holy smoke!” cried Maurice, dropping into American slang in his excitement. “George, the fellow ain’t here!”

“Evidently not. Now, my friend, perhaps you will be willing to believe me that I was neither drunk nor dreaming that night at Panompin. Too much samschow! Too many Manilla cheroots! All a hallucination—I believe that was the way you talked.”

“Shut up!” cried Maurice, half angrily. “This is a mighty serious matter.”

“Awake! Awake! the morn is freshly breaking!” roared the singer on the balcony below.

“Perdition seize the fellow!” snapped Maurice. “George, where in the mischief do you suppose that man Mirrikh has taken himself to? I will understand this business, I swear I will.”

“Levitated, of course,” I replied ironically. “These Buddhist adepts are wonderful fellows, you know. Why, they have the London Times at Benares every morning within ten seconds of the moment of issue. Railroads they never trouble. If they want to go to Calcutta, Paris or New York, they simply levitate—I’m growing fond of that word, ​it rolls so easily off the tongue. Levitated—that’s it, you may depend.”

“George,” said Maurice solemnly, “you are making light of a serious matter. From my remarks made awhile ago, you have a perfect right to consider me not only a super-religious sort of fellow, but a theosophist as well. Now, the fact is, I am neither one nor the other. I am simply a confirmed investigator. The truth is what I want, and what I am determined to have. Therefore I undertook to investigate Buddhism, and I was amazed at what I found in its much misrepresented doctrines. Nevertheless, I believe only what appeals to my reason and to my senses. Levitation does neither, and yet—well, to cut it short, where the deuce has that fellow gone to? That’s what I want to know.”

“Where did he go the night he left me at the end of the alley?” I demanded triumphantly.

“Through some secret door, I presume. There was chance enough.”

“Was there? You yourself searched and could find no such outlet, but it would not be at all out of the way to imagine both a secret door and a hidden staircase in this ruined pile.”

“That’s it! That’s it!” cried Maurice; “unless he is a second Elijah he can have left this tower in no other way.”

I was looking down as Maurice made this remark; gazing into the interior court yard behind the Nagkon Wat, a space surrounded by low, crumbling stone structures, any one of which, even if we had run down stairs at the top of our speed, it would have taken us a good ten minutes to reach.

Five had not elapsed since the disappearance of Mr. Mirrikh—I doubt greatly if it was more than three.

“Look! Look!” I cried, suddenly seizing Maurice by the arm. “Look! Now will you believe?”

“Great God! It is the man himself! ”

He was as pale as death as these words burst from his lips, and even I felt that strange cold thrill pass through my frame again.

I remember hearing the voice of the singer drawing nearer—of being conscious that he was coming up the last of the stairs and we must encounter him in a moment more. Yet I thought nothing of this now. How could it be ​expected, when looking down into the courtyard of the Nagkon Wat I saw the mysterious Mr. Mirrikh standing at the head of a short flight of steps between the columns of a massive portico.

As we gazed, he lifted his eyes toward the tower and saw us.

Raising his hand he waved it lightly in our direction, bowed, and passing into the shadows of the door-way disappeared.

I wish I possessed that great gift, “a facile pen.”

How I would like to describe that glorious sunrise in the elegant and finely rounded periods of Bulwer; to discourse upon the antiquity of that mighty and mysterious temple with the confident assurance of a Lenormant or a Lyell.

Or even were I gifted with the power of stringing flowery phrases, how poetic could I grow about the balmy air, the thrilling songsters whose notes now began to fill the forest, the nodding palms and delicious odors wafted past us on our lofty perch with each breeze that blew.

But pshaw! I am neither poet nor novelist; history I hate, and science I abhor. I am only a plain, every day American; a little brushed up by foreign travel, perhaps; but neither brighter nor better read than the average of my race.

Thus, as Maurice De Veber truly remarked, I am incapable of comprehending the mystical; my mind and thought methods are unadapted to the tenets of Buddhist theology.

Even now that my knowledge has advanced in this direction; even now that I know of that knowledge and must believe because I know, because I have seen and heard, I find myself still incapable of so expressing my thoughts to others as to carry conviction with my statements. But after all, that is a gift, and one which few men possess.

Here was I brought face to face with a man and a mystery. A man more mysterious even than the temple in which we ​had met. A man whose facial appearance violated all the laws of ethnology; a man seemingly possessed of powers which opposed physical law. Yet now that my friend had seen what I had seen, I found myself forced to admit the truth of that which for weeks past I had been trying to persuade myself was but the outgrowth of an over morbid mind.

“George! George! You saw him?” cried Maurice, staring down at the portico through which Mr. Mirrikh had disappeared.

“Decidedly I saw him. And you—now you are forced to admit that my experience at Panompin was no dream?”

“I admit nothing. All my life—that is ever since I was old enough to read and think—I have longed to be a witness to something of this sort. But, George, once seeing is not enough to convince me that the man exists who can set at naught the laws of nature. I must see and see, test and re-test again and again. I admit the possibility—no more.”

“But,” I began, “such business is done by others than Buddhists. Our modern Spiritualists for instance——”

“Oh bother the modern Spiritualists!” he exclaimed impatiently. “There is something different here from your vulgar table tipping, spirit rappings and banjo playings. How did that man get down from this tower? George, I tell you my dear fellow—pshaw! we can talk no longer now!”

He was right. The moment had come when our attention was to be distracted.

Quick footsteps were heard upon the topmost stairs and the full, rich voice of the singer drew nearer. An instant later and we were no longer alone. The singing ceased, a man stepped out upon the platform and advanced to where we stood.

“Ah! So I am not the only one who has had the courage to brave these infernal stairs!” he exclaimed. “Good morning, gentlemen. English I perceive, or American. My name is Philpot—Miles Philpot. I am glad to meet you—glad to meet any one capable of speaking the only respectable language on God’s footstool—I am indeed.”

Let me describe him. It must be done, and the sooner we are through with introductions the sooner my strange story may be told.

A man of forty years, perhaps, of medium height, slightly inclined to corpulency, with brown hair, big, bulging blue ​eyes and smooth shaven, florid cheeks, stood before us with outstretched hand.

The face was an intelligent one, and yet there was about the mouth a certain sneering expresssion which repelled me. I thought then—and afterward I knew it to be true—that here was a man who had drunk of life’s pleasures to the dregs; a man who had seen everything and forgotten nothing; whose life had been a moral failure; one who had lacked sufficient tenacity of purpose to make life a pecuniary success.

And yet why I should thus have estimated him, I scarcely know.

Certainly his dress did not warrant the drawing of any such conclusion.

A suit of rusty black; a waistcoat with innumerable little buttons extending from a dirty collar turned “hindside foremost,” as Maurice put it, and a broad brimmed straw hat all went to indicate a Church of England clergyman. No; it was the face. That spoke louder than broadcloth and buttons. There was no spirituality there.

Maurice was the first to recover himself from the somewhat confused condition of mind into which this abrupt, though not unexpected interruption had thrown us, and taking the proffered hand, he returned the greeting with more warmth than I, under the circumstances, could have displayed.

“Glad to meet you, sir!” he said heartily. “I am Maurice De Veber; this is Mr. George Wylde, my friend. It is unnecessary to ask if you are our countryman, Mr. Philpot. Your manner speaks too plainly. You are an American, of course."

The new comer laughed lightly.

Ah, how many times was I destined to hear that light, sneering laugh in the weeks to come.

“On the contrary,” he replied, “I am an Englishman. There, don’t stare! Don’t expect me to be a boor in consequence. Don’t look round for my bath-tub, my valet, hat box and travelling rug. I said I was an Englishman—so I am by birth, and I am proud of it; but I am prouder still of being a citizen of the world, and of having spent the best part of my life in the United States. Gentlemen, to all intents and purposes I am an American. You have hit the nail squarely on the head.”

​“Singular words for one of your cloth, sir,” I replied with a slight tinge of sarcasm.

“Cloth! Well you are right. I am a Reverend, boys, but the title is about all there is left of it. I have enjoyed many charges and lost them all, and that which I have now is not a charge! Ha! ha! It is only an existence. Being deprived of a charge does not deprive me of the right to live. Briefly, I am a reformed parson. I am sponging on the world.”

He removed his hat and wiped his perspiring brow, gazing off upon the vast sea of green below us with an expression of admiration which told me that his thoughts were not all as trivial as he seemed to wish us to believe.

“Glorious—ain’t it?” he exclaimed. “I had often read of it and I was bound to see it. Well, here I am at Angkor at last, and now the Lord knows where I shall drift to next.”

“What part of the States are you from?” I ventured.

“New York, last; lived ten years in Chicago; besides that have trotted about from Maine to Texas. As you Yankees say, I kinder guess I’ve seen about all your country has to show.”

“When did you reach Angkor?”

“Half an hour ago.”

“Surely you did not come up the river?”

“No, I came through from Siamrap with a little party of natives. Came to Siamrap from Bangkok, to Bangkok from Calcutta. I am travelling because I like to travel. If I see anything odd I jot it down. I’ve written one book and may write another. Can’t promise though, for I’m too lazy, and that’s the truth. Gentlemen, have either of you got anything to smoke? Unfortunately, I left my pipe with my traps below.”

I passed him my cheroot case and Maurice supplied the match. As soon as the light was taken he began rattling on in the same strain.

“Let me see, haven’t I heard of you before, Mr. De Veber? Strikes me I have. You are consul somewhere—let me see, Macao, ain’t it? No, Panompin?”

“Panompin is the spot,” said Maurice, quietly.

“Ah, yes! Knew I’d seen your name mentioned in some register or another. Dull hole that. I was there last year. Was introduced to that royal beggar, King Norodom. Spent ​a whole evening trying to drink him under the table. No go, though. I was only too glad to get out at last.”

“You have been in the East some time then?” I remarked

“Oh yes; a matter of a few years. They sent me out as a missionary, but bless you, I couldn’t stand it. I had a charge near Rangoon—bored the very life out of me. Luckily I fell heir to a few pounds just about that time, so I took to knocking round again. The fact is, gentlemen, I’ve knocked round so much in my time that I’m fit for nothing else.”

“Did you happen to knock against a man—a Hindoo—wearing a black cloth over the lower part of his face, on your way over from Siamrap?” demanded Maurice, turning suddenly upon him.

“No; I saw no such person. I was the only man in the party outside of the bearers and the guide.”

“And you arrived?”

“Half an hour ago, as I just told you.”

“How long were you at Siamrap?”

“Two days. But pardon me—what are you driving at?”

“One moment. Coming up here did you meet any one on the stairs going down?”

“No; the priests told me there were two English gentlemen at the ruins and your man informed me that you had gone up into the tower so I expected to meet you, but I met no one on the way up.”

“Might not some one have passed you while you stopped on the platform where we heard you singing? ”

“Scarcely. I was there only a moment. I should have heard him, and my very highly developed bump of curiosity would most certainly have prompted me to look round.”

Then, to my surprise, Maurice just blurted out the whole affair.

I was disgusted—half angry. I tried to stop him, but in vain.

“It’s no use, George,” he said. “I am determined to fathom this mystery. If your friend Mirrikh did not come to Angkor up the river then he must have come from Siamrap, for there is no other way of getting here unless through the forest. I want to know where he came from and by what means he left this tower. It is not fair to question Mr. Philpot so closely without letting him understand the whole matter.”

​During Maurice’s animated and somewhat highly colored description of the scene in the alley and that upon the tower, the reverend gentleman maintained perfect silence.

He seemed impressed with my friend’s manner, half amused at his earnestness, but at each allusion to the remarkable disappearances of Mr. Mirrikh, that same sneering smile crept over his face. His glances at Maurice were half in pity it seemed to me.

“You may question me as much as you please, Mr. De Veber,” he said, after Maurice had at length ceased speaking. “You perceive that I am above the prejudices of my race, and am not afraid of the interrogation point. But, my dear fellow, I can’t help you. I can throw no light whatever upon this mystery, unless too great an indulgence in——”

“Stop, sir!” I exclaimed. “I protest. I never indulge too deeply, nor does my friend, De Veber. Look at us both. Not ten minutes have elapsed since that man stood beside us on this tower. Do we show any signs of over indulgence now?”

“No, no; certainly not,” he replied hastily. “But tales of mysterious levitations—I think that was the word you used, Mr. De Veber—remind one of sea-serpent stories and naturally suggest—but enough of this! Seriously, gentlemen, I can assure you that such a person as you describe could scarcely have passed me unnoticed. I saw nothing of him and am glad I did not. Hope I never may.”

“Why so?” asked Maurice.

“Because I am wholly skeptical on these points and have seen enough to make me so.”

“For instance?”

“Oh come, I don’t care to enter into a discussion on Spiritualism—that’s what you are driving at. Give me a light.”

“He has seen nothing,” I thought, as I passed him the match safe, “but he has read much and is afraid to expose his hand until he knows the cards against which he has to play.”

“And I,” said Maurice slowly, “am willing to enter into any investigation which will shed light upon the mighty problem of the hereafter. We are here in this world to-day, we are gone to-morrow. Where? That’s what I want to know.”

​“And are you likely to find out?” demanded Mr. Philpot, turning upon Maurice with more earnestness than he had yet displayed. “For centuries the world has been combating with that problem, and how far have they advanced? Not one inch. Thousands of years ago, sorcerers and magicians gave us the same mysterious manifestations that your modern mediums do to-day. Anciently men respected these persons; later on they burned them; now they laugh at their often exposed humbugs. Bah! I have preached heaven and held up hell as a bugaboo, for money, and priests, by the hundreds of thousands, have done and ever will do the same; but what proof is there? Frankly, gentlemen, I, who have the right to know, say to you there is none. We know that we die, and that is all we do know, and a hundred centuries of preaching to the contrary has been unable to show us any more.”

“I cannot agree with you,” replied Maurice, coldly. “Thousands of witnesses have testified to the truth of spiritual manifestations, and yet you throw their testimony aside with one wave of the hand.”

“And you are a Spiritualist then?”

“On the contrary, I am nothing of the sort. I defined my position just now. I am an investigator—nothing more. I do not claim that the testimony of these witnesses is true.”

“And you, to talk as you do, must be a pretty thorough skeptic,” I interposed. “Until now, I could have freely endorsed every word you say.”

“You’ve hit it,” answered Mr. Philpot lightly. “To one likely to betray me I would never admit it, for I may find it convenient to assume a charge again at any time; but, to you, I say freely, I believe nothing, and investigation only goes to strengthen my unbelief. What is religion but a tissue of falsities, a hollow sham, a cloak for a selfish priesthood to aggrandize themselves at the expense of the multitude—it is nothing less, nothing more. Pope, cardinal, bishop and priest, it is all one in my experience. Bah! I was ‘Low-Church,’ and was kicked out, because I wouldn’t burn candles on my altar, swing censers and listen to the confessions of morbid women. Then I tried ‘High-Church,’ burned candles by the box and incense by the pound. But no! ’Twould’nt suit. They kicked because I wasn’t ‘Low-Church,’ growled because I smoked, accused me of being a ​drunkard because I liked my glass of wine as well as the best of them—but pardon me, gentlemen, I find I am drifting toward the autobiographical. The sun is growing hot here. Let us go down.”

“One moment,” interposed Maurice, “and I am not only ready to join you, Mr. Philpot, but extend a cordial invitation for you to join us at breakfast. This man—this Mirrikh—you have heard our story—tell me what you think?”

“That he is an unmitigated fraud,” replied Philpot promptly. “A Hindoo adept, doubtless, full of mysticism and bosh, but still possessed of the knowledge of certain perfectly natural laws which, to us, are mysteries, enabling him to perform certain tricks and produce certain appearances which, in our eyes, seem supernatural—that is all.”

“And his face?”

“Either painted or marked by disease.”

“And you account for his disappearance—how?”

“Of course,” he replied, “any theory which I may advance in that regard can be only a theory. I am no Buddhist, thank God, but during my residence in India I have seen many strange things for which I was wholly unable to account. Let us suppose, for instance, the existence of some subtile and hitherto unknown gas—unknown, at least, so far as our western scientists are concerned. Might it not be possible to project that toward the nostrils secretly, and so deaden the senses that the operator who desires to levitate himself—I have adopted your word, you see, Mr. De Yeber—will have time to pass out of sight?”

“Scarcely satisfactory,” I answered promptly. “I’ll swear that nothing of the kind was tried in this case.”

“Don’t be too sure.”

“Have you ever witnessed anything of the sort in India?”

“The transportation of inanimate matter without visible aid—no.”

“Then it is useless for you to theorize.”

“Perhaps so. Still, I repeat, such things have unquestionably been done.”

“Then why not in this case?”

“It is possible, but I must doubt it.”

“No more than I do,” I answered, “and yet what I saw, I saw.”

​“It is useless to continue this discussion,” interposed Maurice. “Not only in India, but in every country on the face of the globe have such apparent impossibilities occured. And yet, I repeat, even I do not believe.”

“Then this man whom we both saw go up the stairs must actually have gone down?” I demanded testily. “I am no more a religionist than yourselves, gentlemen. Of modern Spiritulism I know next to nothing, of the claims of Buddhist adepts still less; and yet—Great God! Maurice, there he is again!”

In the middle of my protest I broke off suddenly. I recall perfectly the very words I used.

For my eyes finding no pleasant resting place on the face of our “reformed parson,” had wandered to the courtyard below, and there I saw Mr. Mirrikh walking along the grass-grown pavement with bowed head and arms folded across his breast.

“Certainly he is a most singular looking person,” said Philpot. “So that is the man?”

“That is the man,” I replied.

“I wish I might look beneath that covering,” he mused. “Surely the upper part of the face and the hands are white.”

“Rather yellow,” said I. “If you could see him closely, you—protecting powers! Where is he now?”

We stood there gazing at each other in breathless amazement.

But one second before, and the man had been slowly walking across the interior court of the Nagkon Wat.

Speaking for myself—and my companions testified to the same—not for one instant had my eyes been removed from him, and yet now he was no longer there.

“You see,” said Maurice, cooly lighting a fresh cheroot.

There was not the slightest projection of any sort above the pavement of the court. For the man to have hidden himself from our view was quite impossible. Even Philpot was obliged to admit that.

“Come, let us go down at once and investigate this business,” he exclaimed. “I have seen strange things in my time, but this—”

“Stop!” I said. “Going down will not bring us to that man. Gentlemen, look there!”

There are three towers rising above the roof of the ​Nagkon Wat. I reiterate this in order that the situation may be more fully understood. We, let it be remembered, were standing on the middle one, and I now raised my hand and pointed in triumph toward the summit of the lower tower, on our right.

He was there!

Standing upon the topmost platform, leaning against the balustrade we all saw him. His eyes were directed toward the rising sun.

“Amazing!” cried Philpot.

But Maurice was to be satisfied by no simple expression of astonishment.

“Hello! Hello, there!” he shouted.

Then I saw him look toward us, but at so great a distance the expression of the visible portion of his face could not be discerned.

As if in answer to Maurice’s shout he waved his hand, turned, entered the low doorway behind him and disappeared.

It seems to me that I have now rendered tolerably clear the perplexed frame of mind in which Maurice De Veber and I found ourselves at the beginning of our fourth day at Angkor.

Day succeeded day and our perplexity was in no way diminished—rather increased.

Not that the mysterious Mr. Mirrikh manifested himself again.

Quite the contrary. We saw nothing of him, and just there the mystery lay.

Immediately upon our descent from the central tower of the ruined temple, the Reverend Miles Philpot set himself the task of finding “that man.”

Briefly, he did not succeed; and that with every opportunity for success; for Philpot among his other accomplishments—and they were certainly many—numbered a very ​tolerable acquaintance with the Siamese language, and he at once proceeded to question the old priests who guard the Nagkon Wat.

It was a useless effort. From the priests—intelligent men of their class—we received the most positive assurances that no stranger was present at the ruins but ourselves, nor had been for months past. Of a man with a partially concealed face they had never heard.

But had no one seen Mr. Mirrikh but ourselves?

Yes; Maurice’s Chinese cook, Ah Schow, had seen him crossing the courtyard while on the way to fetch water for our breakfast from a spring behind the temple. Seen him for a moment only, for then his attention was attracted by something else. When Ah Schow looked back, wondering at the concealed face, the man was gone.

And this was all.

Be very certain that we all three made haste to ascend the winding staircase of the right hand tower, having our labor for our pains.

As the days glided by, the Rev. Miles Philpot remained our guest, and it struck me that it was a very fortunate thing for His Reverence that he had fallen in with us as he did.

So far as I could learn he was almost without money, and he certainly had come into the depths of this Siamese forest wholly unprovided with such creature comforts as were absolutely necessary for existence, and unattended as well.

He made no concealment of this. On the contrary, he boasted of his luck.

“If I hadn’t met you boys,” he said, “likely as not I would have starved. It was a crazy undertaking, but I had grown tired of Bangkok and was determined to see these ruins. I shall go back with you to Panompin, and if nothing turns up there I’ll jog on to Singapore, where I have been promised a charge at a mission station. If I fail there I think I shall go home to England.”

Never have I been thrown in with a man so well informed and yet so light and trivial in all his methods of thought.

Maurice seemed to like him; I endured him—he amused me with his sarcasm and his dry sayings. So long as he kept me from thinking it was enough.

One of the few things of which his luggage boasted beyond a change of clothing was a small camera, and with this he entertained himself and us by taking negatives, ​which he had no means of developing, of those beautiful bas-reliefs which adorn the walls of the Nagkon Wat.

One morning—I believe it was the tenth, for I remember we had about exhausted the subject of Mr. Mirrikh and his mysterious disappearances—just as I was emerging from the chamber opening off the broad veranda which extends the full length of the old temple in front, I encountered Philpot and Maurice hurrying up the steps.

“Glorious news, old fellow!” exclaimed my friend. “The boat is up from the lake at last and with it all our traps. Now we can pay our long projected visit to Ballambong. Wong is following with the things he brought up; and see, the fellow, bound to make a clean sweep, brought this along with the rest.”

It was Mr. Mirrikh’s little hand bag which Maurice extended toward me, with an odd twinkle in his eye.

“Heavens! That bag!” I exclaimed. “What a pity we did not have it, when—”

“When he last materialized,” broke in Philpot. “I say no. Spirits have no use for hand bags. I believe you are still an advocate for the ghostly theory, Mr. Wylde?”

It was one of his jokes, for it was Maurice, not I, who in our repeated discussions had shown an inclination to connect those strange appearances and vanishings with the materialization phenomena of modern Spiritualism; while I, on the contrary, had stoutly maintained that I never could by any possibility be brought to admit that my Panompin acquaintance was other than a creature of flesh and blood like ourselves.

“Hold on there, Doctor!” I cried—it was Maurice who had given him the title—“remember there is a fine for the first person mentioning the name of that individual argumentatively. I believe we shall see him again, and I am glad Wong made the blunder and brought the bag.”

I extended my hand to take it from Maurice, but Philpot with that impetuosity which characterized all his movements, snatched it away.

“Look out!” he exclaimed. “Dynamite! Infernal machine! Hold on, boys! It don’t matter about me. The world will never miss Miles Philpot. I’m going to open this bag.”

“No, no! Don’t do it!” I said. “Suppose he returns and claims it?”

​“Let him! What do I care? Throw all the blame on me—here goes.”

Before I could prevent, he thrust the big knife he always carried, between the metal edges of the bag, and pried the two halves apart.

“Confound you! What did you do that for?” I exclaimed, now seriously vexed at the persistency he displayed.

But Maurice sided against me.

“Bother, George! Why do you make so much fuss about nothing?” he said. “The Doctor is right. By all means let us see what is inside the bag.”

I maintained a sulky silence. It was quite impossible for me to quarrel with Maurice. I loved him too well for that.

“Thunder!” remarked the Doctor, tumbling over the contents of the bag, “nothing very theosophic here. On the contrary, everything seems quite material. Two shirts, a pair of muslin drawers, six collars, four pair of cuffs, a tooth brush, comb, hair brush and a bottle of Brigg’s patent liver pills.”

“Try the other side,” suggested Maurice.

“Well, here we have one or two Calcutta papers, not more than six months old,” continued the Doctor, “a packet of court plaster, a pair of shoes, six pair stockings, pocket ink stand and this book—perhaps that will throw some ray of light upon the dark mystery surrounding our levitating friend.”

“Stop!” I exclaimed. “Stop! I won’t have it. Let Mr. Mirrikh be what he may, I gave him my word that this bag should be forwarded to Radma Gungeet, of Benares. Doctor, I appeal to you as a gentleman——”

“What! Radma Gungeet—did you say, Radma Gungeet?” cried the Doctor. He paused with the book unopened in his hand.

“Certainly. That was the address he gave me.”

“That fixes Mirrikh as a Hindoo, at all events. Do you happen to know who and what this Radma Gungeet is?”

“I neither know nor care. He shall have that bag unless Mirrikh comes after it, and I feel thoroughly ashamed of myself to think that it is now impossible for him to receive it with its contents undisturbed.”

“Radma Gungeet is one of the most noted adepts in India,” said the Doctor, slowly. “Wylde, this goes far to show that Mirrikh is one of those singular beings himself.”

​“No matter. I want that bag, Doctor, and I insist upon that book remaining unopened.”

“Too late!” replied Philpot, and before I could interfere he had opened the volume and was running over its pages.

I sprang forward and would have snatched it from him, but Maurice caught my arm and restrained me.

“Come, come, George! No quarrelling!” he said. “What’s done can’t be undone. Everything shall be carefully returned to the bag. Doctor, what do you make of the book?”

For the Doctor had stopped turning over the leaves and was staring at a page with a deeply puzzled expression.

“Upon my word I can’t make anything of it,” he replied, slowly. “It is a mystery, a veritable mystery. Look here.” He held up the book, open as it was, looking more serious than I had ever seen him look before.

Now there was nothing peculiar about the book so far as outward appearance was concerned. It was simply an ordinary blank book, leather bound, with limp covers, closely written perhaps half through. It was the peculiarity of the writing which had puzzled the Doctor, and possibly had I been better informed on such matters it might have puzzled me.

“Well, what is odd about it?” I demanded, sulkily.

“Look and see,” repeated Philpot. “De Veber, you surely are able to comprehend.”

“I confess I don’t see what you are driving at!” answered Maurice. “Of course the language is as incomprehensible to me as it is to Wylde. Hindoo, I take it, Sanscrit or possibly Bengalee.”

“Neither one nor the other,” replied the Doctor. “No such characters as those were ever used in India.”

“What then?” I asked.

“There lies the mystery,” he answered slowly. “Those characters belong to no nation on earth.”

“Bosh! As though you were competent to decide that.”

I saw his eyes flash, and I knew that I had come near to rousing a temper which I fancy seldom showed itself.

“You are angry Wylde,” he said cooly. “It happens that I am competent to decide in this matter. I can read Sanscrit, Hindoostanee, Bengalee, Talenga, Siamese and Persian. Beside that I was for ten years linguist of the British Bible Society and have assisted in the ​translation of the Bible into nearly every language of the East.”

I was amazed. Were the claims of this man true? In the days which followed I came to know that they were.

“And do you mean to say that this book is written in an unknown language?” demanded Maurice, incredulously.

“By no means,” replied the Doctor. “All I assert is that the characters are unknown—the language may be English, for all I can tell.”

“May it not be written in cipher?”

“Certainly; and such I am inclined to think is actually the case. But there, examine it for yourselves, gentlemen. Wylde, I owe you an apology. I am sorry I opened the bag against your wishes, but having opened it, I was determined to see what it contained.”

I made no reply, for I was still angry. Taking the book from his hand almost rudely, I proceeded to make a more critical examination, half expecting, I am free to confess, to see Mr. Mirrikh suddenly appear among us and reproach me for what had been done.

But I could make nothing of it, nor could Maurice. The characters were most peculiar and seemed to be made up of simple strokes, dots and curves, arranged at different angles. They neither extended across the page, nor yet up and down in columns, as the Chinese write, but were arranged in little squares, or tablets, after the manner of those mysterious hieroglyphics found sculptured on the monuments of Palenque, Copan, Uxmal, and other ruined cities of Mexico and Central America, which, as is well known, have thus far defied the skill of the most noted antiquarians of the world.

But in a matter of this kind, description goes for nothing. I reproduce, above, three sample squares for the inspection of the reader. Let him judge of their peculiarity for himself.

​Now this happened at the beginning of a day destined to become most notable among those spent at Angkor.

By noon we were at Ballambong, where lies concealed in the very heart of the forest a minature Nagkon Wat, not lacking interest to the professed antiquarian, but to us it seemed decidedly tame.

We had gone into the jungle accompanied only by one old priest whom we had taken pains to propitiate by frequent gifts of brandy and tobacco. Although only three miles distant from Angkor, the journey had been a hard one, since every step of the way took us through a dense tropical tangle, keeping me in momentary dread of dangling pythons, prowling tigers and other pleasing diversions.

Nevertheless the trip was not without enjoyment. The day was perfect, and as the rainy season was now close upon us, such days were not to be despised. Maurice was full of life and spirits, and Philpot certainly at his best. Jovial always, he seemed to surpass himself in joviality on that particular morning. Witty upon all occasions, he kept us in a constant roar of laughter by his quaint remarks and comical sayings. More than all this, it was a pleasure to listen as he unfolded his vast stores of knowledge. Not a plant, not a tree nor shrub, but he had the name, botanical and vulgar, at his tongue’s end, and as he rattled on, discoursing learnedly at one moment, telling a witty and often broad anecdote the next, I could not but wonder where and when the man had found time to learn all these things, and how it happened that one whose manners and acquirements certainly seemed to fit him for many elevated positions, had become so complete a nomad—a wanderer on the face of the earth.

We remained at the ruins three hours, during which time Philpot took a series of views of the temple and the most notable of the bas-reliefs.

I remember how he sang over his work, stopping only to light his pipe—the tobacco had been begged from Maurice—and to quiz the old priest, who followed us about like a dog, watching our operations with awe.

Meanwhile I kept myself busy studying inscriptions and dreaming over the lost glories of this wonderful land. I pondered upon the problems which Angkor and its environs offer to the antiquarian. I fancied these old temples in their glory, with a mighty city surrounding them.

​“This very building may have been included within the limits,” I was reflecting, when all at once Philpot came bursting into the apartment where I stood before an inscribed tablet bearing a long history of the doings of some forgotten dignitary of the ancient Cambodian race.

“Look here, Wylde, we are in a precious pickle now!” he broke out.

“What is the trouble?” I inquired, turning with a start, for I had not been conscious of his approach.

“Why that wretched fraud of a priest refuses to go back with us. Says he is obliged to stay here to perform some heathen ceremony or another, and has just informed me that we can stay until morning or return to the Nagkon Wat as best we can.”

“Well, I don’t see anything so very terrible about that,” I answered. “It is scarcely past four o’clock, and the distance is only three miles. For my part I’d as soon be rid of the fellow—he’s only in the way.”

“Precisely, but suppose we miss the path?”

“No danger. It is a straight trail through the forest. We couldn’t miss it if we were to try.”

“Which only goes to show how little you comprehend the dangers of a Siamese forest,” he replied. “I tell you, my dear fellow, we are very likely to miss our way, and that means wandering in the jungle indefinitely, living on all sorts of unpleasant things, with the beautiful prospect of starving to death in the end.”

“Pshaw! You exaggerate. Have you tried all your powers of persuasion?”

“Aye, and of Maurice’s brandy flask and tobacco bag into the bargain. It’s no go. The old fanatic has got some crotchet into his head, and the devil himself couldn’t knock it out.”

I found Maurice less excited than the Doctor, but still anxious, and of the opinion that we ought to start back at once.

“Mr. Philpot is right, George, he said. “There is danger. We are without a compass and the jungle is full of wild beasts. It would be no joke to get lost in these woods.”

Meanwhile the priest had taken himself off and could not be found. Probably he was concealed somewhere among the ruins, but we made no attempt to look for him, simply bundling our traps together and starting off along the narrow trail in single file.

​“Upon my word I'm sorry we ever ventured into this beastly hole,” grumbled Philpot, after we had advanced about a mile or so. “A night spent here would bring us all down with jungle fever—heavens! look there!”

He pointed toward a huge atap palm just in advance of us, from which a thick, brown tendril, as I supposed it to be, for I had seen it before, hung dangling. But, now, as I looked again, I saw the supposed tendril suddenly elevate itself; saw a well defined head, a pair of wicked beady eyes flash fire, and a forked tongue shoot out like lightning. It was a huge serpent, which in a moment more might have been twining its folds about the Doctor’s neck.

I started back in terror, but Maurice, always cool, raised his rifle and fired.

The snake drew back and disappeared among the palm leaves. Whether the shot took effect or not, I cannot say, for we did not pause to investigate.

“Now you see!” said the Doctor. “Pleasant prospect for the night if we should happen to miss our way. Once in India I spent three nights in the jungle. I tell you those nights will live in my memory until my dying day.”

“But we are not going to stay here all night,” answered Maurice.

Suddenly he paused. A puzzled expression passed over his face, for we had come to a division in the path.

“By Jove!” cried the Doctor. “What did I tell you?”

“We want to keep to the right,” I said emphatically, for I felt certain that I remembered the place.

“Are you sure?” asked Maurice.

“As certain as I can be.”

“We passed three such divisions coming down,” interposed the Doctor; “what do you go by? Is there any landmark that you particularly observed?”

I was obliged to confess that there was not, and yet I felt so positive of my position that I repeated my assertion with some warmth.

“What do you say, Doctor?” asked Maurice. “Shall we venture?”

“Faith, my dear boy, we might as well try one road as the other,” he replied lightly, “but with all due deference to Brother Wylde, I doubt if he knows any more about it than we do.”

“Very well; I am quite willing to yield my opinion,” said ​I. But they would not have it so. Since I had an opinion and they had none, it was decided to take the right hand path.

As we hurried on the jungle seemed to grow denser, yet the path remained clearly defined.

“I am becoming more and more convinced that we are going wrong,” said the Doctor, at length. “Look at that fan palm—I am certain we did not pass it. A beautiful specimen. I should have been sure to notice it particularly, but as it is I am ready to swear I never saw it before.”

“Shall we retrace our steps then?” I asked, for I had become less confident myself.

“Suppose we push on a little further,” said Maurice. “It seems to me I can distinguish an opening on ahead.”

“Which would go to prove that we are astray,” added the Doctor, “for we passed no clearing of any sort coming down.”

“True; but it may be a native village where we could find a guide,” said I.

“Hark!” cried Maurice. “What was that? An elephant, surely!”

For an instant a shrill trumpeting resounded through the forest and then all grew still.

“Come on!” shouted Maurice, unslinging his rifle. “It has always been my ambition to bag an elephant and the chance has come at last!”

We pushed on, advancing with as much caution as possible. Again the trumpeting was heard, and still again.

“An elephant it is beyond all question,” said Philpot, “but I'm afraid you can’t kill it, after all, Maurice.”

“Why not, I’d like to know! Do you mean to intimate that my shooting is so poor that I couldn’t hit a beast as big as the side of a house? ”

“Not at all,” laughed the Doctor. “I only mean to intimate that your elephant is a tame one. Look there!”

We had rounded a turn in the path now and saw directly ahead a large elephant, standing beneath a cocoa palm which formed one of a grove of similar trees surrounding a little collection of grass-thatched huts.

“A village!” I exclaimed. “This settles it. We are on the wrong road.”

“And it puts a finish to De Veber’s elephant hunt!” laughed the Doctor. “Why that beast is half blind and ​looks as though he might be crowding a hundred. But where are all the people?”

There was no one to be seen; at least no one but the aged elephant, who stood there leisurely waving his trunk back and forth and peering at us out of his little eyes in a fashion which disproved the Doctor’s theory of blindness. There were at least a dozen of the huts; the doors all stood wide open, with fowls running in and out, and stretched directly across the threshold of one lay an old sow with her litter of pigs who blinked at us lazily, and then, apparently assured that we were harmless, closed her eyes with a satisfied grunt.

“Good!” cried the Doctor. “This is precisely what we want. We shall be sure to find a guide here who will take us over to Angkor for a few ticals. Hello there! Hello!”

There was no direct answer, but at the same instant the echoes of the forest were awakened by a piercing scream, which seemed to proceed from behind the huts among the palms.

“By Jove!” exclaimed the Doctor. “A female in distress? It is, as I live! Shades of my ancestors! This won’t do! No true born Briton can turn away from that appeal.”

Now the cry came again. It was surely that of a woman in agony, just as the Doctor said.

We hurried behind the huts, coming upon a group of half-naked natives, who were clustering about two giant cocoa palms in the middle of a little clearing.

“Thunder and Mars! What barbarity!” burst from the Doctor, as we looked ahead.

Between the palms was a young girl, her only dress the panoung, or Siamese breech cloth, worn by men, which dropped from the waist below the knees. She was bound by the wrists and ankles to the two trees writhing under the blows of a strip of rawhide wielded by a wicked looking fellow behind her. Each time it descended a shout of satisfaction went up from those who crowded around.

“I’ll soon put a stop to this!” shouted the Doctor. “Nothing of the sort can be allowed with your uncle about.”

Never had I respected the man as I did at that moment when he sprang away from us and dashed fearlessly among the group.

Not that Maurice and I were backward. Cocking our rifles we followed the Doctor, shouting as we went.

​But there was nothing to fear. The instant the crowd saw us they fell back, the half-naked cowards scampering off in every direction, not, however, before the Doctor had caught the flogger and dashed him to the earth. The fellow made no resistence, but went crawling off on his hands and knees like some animal, disappearing among the palms.

Meanwhile Maurice had whipped out his knife and cut the cords which bound the girl, who seemed to have fallen into a state of unconsciousness. I would have helped him had I not been prevented by my legs being suddenly seized by an aged, white haired man, who crouched upon the ground weeping and muttering. With some little difficulty I managed to free myself, and extending a hand raised him to his feet.

“What does all this mean?” I exclaimed. “Look, Doctor! These people are white!”

I had used the word when perhaps I should not, for certainly the girl was not white, her skin having rather the yellowish tinge of the Spaniard or Portuguese. And yet she was beautiful. As my eyes turned toward her I saw it and wondered that I had not seen it at the first. Never was there a form of more correct proportions! Never such hair as those long black tresses, hanging loosely in a thick mass over her shoulders; as for the face every feature was perfection itself, a study for a sculptor; involuntarily my mind pictured the Venus di Milo, and then——

Why then, as my eyes rested upon her while she stood supported by Maurice, a most singular thing happened to me.

Suddenly all my surroundings seemed blotted out and I could see only the girl, and the sight seemed to move my heart as it had never been moved before.

What did it mean?

Was it a case of love?

Love! Had I ever known it? Never, certainly, as I knew it then!

As I gazed upon that still, tear-stained face, a strange tingling shot through me down to my very toes, and I was seized with an instant of jealousy of Maurice; a longing to tear her from him and fly with her to the forest, to bury myself in its most remote recesses where I could live for her alone!

Was I mad? Was this the man who had cursed the fair sex with that bitterness which can be had only by sad ​experience? What was the meaning of this sudden freak?

Certainly I was not master of my own actions when I leaped forward and seizing her bleeding form pressed it to my heart!

Yes, in that moment I must have been mad; though in the days that followed, when memory recalled my ridiculous action, I came to believe that the man Mirrikh was in a measure responsible; that the mere touch of his hand had brought to life some force within me the nature of which I do not pretend to explain. But this is anticipating the outcome of our strange meeting at Panompin. I must return.

The instant I found my arms about the girl I was myself again, and amazed at what I had done.

Love! Why, to me love meant misery—misery pure and unadulterated. I had drank my fill of the fatal cup before this and the draught had sickened me. Almost roughly I pushed the girl back upon Maurice who was regarding me in mild surprise.

“Take her! Take her!” I exclaimed. “She is too heavy for me—I shall let her fall.”

“Take the devil!” he cried half angrily. “Have you lost your senses? What do you mean? You were so anxious to get her, now keep her. I don’t know anything about women and don’t want to.” Angrily he drew away.

But Maurice was not quick enough. Before he could prevent it I had again transferred the burden to his arms, a strange shudder passing over me as I let her go.

“I beg your pardon, old fellow, I—I’m a little upset by all this,” I stammered. “If you can’t hold her why lay her down on the grass.”

“Now that’s more like it,” muttered Maurice. “Here, let the old fellow take care of her—he’s the proper person. Hello there, Doctor! Tell him to look after the girl, will you? I don’t want the responsibility of this.”

“It’s all right. She’s only fainted. I saw that at the start,” replied the Doctor, who had been talking to the old man in Siamese. “She’s his daughter, he says. He’ll look after her, boys.”

The man was at her side in an instant, for be very sure Maurice lost no time in laying the girl down. Hastily bending over her he pressed his hand upon her heart, and then turning suddenly, flung himself at Maurice’s feet, kissing them again and again, at the same time clutching his ankles ​so that the boy could not move. Meanwhile the Doctor, seized by some sudden notion had started off on the run toward the huts.

Maurice’s face was a study as he tried to free himself from the old man’s grasp.

“Great heavens! Has everybody run mad but me!” he shouted. “Take him off, George! Take him off, will you? I don’t want to kick the old fellow, but I can’t stand this.”

I interfered and in a moment had rescued him.

“Ye gods! but that’s a relief!” cried Maurice, as the old man returned to the girl again. “What a row we’ve all got into, to be sure! Is she dead, George? Where’s the Doctor? He knows everything and ought to be here now. One would think you’d both been bitten by the tarantula. Confound him! Why did he run away?”

“No, no! She’s not dead. It’s only a faint,” I exclaimed. “She’ll come out of it all right.”

Something of a physician myself, I bent down hastily and feeling heart and pulse saw that there was really nothing to be feared. I was right, too. A few drops of brandy from Maurice’s flask speedily brought a return of consciousness. Perceiving a spring among the palms near by, I fetched some water in an earthen pot, which I happily discovered, and with this the old man tenderly bathed her head and the bleeding welts upon her back, talking incessantly in an unknown tongue. I could not fail to notice that his conversation was directed toward Maurice, whom he evidently regarded as responsible for the whole affair.

Meanwhile the Doctor continued absent and Maurice kept right on growling; he had not got over my moment of folly it seemed. Nor had I recovered from it either, and I was furious with myself about it. As I could not look toward the girl without starting into life the same absurd sensations, I bravely looked the other way.

“Confound it all! it will be dark in a few moments!” exclaimed Maurice. “Why don’t he come? We want to be getting out of this.”

It was quite evident that he was right. Not only was night approaching, but the sky, hitherto perpetually serene, had now begun to cloud over, and the faint sighing of the wind through the palms seemed to indicate an approaching storm.

Meanwhile the girl had arisen and stood leaning against ​her father, who kept “firing words at us,” as Maurice expressed it, which of course were wholly unintelligible.

“Yes, yes, it’s all right!” said Maurice, nodding good naturedly. “Much obliged—never forget us, and all that sort of thing. We understand.”

Suddenly the old fellow made a dart off among the palms and vanished.

“Great heavens! is he going to leave the girl on our hands?” cried Maurice, in evident alarm. But before we had time to discuss it there he was back again, carrying in his arms a rawhide pack which he flung upon the ground at Maurice’s feet. Still chattering, he loosened the straps and opening the pack drew out a loose, cotton garment, blue in color and fashioned something like the native pajama, which he proceeded to throw over the shoulders of the girl who, with downcast eyes, stood quietly by his side.

Now he bent over the pack again and took out a large camel’s hair shawl of exquisite pattern and laid it over Maurice’s arm with a profound salaam.

“That’s for you!” said I. “See what you get for your share in this business.”

“But I don’t want it! I’m no more entitled to it than you are, George! What in the world am I to do with the thing?”

Indeed, he would have returned the gift, but the old man either could not or would not comprehend.

Salaaming again, this time including both of us, he hastily closed the pack, slung it upon his shoulders, and taking the girl by the hand tottered off among the palms.

Was she actually going? Again those ridiculous sensations seemed to seize me. I longed to rush forward to drag her back, but I restrained myself, disgusted at my own thoughts which not for worlds would I have had Maurice know. “We ought to stop them—we ought to know more of this matter;” was all I could trust myself to say.

“Why?” asked Maurice, indifferently. “We’ve done all that could be expected of us, George. Let them go their way. Hello! Here’s the Doctor back at last, and its about time, I must say.”

I turned to look. Philpot was approaching from the direction of the huts. When my gaze reverted toward the forest again it was only to get a last glimpse of that singular pair disappearing among the palms, hand in hand.

​“Hello! Where are those people?” exclaimed the Doctor, as he came hurrying up a few minutes later on.

“Gone,” replied Maurice, “and it’s time we were going too. What in thunder made you run off the way you did?”

“Why, the old man said they had robbed him of all his money,” cried the Doctor. “Told me it was in a little canvas bag; the reason they were beating the girl was to make her confess where he had hidden the rest.”

“And you went to get it back?”

“Yes. I pitied them. Unfortunate wretches! Said he was a peddler from a country to the north of this. Why, he begged me, with tears in his eyes, to get back the money, saying that he was ruined, and all that sort of thing, and now he has gone and lit out without even waiting to see what success I met with. I say it begins to look as though I’d been played for a fool.”

“Did you get the money?” asked Maurice.

“Got nothing,” was the angry response. “Couldn’t come up with one of those fellows. The whole village is deserted now, except for the elephant and the pigs. Confound the luck! I wanted to see the head-man, as they call him, and make him tell us our way. There never were such precious cowards as these Siamese. I say, De Veber, where did you get the shawl?”

Explanations were evidently in order now all around, and the next five minutes were spent in making them.

I expected to learn something about the old man and his daughter, but was disappointed, for the Doctor had already told all he knew.

“What were those people, anyhow?” asked Maurice. “They looked too white to be Siamese, or Cambodians either, for that matter.”

“Certainly they were neither, though the old chap spoke Siamese well enough,” replied the Doctor. “I wish to goodness you fellows hadn’t let them off so easily. I’m puzzled to know why the man should have humbugged me about the money the way he did.”

“You don’t think he had lost any money then?” I asked.

“Why of course not. Do you suppose he would have trotted off if he had?”

“Probably not. Yet I can’t see his motive.”

“I rather suspect he thought we were French officers and might detain them both until the outrage could be ​investigated, though why he should have picked me out for the leader and tried that clever dodge to get me out of the way, I can’t understand.”

“Come, come!” cried Maurice, “time enough has been wasted over this adventure. Night is right on top of us, and a storm along with it, if I am any judge of Siamese meteorology. Let us get back to the place we turned off as soon as possible, and try the left hand trail.”

There was sound common sense in this, yet, in spite of myself, my thoughts would wander toward the forest. “What do you think of the shawl, Doctor?” I asked abruptly, in the effort to shake them off.

“Why, it’s a genuine camel’s hair. Did the old man give it to you, De Veber?”

“Yes; I had to accept it.”

“Had to accept it! I only wish it had been me then. Why man, that shawl would bring a good hundred pounds in London..”

“No!”

“Fact, I assure you. I didn’t notice what it was till Wylde called my attention to it. A famous present for the future Mrs. De Veber. You will do well to hold on to it.”

He was right, too. I may as well mention that the shawl was finally sold for £70. Perhaps it was the last part of Philpot’s remark that made Maurice so anxious to get rid of it. I remember well how he laughed when he answered:

“I shall hold it till it rots then before I put it to the use you suggest. Mrs. De Veber is a long way in future. I’m afraid she will never find any use for her shawl.”

“What? Opposed to the divine institution,” cried the Doctor. “Give me your hand young man? You are a fellow after my own heart. I wouldn’t marry the best woman in the world, no, not if she were hung with diamonds. But a young chap like you can scarcely be expected to feel that way.”

“I think I am one of the select few who are willing to profit by the experience of others,” laughed Maurice.

“Wise man! And have the matrimonial experiences of your friends then been so disastrous?”

“Ask Wylde,” Maurice was beginning, when I checked him with a frown. The Doctor saw it, and, with that perfect politeness of which he was certainly master when he chose to exert himself, immediately changed the subject.

​“Come! Let us get on,” he exclaimed. “There’s mischief in yonder clouds. We have no time to waste.”

We now hurried through the village, pausing for a moment to see if we could catch a glimpse of some of the cowardly inhabitants, and gain a word of information about the path back to Angkor.

“No go,” said the Doctor. “We shan’t find ’em. Anyhow, this is nothing but a wood-cutters’ camp, probably belonging to some of the people in Siamrap.”

None of the villagers were to be seen, and, still discussing our adventure, we now retraced our steps through the jungle. Darkness was rapidly approaching, and there was no time to be lost.

But our discussion left us where we started—nowhere.

Maurice and I had depended upon the Doctor to enlighten us. The dependence proved futile. The Doctor had no suggestion to offer.

“More of your mysterious people, Wylde,” he said in his usual half-sneering way. “We shall have to hold you responsible for the whole business. Gad, boys, but she was a little beauty! If I had dreamed that our acquaintance would be so brief, I should certainly have stayed by her. Now De Veber gets all the glory, and——”

“And the shawl!” broke in Maurice. “Take it if you want it. I acknowledge you as the rescuer of the fair one. Why, even George was more active than I, and yet I have reaped the reward.”

“Nonsense! What do I want of your shawl, but I will be tolerably obliged to you for a cheroot. I understand the whole business. It was your good looks that did it, De Veber. Alongside of a Yankee Apollo, what chance could two old birds like Wylde and myself hope to stand?”

Coming from one of his cloth, there was something intolerably repulsive to me in these flippant remarks. Yet why should that have influenced me? I had abjured the man’s creed, I despised his profession, I had laughed when he made light of it, and yet now I seemed to demand of him a greater delicacy of thought, a purity of sentiment than possessed by the average man, although I had put him down for an average man and nothing more.

It grew darker, and darker, and yet the sun must have still been there behind the clouds, for twilight is a thing unknown in Siam. Now the whole heavens were obscured, and ​the hot south wind swept our faces, passing among the tree-tops with a sighing which foretold the approaching storm.

“It is certainly going to rain,” said Maurice anxiously, “and it will be dark in next to no time. I wish we were at the place where we turned off.”

“It is dark now,” I answered, as even the trifle of light remaining grew suddenly less, and the deepening shadows told me that the sun was down at last.

Philpot peered about anxiously.

“Plague take the fork in the path—where is it?” he exclaimed. “Do you know what I begin to fear?”

“That we have been going wrong again?” I asked.

“That’s about the size of it.”

It would not surprise me. Who said this was the same trail? I declare I saw the path and just followed it—that is about all.”

“What? Do you mean to tell me that! By Jove, man! I’ve been following you!”

“And I,” added Maurice “have been tamely following both of you.”

“Blind, leading the blind,” cried the Doctor. “Look here, if we don’t strike the junction soon, we’re in for a night of it, and had better return to the wood-cutters’ camp before it’s too dark to find the way.”

“And have our throats cut before morning?” retorted Maurice. “No, thank you. I don’t pretend to the knowledge of the Siamese character that you claim, but catch me running my neck into any such noose as that.”

That the situation was becoming serious there was no denying. We plunged on, the ground growing low and marshy as we advanced. A bad indication. We had passed through nothing of the sort on our way to the woodcutters’ camp.

Now the wind began to moan more ominously, and the darkness increased to that extent that we could no longer see our way.

“Delightful, ain’t it?” sneered Philpot. “Heavens! I’m in water up to my knees.”

He was only a few yards ahead of us, but we could no longer see him.

“Give me a hand boys, or I’m stuck! ” he called. “I’m slowly sinking, Lord knows where!”

We pulled him out with considerable difficulty, all retreating a few steps to more solid ground.

​“Are you all right now?” questioned Maurice.

“All right for a fever!” was the reply. “Your flask, like a good fellow, De Veber. Nothing like a little brandy as a preventive.”

His “little” would have set my brain reeling, but it appeared to have but slight effect. I thought then that I could comprehend reasons for his want of success in the pulpit which the Rev. Miles Philpot had failed to name.

“Don’t drink it dry, Doctor, said Maurice. “George and I may need a dose before we get out of this scrape.”

“Yours truly! I leave you the flask,” he replied, with that good humor which nothing seemed to ruffle. “Now boys, we’re in a hole. How are we to get out of it! Decision must be had at once Hark! Was that thunder? The plot thickens, the darkness deepens! My inventive Yankee friends, what’s to be did?”

“In my opinion, the sooner we get back to the woodcutters’ huts the better,” I said decidedly.

At that instant the low, ominous growling heard a moment before was repeated. It seemed to me that I could hear also rustling sounds among the tangled thicket which had now taken the place of the atap palms and other trees of respectable growth on either side of our path.

I trembled. Thoughts of the dangers of the jungle would suggest themselves. I instinctively unslung my rifle and held it ready in my hand.

“More thunder? ” said Maurice. “Come, come, we must decide quick. Plague take these mosquitoes! They are as thick as bees around a hive.”

“Hark!” exclaimed Philpot, suddenly. “I’m not so sure it is thunder.”

Nor was I. Presently it came again—a low, sullen growl, beginning in the deepest bass—rising slightly, then sinking into the bass again.

I was glad of the darkness then, for I knew my face must have been livid.

“A tiger,” I suppose, I said as coolly as possible.

“As sure as we are lost in the jungle,” whispered the Doctor. “Even those wood-cutters are preferable. Come! There is no time to be lost.”

Again he started ahead, for the path was so narrow that single file was a necessity.

“I don’t believe it’s a tiger,” said Maurice incredulously.

​“Don’t deceive yourself, De Veber,” said the Doctor, “it is nothing else. “Not,” he added, “that there is any great danger of the beast attacking us. But——”

The sentence remained uncompleted; or rather it was completed in a way which, to my dying day, I am not likely to forget.

A quick rush, a violent stirring of the thicket, followed by a yell which set us all trembling, and a huge, dark form leaped out upon the path before us, pausing not three yards from the spot where Philpot stood.

“Great God!” I heard Maurice exclaim, and I knew, rather than saw, that he grasped his rifle.

But I was as one paralyzed, I could see the flash of those awful eyes, could see the beast crouch for a spring, could hear its tail lash the ground and yet I never made a move.

Though wholly unarmed, poor Philpot stood his ground like a Trojan. A second of awful suspense followed.

I could hear the click of Maurice’s rifle. I wondered why he did not fire, when suddenly a light broke upon the scene, and to my utter amazement I saw a man leap from the thicket directly in front of the Doctor, and dash a flaming torch into the tiger’s face.

It was the work of an instant. The next and all danger had passed.

Bushes, the path, my companions, everything seemed swimming about me. I saw the great cat retreating into the jungle. I heard the Doctor shout, but until the man who had burst so unceremoniously into our midst, stooped and recovered the torch, I did not realize the full significance of the scene.

Then as the light struck upon his face I knew him. Seen in that weird glare the sight was even more marvellous now. It was a face black below, yellowish white above.

It was the mysterious Mr. Mirrikh to whom we were indebted. Calm and dignified he stood there as though nothing unusual had occurred. ​

“Good evening, gentlemen. You tarry late in the forest. Let me advise you to seek shelter as soon as possible, for unless all signs fail a storm is at hand.”

It was Mr. Mirrikh who thus addressed our little party, as we all stood there staring at him like a parcel of geese, without even a word of thanks for what he had done.

The voice recalled me to myself and I hurried forward to greet him, offering my hand which he grasped cordially.

“My dear sir, how can we thank you?” I said. “Let me introduce you—the Rev. Miles Philpot, Mr. Mirrikh. Maurice, surely you have not forgotten Mr. Mirrikh so soon!”

It was a brave effort on my part, but alas! It came to nothing. They could not help staring at that face—no one could help it—I, myself, could not.

Maurice muttered something and extended his hand also, but Mr. Mirrikh seemed not to see it, while the Doctor just blurted out:

“Gad, where did you spring from? I’m awfully obliged to you for what you did, don’t you know, but that face of yours——”

“Yes, we are late!” I burst out in a voice which was intended to smother the Doctor’s impudent allusion, and did. “We were over at Ballambong and have been delayed, lost our way.”

He smiled at me kindly and then, without answering or even looking toward Philpot until it was done, took out the black cloth and quietly proceeded to ajust it about his face.

“Now sir, you may look at me without disgust,” he said, coolly, addressing himself to the Doctor. “Possibly you are not aware of the danger you have escaped?”

It was well timed and recalled Philpot to himself.

“Indeed I am, and owe you a big debt of gratitude,” he hastened to say. “Pardon my curiosity, I——”

“Did you say you had missed your way, Mr. Wylde?” ​interrupted Mr. Mirrikh, turning his back squarely upon him.

“I fear so.”

“You wish to return to Angkor of course?”

“Of course.”

“Take my advice and make no such attempt,” he said hastily. “A storm of unusual violence is certainly approaching, and the best thing you can do is to get under cover as soon as you possibly can.”

“But where can we find shelter? In the wood-cutters’ village back there we shall hardly be safe.”

“I do not refer to the wood-cutters’ village,” he interrupted. “Keep directly on as you are going. About a quarter of a mile further and you will come to a hill upon which stands an old stone tower, once an observatory they say. It is a ruinous old affair, but it will afford you shelter. You had best be quick or you will be half drowned before you can make it. Good night.”

He turned to leave us, but I could not have him go so. The recollection of the bag preyed upon me. How guilty I felt. Did he know? Had he in addition to his other wonderful acquirements the power of reading men’s thoughts?

“Stay!” I exclaimed, “I feel that we have not half expressed our gratitude. If you had not happened along as you did—”

“But I did, and there’s been enough said already,” he replied. “I have been at Ballambong myself, and was on my way through the jungle to another ruin near here. Just as I heard your voices I happened to spy the man-eater. I have been tiger hunting many times in India, and have seen that trick played before. It was a fortunate thing for all of you that I happened to have this torch.”

“But will you not remain with us?” I persisted. “You stand in the same need of shelter that we do, surely,”

He shook his head, and smiled peculiarly.

“No, I do not fear the storm, I love it. What is so grand as to witness a conflict of the elements in a tropical forest? Nothing that I know of. It brings man to such a thorough realization of his own insignificance; besides I have a place of shelter in view, and shall surely reach it. Perhaps I may see you again before the storm is over. Until then, adieu!”

He bowed low, crossing his arms after the Eastern fashion, and before I could say another word, glided into the ​thicket and disappeared, leaving us stupidly staring at the place where he had stood.

Philpot was the first to break the silence.

“Well, upon my word!” he exclaimed, “if that fellow ain’t a puzzle there never was one in the world.”

“He’s a gentleman, at all events,” I replied coolly, “which, considering the way you acted, is more than I can say for you.”

“Come, come, George, none of that!” cried Maurice hastily.

“Thank you,” replied the Doctor. “Your remark is plainness itself, Wylde, and I am free to admit it is not undeserved.”

“The same may be said of me,” added Maurice. “I can never get used to that man’s face.”

“I’d give something if I could have touched it,” added the Doctor. “It’s painted, just as sure as you live.”

“Nonsense! It’s nothing of the sort,” I answered, testily. “Disease may have produced it, but fraud, never.”

“Don’t be too sure, Wylde,” said the Doctor.

“But I am sure. Remember I have seen it in the daylight.”

“You are wrong, Doctor,” added Maurice. “You are certainly wrong, and George is just as certainly right. Did you in your travels ever see anything like it before?”

“Never!”

“Or hear of any disease which could produce it?”

“I am certain there is none. In my younger days I devoted a year or two to the study of medicine—that was before I thought of the pulpit. I can assure you both that disease never made that face what it is.”

“In other words, it is as unaccountable to you as to Wylde and myself; as unaccountable as the man’s sudden appearance among us. Of course, he was not at Ballambong, or we should have seen him, and, even if he was, why should he go beating his way through the jungle instead of choosing the path?”

“Conundrums, everyone of them, and I am not Yankee enough to be good at guessing,” replied the Doctor.

But I had not regained my temper yet, for the recollection of the bag still troubled me.

“Explain the mystery or not, as you can,” I said, “the fact remains, Philpot, that the man saved your life, and you were barely civil to him in return.”

​“Confound it, Wylde, why do you keep harping on that?” he answered almost hotly. “Do you make no allowance for a fellow’s astonishment? I’ll bet you a shilling when you first saw that face you were as much taken aback as I. You’ve said enough—let it rest.”.

“Yes, and while you two are squabbling, what is to hinder the tiger from returning?” put in Maurice. “I move we get out of this.”

“It is time,” I answered, dryly. “Look! The storm is almost upon us. Which way shall we go?”

“To the old stone tower,” said Maurice promptly. “We shall do well to follow his advice.”

“We’ll do it!” exclaimed the Doctor. “We’ll take his advice, and, by the eternal gods, if he does favor us with another call, I’ll have his secret out of him, or know the reason why.”

We now hurried on, crossing the swampy stretch in the path before us as best we could. Fortunately, it was of no great extent, and we soon found ourselves upon rising ground.

Clearly there was no time to be lost, for the sky had now assumed an inky blackness, and there was barely light enough to enable us to see our way.

“If we don’t find his tower we are going to be in a sweet fix;” growled Philpot, after a little. “Hark! Did you hear that? Boys, I tell you there’s no time to lose.”

It was thunder this time. A growl, a low rumbling followed by a faint breath of wind which struck our faces with refreshing coolness in that moist, stifling heat.

Suddenly there was a rush among the bushes ahead of us, and some animal dashed across our path, disappearing in the thicket beyond, while the shrill screams of paroquets and birds whose notes were unknown, told us that we were not the only creatures in the jungle in dread of the approaching storm.

“Run!” cried Maurice. “Every moment is precious.”

I felt my heart sink as we dashed ahead.

What if we had missed the tower? What if we were to be forced to brave the fury of this storm in the forest? Yet, after all, why should I care—I, who felt no interest in life?

And, as we ran, I could not but think of Mr. Mirrikh. Were there actually other ruins hidden in the jungle? Surely ​he would not venture among the wood-cutters, with every probability of receiving even a ruder reception than he had experienced at the hands of the Panompin mob.

I was deeply puzzled. More so, far more so, than I had shown to my companions. I half expected, I own, to see him suddenly spring out upon us again. I would not have been surprised if I had spied him flying through the air above our heads like the witches of old. But I kept my thoughts to myself, and we hurried on.

Soon the wind had increased to a gale, and the giant trees of a belt of woodland which we had now entered bent beneath it. The thunder, too, was growing deafening, with claps alternately loud and stifled, short and prolonged, sharp and crackling, while blinding flashes of light illuminated our surroundings with terrible distinctness, only to make the darkness more profound when the change came.

But, as yet, no rain—that was still in reserve. Come it must, we knew, and we ran with all speed, peering about for the hill which Mr. Mirrikh had described.

“It’s no use, George! Either there is no tower, or we must have passed it!” cried Maurice.

The words were no more than spoken, when a frightful crash resounded through the forest, and a flash of unusual intensity showed us a gigantic tree whose trunk our united arms could not have encircled, topple and fall directly before us, bringing down with it a mass of orchids and other parasitic plants, while a colony of monkeys which had taken refuge among its branches, scampered away, screaming and chattering to seek other shelter. It is needless to say we were brought to a halt.

“Merciful God! but this is terrible!” cried the Doctor. “We are safe nowhere. Ha! here comes the rain at last!”

He was right. First great drops against our faces, then a torrent, then a flood. It was the first storm of the season and if there were any worse before the dry months came again, I thank God I was not there to see.

Now came a lightning flash hardly equal to its predecessor, but of vastly more interest to us.

“Look! look! shouted Maurice. “The tower!”

We saw it before he spoke, otherwise we might never have seen it at all, for in a second all was darkness and the thunder rolling and crashing again.

​“Forward!” cried the Doctor. “I saw the hill and a flight of stone steps leading up.”

We leaped over the fallen tree and following the Doctor soon found ourselves at the beginning of steps leading up a hill which must surely have been artificial. It was about one hundred feet in height and cut in terraces paved with stone. Up upon these terraces four staircases led—I describe the place as I saw it afterward—solid stone affairs having hand-rails, ornamented with lions, beautifully carved, and at the top stood a large circular tower of considerable circumference, completely overgrown with shrubs and vines. On the level space about it dozens of great trees had forced their roots down between the blocks of the pavement and were now swaying wildly before the blast.

“By gracious! Mirrikh was right George!” cried Maurice, as we gained the platform at the top of the steps. “Here is the tower, sure enough!”

“But the door—where is the door!” shouted the Doctor, his words scarcely distinguishable above the howl of the storm.

We ran entirely around the building before we found it, and then it was just about where we had started from, half hidden by a mass of vines which hung trailing down from the stones above.

It was I who made the discovery; pushing the vines aside we made our way into a circular enclosure, from one side of which a flight of stairs led up into the tower; the only peculiar feature it possessed, except a huge stone image of Buddha which occupied a sitting position in a niche to the right of the staircase. A veritable colossus, three times life size, but in a sad state of delapidation, being minus a leg, an arm and the better part of the nose. In front of the pedestal was a circular depression in the stone floor half filled with bits of charcoal, and behind the image Maurice found quite a pile of dry brush wood which showed that this was not the first time the old stone tower had served as a shelter. Meanwhile the storm raged more fiercely than ever and the continual crashing of thunder was something awful to hear.

Involuntarily I thought of Mr. Mirrikh and wondered where in that wilderness beneath us he was just then. There was no other building upon the platform—that I had already made sure of—so if he was actually near us, and I half suspected it, his hiding place must be in the tower itself.

​“Thank God we are here!” exclaimed Philpot—somehow his pious ejaculations always sounded to my ears like profanity—“or rather thank your friend with the black and white face. I only hope he has got so good a shelter. I say, De Veber, lend us your shawl, will you? The rain is beating in through the doorway in a perfect torrent. It will break it a little, and cut off the draught. Ye gods! but ain’t it cold!”

It was exceedingly cold and we, in our wet garments, were shivering in a way horribly suggestive of fever.

Maurice brought out his brandy flask which helped us in imagination, if not in fact, and while Philpot busied himself in hanging the shawl, he and I raked out the charcoal from the hole before the image, brought wood from the corner, and as I had my matches in a waterproof case, we soon experienced the comfortable sensations of a crackling blaze; which not only served to dry our clothes and warm us up, but made things cheerful with its light.

Not that all these things were done in a moment. By no means. When we entered the tower we were in total darkness and it was only by lighting match after match that we were able to make out anything at all. Now the fire was blazing merrily and I lighted my pipe, and Maurice his cheroot—the Doctor sponging on my friend for his smoke as usual—and we all seated ourselves on the stone floor beside it, well satisfied with our snug retreat.

“We’re in for a night of it,” said Philpot, “and upon my soul we might have a worse place. Look at his nibs scowling down at us there! To think of men being fools enough to worship that block of stone.”

He was looking up at the big image which returned his gaze with a stony stare, as the flashes from the fire played grotesquely upon its battered face.

“He is God to his worshippers, at all events,” said Maurice, dreamily.

“And as good a one as the invisible Jehovah of the Jews and Christians,” retorted Philpot. “There, I have said it—don’t one of you dare to give me away boys.”

And then, as though in rebuke of his blasphemy, came a crash of thunder which was truly terrible. It seemed to shake the old tower to its very foundation stones.

“Enough!” I cried. “Enough! Let us have no more of it. Though I may be to a certain extent in harmony ​with your views, let us at least respect the prejudices of our fellows. Nor have I gone so far yet as to deny the existence of a ruling power. There must be some guiding hand which controls the vast machine we call the universe.”

“Good, George!” exclaimed Maurice. “Good! It is the first time I ever heard you admit even that much.”

And in truth it was a night which would have made most men chary of denying the existence of their God.

A DRY DISCOURSE ON MARRIAGE AND OTHER THINGS.

“Marriage,” said the Rev. Miles Philpot, “it's a snare and a delusion. The world were better off without it. Better with such easy matrimonial relations as obtain among these people and other Eastern nations. That is my firm conviction, based upon an experience which, believe me, has been by no means small.”

We were still seated around the fire in the old stone tower and as the storm without was raging with unabated fury, it seemed altogether probable that we should be forced to continue there for the remainder of the night.

Really I cannot say how our conversation came to drift into this channel. I have no doubt, however, that Philpot himself started it. Maurice had been defending the marriage relation when it reached this point, while for my own part, finding the subject entirely distasteful, I had thus far kept quietly to my pipe and made no remark.

“I don’t agree with you all,” replied Maurice. “It is a well known fact that the nations most advanced in civilization are those among whom the marriage relation is held to be sacred. Am I not right, George?”

“Of course you are,” I replied. “A happy conjugal union is——”

“Slavery,” interrupted Philpot, “mere slavery. A wife tied down by pinafores and household cares is in much the same situation as an enterprising oyster, who can’t get off its bed no matter how hard it tries. As for the husband, ask any ​poor devil who has been there if slavery is not preferable. Besides that, marriage breeds deceit in any man who is a man. A bachelor may and does do as he pleases and don’t give a rap who knows it; but a married man must perpetually dissemble if he would keep the peace. It is a known fact that our greatest minds have been those untrammeled by domestic cares.”

“Have you ever been married yourself?” I asked, abruptly.

“No, thank God, nor never intend to be; though I have spliced at least a great gross of idiots in my time.”

“Which gives you no claim to an intimate knowledge of the conjugal relation, however.”

“Bah! The French manage things after my notion. There you have an enlightened race upon whom the sanctity of the marriage relation rests with feathery lightness. Don’t trust the woman unless you want to have your heart turned inside out, and your faith in human nature destroyed. Hasn’t such been your experience, Mr. Wylde?”

“Unfortunately it has, and probably you know it,” I answered, “but, for all that, I am not shallow enough to fancy that because I have been unfortunate, there are no true women in the world.”

“I know nothing about your private affairs,” he replied, hastily. “Pardon me if I have probed an unhealed wound.”

“I assure you, George, that he don’t,” Maurice hastened to say. “I never told him a solitary thing.”

“I don’t care whether he knows or not,” I said, for I felt in just that mood. “Look here, Doctor, my wife made life a hell while she lived with me, and wound up by running off with another man.”

“Indeed!”

“It is true. I——”

He raised his hand and gave one of his disagreeable laughs.

“Pray spare me the details, Wylde. I have no doubt you were as much to blame as she was. Now with an easy divorce law, all this might have been avoided. As it is, your life is broken, your happiness destroyed, or at least you think so, for I have not the least doubt you will be idiot enough to try it again.”

“Thank you for the compliment—no. I’ve had enough ​of married life, but because I’ve been bitten it don’t follow that marriage has brought the same unhappiness to every other man who has been bold enough to take the risk.”

“Oh, of course not. Nobody claims that. But a woman must be the husband’s slave to bring conjugal happiness. De Veber, ain’t that so?”

“Don’t ask me. I’ve never been married, and doubt if I ever shall be,” laughed Maurice.

“Take my advice,” said Philpot, “and you never will be; but just the same I’d like to have your ideas on the subject.”

“You’d only laugh at them if I were to undertake to express them.”

“Indeed no. I’m a bit cynical, I own, but every man has a right to his opinion.”

“I don’t think the marriage relation has ever been properly understood.”

“And why so? I labored under the delusion that it was something which scarcely called for instruction.”

“Doctor,” said Maurice, slowly, “which was created first, the man or the woman?”

“Adam was the first man, Eve was the t’other, Cain was a wicked man, ’cause he killed his brother,” laughed the Doctor. “That’s the way the old rhyme runs.”

“In which there is more truth than you may fancy. But I put Genesis aside, for it has nothing whatever to do with the conclusion I have reasoned myself into.”

“Which is? ”

“Substantially this,” replied Maurice, lighting his cheroot by pressing it against a glowing coal. I don’t know that I shall be able to express myself, but I will try.”

“I’m all attention, my dear fellow.”

“Well then, here goes. There must have been a beginning, and in that beginning I believe that man and woman were actually one, being a complete object, a harmonious whole.”

“On what do you base such a fancy, if not upon the Adamic tradition?”

“I can hardly tell you, but it is nevertheless my belief. Woman is but the half of a perfect human creation—you cannot look at her in any other way.”

“Physically?”

“No, spiritually; or, if you like it better, mentally. In ​the man the reasoning principle is uppermost and strongest; in the woman the principle of affection. Wisdom, knowledge, combined with the power of utilizing that knowledge and combined again with love, which embraces all the finer sentiments of human nature, is the power which controls the world. In God we have such a combination of qualifications. Man, made in the image of God, must, therefore, originally have possessed these qualities so combined. The necessities of man’s future existence on this earth demanded a separation, and it was given. Hence we have men and women. The one possessed with wisdom, the other with affection. Marriage, therefore, becomes a positive necessity; for without it, man must ever remain an uncompleted work,”

“Rubbish!” broke out the Doctor. “You have been reading the works of some mediaeval mystic. I think I could name him if I chose.”

“On the contrary, I have never read a line which conveys such notions. It is solely by thought and observation that I have reached these conclusions. A married man who is uncongenially mated, is simply one of the mistakes, and in no way affects my theory; an unmarried man is a half developed creature, and invariably a selfish one, full of evil qualities which, had he entered the true conjugal relation, would, to a great or less extent, have been eradicated. I’m afraid I don’t make myself very plain.”

“Your proposition is plain enough, but I can’t endorse it,” replied the Doctor. “How is it with you, Wylde?”

“Oh, it’s too deep a thought for me.” I answered. “I have never considered marriage in that light; but it is a known fact, that happily married persons grow to resemble one another in the course of years.”

“Of course it is,” replied Maurice. “Not only in outward appearance, but mentally to a far greater degree.”

“Then you think that in the Milenium, men and women will actually become one? Two souls dwelling in one body?”

“Now you are quizzing,” replied Maurice, “and ’tis time to call a halt. I don’t claim that my theory has the virtue of novelty——”

“You’d better not. It’s been written upon again and again.”

“Yet, I repeat, I never read a line which helped me to ​my way of thinking. Do you know I’ve often wondered if, perhaps, on some of the planets such a state of affairs did not actually exist.”

“What a dreamy chap you are, to be sure, De Veber,” said Philpot, yawning. “It would be a deuced disagreeable state of affairs if a fellow had to carry his wife about with him wherever he went. But I’m sick of the discussion, and my pipe is out. After I fill up—my dear boy I shall have to trouble you again for the tobacco bag—suppose we turn our attention to Mirrikh. A union of souls or a union of bodies is scarcely worth considering, but a union of black and white, or black and yellow, in a man’s face we have seen to-night, and I, for one, am puzzled to death to understand what it means.”

“And we might puzzle ourselves over it to all eternity, and then not understand it,” said Maurice.

“Just so. Could you spare another nip of that brandy, De Veber? Ah, thanks! Yours truly! It shall be only a little one, for there’s precious little left. Devilish good liquor that! I’ll warrant you had it sent out to you from New York. Some favorite brand that you had been accustomed to drinking, no doubt.”

“On the contrary, I bought it in Panompin,” replied Maurice, “We Americans don’t all drink spirits as the English do. I never tasted liquor until after I left for the East.”

“Come now, that’s pretty good!” exclaimed the Doctor. “Americans don’t drink spirits like the English. Why man, I never knew the capacity of the human system to dispose of alcohol until I visited your Chicago, and that is not to be compared with some of the Canadian cities. But speaking of spirits, brings us by natural and easy stages to Spiritualism. Ardent spirits wandering down a fellow’s gullet naturally suggests wandering spirits from another sphere ardently seeking to return to the scene of their earthly pains and pleasures. There, I throw down the gauntlet, boys. Spiritualism—Mirrikh. Mirrikh—Spiritualism. I don’t care which is on top. Let the chairman of the committee on manifestations, materializations and mediumistic humbuggery, take it up and express his views.”

“Bless my soul, Mr. Philpot, how you do rattle on,” I answered, half angrily, as I threw a few fresh sticks on the fire. “What in the name of sense has Spiritualism got to do with Mirrikh? You don’t consider him a ghost, I suppose?”

​“I’m not so sure, Wylde. Not so sure.”

“What do you mean? How can an agnostic believe in ghosts?”

“He cannot, as you understand the meaning of the word ghost, as the world understands it; but, like De Veber and his marriage views, I have an odd theory of my own on the subject of ghosts.”

“And you are just dying to let it out, I suppose. Good; by all means let us have the great Philpot ghost theory. If it will explain the levitations of Mirrikh, the medal of the Angkor theosophical club is fairly yours.”

“That’s right, George. I’m glad to see you brightening up. Come, Philpot, let’s have it. You claim that when man dies he goes to dust and there’s the end of him, and now you profess to believe in ghosts. I am curious to see how you propose to reconcile all this.”

“I go to show you, boys,” was the Doctor’s answer. “Hitherto I have maintained a discreet silence about this Mirrikh business, for I wanted to actually see the man before I expressed an opinion. Now that I have seen him I am ready to talk. Let us begin with the proposition, what is a ghost?”

“The disembodied spirit of some deceased person, of course,” answered Maurice.

“There you are wrong. It is usually so considered, but it is by no means necessarily so. Indeed, if you were to investigate this subject as closely as I have done, you would find that the ghosts of living persons have as frequently put in an appearance as the so-called disembodied spirits of the dead.”

“I have heard something of this before,” said Maurice. “Indeed I had a friend who claimed to have repeatedly seen the shades of living people of whose presence at distant points at the time of their appearance he was most positive.”

“Very good, my boy. Your friend is not alone in that. I, myself, have experienced the same thing. Hundreds of others have experienced it. Were such things recorded to the extent that similar appearances of dead persons have been, I firmly believe the world would be astounded. Take, for instance, the case of an old aunt of mine. When I was a boy, and living in London, she resided in Bristol. I was her favorite, and I must confess to a fondness for the dear old lady which I never felt for any one else. My father ​died before I was born, and she was his sister, which, perhaps, accounts for it. But as I was about to say, I used occasionally to take a run down to Bristol to see my aunt. At first I always notified her of my intended visit, but upon one occasion I omitted to do so, and dropping in upon her one morning quite unexpectedly, was astonished to find a room all ready for me and breakfast prepared. ‘I knew you were coming, Miles,’ she said. ‘You were here in this room last evening and told me so.’ I was amazed; but never after that did I notify my aunt of my intended visits and never did I fail to find everything ready for my reception.”

“Oh such impressions are common enough,” said Maurice.

“I could duplicate that story and give half a dozen more just like it.”

“No doubt. So could almost any one. Let us admit, therefore, that a certain degree of intensity of thought may command the presence of the spirit of an absent living friend—I use the word spirit solely for want of another as expressive—why, then, may we not conclude that a still greater intensity of thought can produce the same phenomena on a grander scale? Why not admit that it can produce, not actual presence, perhaps—that would be levitation, and I don’t admit levitation—but something so nearly akin to it that not only is our sense of sight deceived, but our senses of hearing and feeling as well.”

“It would be almost as easy to admit levitation and be done with it,” I said.

“Not at all. Bodily levitation is a manifest impossibility, but thought transference to the extent of deceiving each one of man’s senses into the belief that he can actually see, hear, and feel the person who appears before him, is almost, if not quite, a proven fact.”

“I cannot admit any such statement,” said I.

“But if you knew the Indian Buddhists as I know them you would be forced into the admission,” he replied. “I tell you the things they actually do are wonderful—totally unexplainable. Either we must admit the existence of a spiritual world which is all around us, or fall back on some such theory as this. I tell you, gentlemen, it is no uncommon thing for some of these adepts to summon into their presence not only living persons from great distances, but material forms of those who have been long dead. That ​I have seen myself; hundreds of others have seen it. When I said I have never seen levitation I meant what I said, for I never did see a living man taken up by invisible force and carried from one place to another, nor do I ever expect to see it: but I have seen forms of persons both living and dead, persons whom I knew and had known in life, produced before me by more than one adept, and that brings me to my ghost theory again.”

“Which I am more than anxious to hear,” said I. “Though your statements thus far are strong and your reasoning subtile, you have proved nothing. If there is no such thing as a disembodied spirit, how can you reason out the existence of ghosts?”

“In this way. Mesmerism, hypnotism, or whatever you are pleased to call it, is, of course, an admitted fact. There is a power existing in certain mental organizations enabling them to control weaker ones, and to deprive them for the time being of their individuality; to make them believe that black is white; that they are not themselves, but other people—living people, or dead people, it matters not which. Given such a mind, or such a mental state—for I believe that under certain favoring conditions a weak mind may possess this power quite as much as a strong one—and we have a force which can summon to our presence not only apparitions of living people but of dead ones. For instance, A possessed of this power desires to see B who is dead. The force leaves him just as the electric current leaves a battery. It cannot reach B because there is no B, but it does strike upon the mental receiver of C’s organization, because C is of a receptive nature. Then C appears to A, but instead of appearing as C he appears as B, because A, by his intensity of thought, has transformed him into B. Thus while the shade of B is apparently raised, while it looks, acts and even speaks like B, it is, after all, nothing but a transfer of individuality. That, gentlemen, is my theory of ghosts. I fear it is not very clearly expressed.”

“As clear as mud,” I replied, sneeringly. “Frankly I got so befogged before you were half through that I could not follow you. How such a theory could possibly account for the strange disappearances of Mr. Mirrikh, I fail to see.”

“Oh, I don’t claim that it does,” protested Philpot. “Of course it can’t, unless, to go a step further, Mirrikh possesses the power I speak of to such an extent as to be able to ​make us believe that we saw him on top of that tower when actually he was not there.”

“Weak! Weak as water! Does that explain his disappearance in the Panompin alley? ”

“I am constrained to admit, Wylde, that it does not.”

“Then, as I understand it,” said Maurice, who had until now maintained silence, “you claim the existence of a natural force, a mental magnetic current, which is capable of producing all the so-called spiritualistic phenomena with which the history of the world teems?”

“That’s it! That’s it! I firmly believe that just such a force exists and is as controlable as the electric current by those who understand its nature,”

“And understood by the Buddhist adepts?”

“I believe it.”

“Is it not just as easy to believe that they possess the secret of some natural force which can overcome the attraction of gravatation?”

“Scarcely.”

“It seems so to me. I have great difficulty in following your reasoning, but I understand the point toward which you are aiming, and was amazed at the labor you were at to get there. Just admit the existence of a spiritual world surrounding the natural world, and you have the easiest sort of solution of the whole matter.”

“But I won’t.”

“But the Buddhists do.”

“I know it.”

“They do wonderful things, Doctor.”

“I admit it.”

“Many of our modern Spiritualists do similar things.”

“I know that.”

“As I said before, history teems with the relations of such occurences. You cannot name a nation where there are not individuals who claim free intercourse with the spirits of the dead.”

“True again, but their claims are yet to be proved.”

“I don’t know,” said Maurice dreamily. “I have puzzled my brains over the problem until I can think no more. Like you, Philpot, I demand proof; but this much I will say:. I have reached the firm conclusion that there exist laws in nature, call them physical, or call them spiritual, understood only by certain persons, or exercised ​without being fully comprehended by ignorant persons, that do produce phenomena, the true nature of which we are as yet wholly unable to comprehend.”

“And by these laws you would explain the levitations of Mirrikh?” I yawned, for I was growing entirely sick of this lengthy discussion.

“I see no other way of explaining them.”

“If we could only read this, we might get some light upon the subject,” said the Doctor.

He thrust his hand into his coat pocket as he spoke, and pulled out the book which he had taken from Mr. Mirrikh’s bag.

I was amazed—indignant.

“What? You can’t have had the impudence to appropriate that book after all I said?” I angrily cried.

“There, there, Wylde, don’t lose your temper again! I did keep it. I was curious to study it. I——”

“Give it to me! ” I exclaimed, holding out my hand. “Until it is delivered to its owner, it is my property. Give it to me at once.”

“Take it then, since you are going to be so savage about it,” he replied sulkily; and he just tossed the book across the fire to my side. I tried to catch it, but failing, it went sprawling open upon the floor. Indeed, it had partly opened before he threw it, for I saw an envelope drop from between the leaves at Philpot’s feet. When I picked the book up, he had already possessed himself of the envelope, and with the idea of stirring me still further, no doubt, coolly opened it, and now I saw him draw out a letter and hold it close to the fire’s light.

“What is that?” asked Maurice. Philpot, who was glancing at the contents of the letter, did not immediately reply.

“Give it to me!” I cried. “It came out of the book.”

“So it did. Astonishing!”

“What’s astonishing?” asked Maurice.

“His impudence,” said I. “Mr. Philpot, I demand that letter.”

“Shut up, George!” cried Maurice. “Read it, Doctor; if it throws the least light upon the mystery of Mirrikh, read it by all means.”

“On the contrary, my dear fellow, it only increases it. Wylde will you behave yourself?”

​He pushed me aside when I reached over and attempted to possess myself of the letter, and did it with an ugly look in his eyes which warned me it was time to desist. Besides Maurice was against me, and I drew back sulkily to my own side of the fire and listened while Philpot read the following:—

“Dear Friend:—I greet you. Business of an important nature has kept me from fulfilling my promise to visit you this month. I have about completed my observations on the manners and social customs of China and Farther India, and now propose to visit that ancient shrine of the illuminati, Angkor, after which I shall probably return to Mars by way of Thibet. If you have any communication which you may desire to forward to the brethern in that planet, it would be well for you to embrace this opportunity, for there is no telling when another may occur. Prepare whatever may suggest itself, and I will drop in on you sometime before I depart for Thibet, but cannot at the present writing say just when. Would that you could be persuaded to accompany me, but I presume it would be quite useless to urge you further.

Yours, ever in the faith,⁠
Mirrikh.

Written at Panompin.

⁠Mr. Radma Gungeet, Benares.

“There, Wylde, is your letter; you may have it now if you want it so bad. Since it is written in Hindustanee, it is not likely that I shall be contradicted by you as to the nature of its contents. Singular name that. Now I come to think of it, in Hindustanee, it means the planet Mars.”

As the Doctor spoke, he tossed the sheet across the fire, just as the thunder, which for some time had been silent, came crashing about the tower with a rattle and roar which sent us all three to our feet.

“Great Heavens! What a crash!” cried Philpot, as he strode to the doorway to adjust the shawl, one end of which had been torn from its fastenings by the whirl of the wind. “Positively I thought this old rookery was coming down about our ears. There it goes again! By Jove! that was a blinder—look out boys, it’s coming again!”

It came. In an instant, we heard the echoing roll of that stupendous conflict in progress among the clouds.

I threw more wood on the fire, but did not speak—I could not. This last had struck me dumb.

Not the thunder of course; I do not refer to that! It was the letter. Could it by any possibility be that—but no. It was too absurd.

Meanwhile Maurice had seated himself again and Philpot returned to the fire.

“It is a good thing I found it,” he said. “It proves conclusively that the fellow is only a paltry trickster after all. No doubt the letter was written for your express benefit Wylde. He has some object in view in crossing your path as he does, you may rest assured.”

“Have you formed so low an estimate of my intelligence Doctor, that you think for an instant I could believe such a claim as that letter puts forth?”

“No—oh, no! I was only joking.”

“How dumb you are! Can’t you see that the letter is a cipher—that the allusions to Mars mean something altogether different—that——”

“Do you believe that George?” interposed Maurice.

“I do indeed.”

“Then I don’t.”

“What!” cried the Doctor. “De Veber, for gracious sake don’t let your love of the occult carry you too far!”

“I did not say I believed what the letter hints at. I say it is not a cipher. I stick to it. No man would write a ​cipher that way. His eagerness to recover the letter proves that it was nothing of the sort.”

“And I,” persisted Philpot, “believe that Wylde is right, and has hit the true solution. A journey to Mars! Transmigration to another planet! By Jove! that beats all the Buddhistic claims which have come to my knowledge yet. When I was a lad I used to dream of such a possibility, but——”

“But it is a startling conclusion to our acquaintance with Mr. Mirrikh,” interrupted Maurice. “If he can levitate from one tower of the Nagkon Wat to the other, why not from one planet to another?”

“Gad!” cried the Doctor suddenly slapping his knee. “I have it!”

“What is it?” I exclaimed,

“A thought—a remembrance—a curious coincidence all in one.”

“Out with it, Doctor,” said Maurice.

“Years ago I read a curious book written by an eighteenth century religious lunatic—you may have heard of him—Emmanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish seer.”

“I have heard of him, but never read any of his works. A sort of Spiritualist on a mild scale was he not?”

“Something that way. I have read but little of him myself, but I recollect this particular book because of the sublime impudence of its claim.”

“Which was?”

“That he had visited several of the planets in the spirit—among the rest the planet Mars.”

“Well?”

“Oh, I’m coming to it. Among other things he states that a portion of the inhabitants of Mars have faces which are black below and white above.”

“My stars! You don’t mean it!” cried Maurice.

“He does. He says just that. Now I see it all. Mirrikh is a fraud. He has been playing upon the credulity of the Benares Buddhists. His face is painted to help bear out his claim.”

“It must be so,” I cried. “Doctor you have hit it.”

“I’m sure of it!” said Philpot. “Would that he were here now. I could make the charge to his face. Oh, depend upon it, he is a shrewd rascal——hark! What is that!”

We listened.

​Above the howl of the storm I could distinctly hear strange sounds proceeding apparently from that part of the tower which lay above us. Musical sounds—a voice singing, or rather chanting a strain so weird and dismal that it made my very blood run cold.

“Mirrikh, by all that’s holy!” ejaculated the Doctor. “The fakir has kept his word! He said that we should have a visit from him to-night.”

“Listen! listen!” breathed Maurice, raising his hand. “Could anything be grander, more solemn, more entirely in harmony with our strange surroundings?”

We listened breathlessly; even Philpot seemed to experience the influence of that wild, mournful strain which echoed down from the obscurity above us, reminding me most forcibly of the opening measures of the “Wolfschlticht” in Der Freischütz, being a series of prolonged shakes in a minor key, with an occasional break into melody, followed by an instant return to the shake again.

Suddenly this ceased and a moment of stillness followed, and then began a movement of a wholly different sort.

“Gad!” broke in the Doctor; “the top of the tower must be filled with people! No one voice could produce such sounds as those.”

“Hark! Hark!” whispered Maurice. “Was anything ever so heavenly, so divine!”

Now I am not much of a musician. I perform on no instrument nor do I sing, but I love music and in my time have attended operas and philharmonics sufficient to know something of what is what, and I can truthfully affirm that no more remarkable performance was ever heard by the ears of mortal man.

Beginning in low, sweet, sympathetic strains, which re-reminded me of the opening of the Larghetto in the Second Symphony, it rose by a gentle crescendo until it seemed to fill the whole of that gloomy interior, then falling again into melody which stirred the inmost depths of my soul.

Now the motive became more strident, and rising above the thunder which was again cracking outside, there came a succession of sounds harmonizing with the fury of the elements to a degree fairly enchanting, It was not one voice, but many; it could not have been produced otherwise, I was reflecting, when suddenly the chorus ceased, and but one ​voice was heard, and that deep and sonorous, rising and falling until at length it appeared to die away in the distance, and profound stillness pervaded the interior of the tower once more.

For several seconds no one spoke.

“Wonderful!” breathed Maurice at last. “Never in all my life have I listened to music so heavenly. George, what can it mean?”

“I propose to find out what it means,” cried the Doctor, seizing a burning brand from the fire. “Follow me, gentlemen. We shall soon know.”

He moved towards the stone staircase which communicated with the upper portion of the tower. What the sensations of my friend De Veber may have been I cannot say, but I know mine, as we followed, were those of deepest awe.

As we ascended, the silence remained unbroken. Presently we reached the floor above, the Doctor flashed his torch about, but we could discern no one. The circular chamber in which we found ourselves was untenanted; the rain was beating in through the solitary window with wild fury and I found myself wondering where all the water went to and why it had not long ago come pouring down about our heads.

“No one here!” breathed Philpot. “We must try the next floor above.”

We pushed on, but we might as well have spared ourselves the effort. There was no one to be found on that floor nor on the next, nor the next still.

Here the stairs came to an end. Nothing but a dilapidated wooden ladder remained, communicating with a small square opening like a scuttle, only there was no cover. Resolved to leave no portion of the tower unexplored, the Doctor even ascended to the opening, reporting nothing but the darkened vault of the heavens beyond.

We could go no further now, and just then a gust of wind extinguished the torch which Philpot had given Maurice to hold. A bat with flapping wings, disturbed by our intrusion, flew past my face, startling me more than I would have cared to own; just then the Doctor came hurrying down the ladder with an imprecation upon our want of success.

“By Jove! boys, this is most mysterious!” he exclaimed. “There’s no one in the tower but ourselves—that’s just as sure as fate.”

​“I knew it!” I answered. “I’m going down.”

“Stay! We will light up first. I have matches.”

“You can’t do it in this draught,” said Maurice? “I’m going back. I’ve had enough of it up here.”

The attempt to light the brand proved futile. Without waiting to see the result, I had already started. The shadows oppressed me. I had had quite enough of them and was anxious to get back to our retreat on the ground floor.

Last to ascend, I was first on the stairs going back. My mental state spurred me on, and I reached the top of the last flight before Maurice and the Doctor had started on the one above.

Now, as I hurried down, my eyes naturally fixed themselves upon the fire, and I perceived that a man stood beside it with his back turned toward me, warming his hands by the blaze.

Instantly that same cold sensation came upon me, and in the same moment I saw that the man was Mirrikh. The next—I will swear that I never removed my eyes from him—and I perceived that the spot which he had occupied before the fire was vacant—Never pausing even to wonder, I dashed on, but when I reached the fire, he was no longer there.

I was glad of it. I had no wish to see him. Past being amazed at any phenomena which might present itself in connection with this man, I never even looked behind the statue to see if he was in hiding, never stopped to consider whether I had been the victim of an illusion or had actually seen him. It seemed useless to disturb myself about this mysterious person any longer, so I just shouted to my companions and bade them make haste, telling what I had seen when they reached my side.

Maurice said nothing, but Philpot was entirely incredulous. He took another brand from the fire and passed behind the big stone Buddha, calling out that there was no one concealed there. In no other part of the enclosure could a man have successfully hidden, so we found ourselves just where we started out.

“It won’t wash, Wylde,” said the Doctor, coarsely. “You didn’t see him.”

“But I did, though.”

“An optical illusion. You were scared, puzzled; thinking of Mirrikh is what brought it about.”

​“And you—did you hear that music, or was it an aural illusion?” I retorted.

“Gad! But we all heard that.”

“Account for it.”

“I can’t!”

“Then in heaven’s name don’t talk to me of optical illusions, when—” The words fairly froze upon my lips. I stood staring at the shawl which Maurice had hung before the door, a prey to sensations which simply beggar description. Maurice’s back was turned, and so was the Doctor’s, thus they saw nothing, and, so far as the latter was concerned, it was just as well. But I saw a head come through that shawl—Mirrikh’s head, with the face uncovered—I swear I saw it—it is useless for me to attempt to unpersuade myself, though I have tried it again and again.

Not through any rent or opening in the shawl. Oh, no! Not that! It seemed to pass directly through the fabric itself as if the cohesive attraction of each particle were for the instant destroyed, not assuming its full form until at least three seconds had elapsed. First I saw the forehead, the parti-colored face and the hair form on the inside of the shawl. Then the eyes fitted themselves below the brow, and the nose and mouth appeared, last coming that black and beardless chin, and then I beheld the entire head in perfect outline floating in the air.

Dumb with amazement I neither moved nor spoke.

Now I saw the shadowy outline of a body beneath the head, and suddenly a detached hand appeared, then the other hand, then the legs, and then——

“What’s the matter, George! What is it, old fellow? For heaven sake speak to me,” I could hear Maurice saying.

I had fainted!

I lay upon the stone floor beside the fire with Maurice bending over me on one side and Philpot on the other. They were chafing my hands, Maurice’s face expressing the deepest concern.

I tried to answer—tried to pull myself together, and I did it—did it in spite of another shock, for, raising my eyes I saw Mr. Mirrikh standing near the fire fumbling in a pocket medicine case. Mirrikh in full form and not chopped up like a Chinese puzzle. It was the man I had met at Panompin; the man I had seen on the tower of the ​Nagkon Wat; the man who had saved the Doctor from the fury of the tiger; Mirrikh in full flesh, as tangible and material as Philpot or Maurice; and when from his face I turned my eyes toward the shawl, there it hung before the door swaying with the wind, not a rent in it—not even the pins by which the Doctor had fastened it to the wood-work disturbed.

“George! George!” called Maurice. “Speak! Don't look that way if you have the least consideration for my feelings. Old fellow, all this has been too much——”

“It’s all right,” I interrupted. “Nothing ails me. Let me get up, will you? I shall be right in a moment.”

“Nothing ails you? What do you mean then by frightening us to death, tumbling over into the fire?” Philpot cried. But I never heeded him. I sprang up just in time to meet the eyes of that wonderful man.

“Mr. Wylde! I am very sorry. I am afraid my abrupt entrance startled you,” he said gently. “You have had a hard day of it; and the storm has affected your nerves. Try a few drops of this mixture. It will put you right in a moment. You need not be afraid of it—it is a simple remedy prepared by myself.”

“I don’t want any of it,” I answered almost roughly. “Maurice, your brandy flask.”

I drank before attempting to speak again. Not for worlds would I have tasted the contents of that bottle then.

“How came he here?” I whispered to my friend.

“Positively I don't know, George. I saw you fall and sprang to catch you. When I looked up, there he was.”

I shuddered and said no more. Just then my eyes discovered another mystery. Mr. Mirrikh wore the same clothing as usual, and every stitch was as dry as the traditional bone!

Philpot, however, was in no mood for silence. I could see by the way his eyes snapped that he was all ready for the fray.

“Probably it was your sudden appearance among us, sir, that startled Mr. Wylde,” he began—we were standing, Maurice and I, on one side of the fire, and they two on the other—“positively you startled even me.”

“For which I am very sorry. If Mr. Wylde will only consent to take a few drops ”

“Which he wont. Look here, sir, where did you come from?”

​“From the forest,” he replied with singular mildness. “Surely you have not forgotten your encounter with the tiger so soon?”

“Were you not here a moment ago?” cried the Doctor, ignoring the allusion.

“Did you see me here, sir?”

“No sir, but Wylde did.”

“I was here. I stepped out for a moment; now I am here again.”

“Faith, I see you are! Would you be obliging enough to inform me how you managed to escape a wetting?”

“By a very simple process, sir.”

“Name it.”

“When it began to rain I went inside.”

“What!”

“Did you fail to catch my words?”

“I failed to catch their significance.”

“Really, then I am at a loss to know how I can explain myself more fully.”

“Do you mean to tell us that you have been in this tower ever since it began to rain?”

“I came here before the rain began.”

“And where, pray, have you been since?”

“In one of the chambers above. I answer your questions, sir, simply from politeness. I deny your right to interrogate me; but go on to your heart’s content.”

“I propose to,” replied the Doctor, coolly. “You say you have been up stairs all the time we have been down stairs. May I inquire if it was you who favored us with an exhibition more or less musical, a few moments ago?”

“I was singing—yes, sir.”

“Alone?”

“If you had come up you would have found no one with me.”

“We did go up and we could not find even you.”

“For an excellent reason, sir. When you came up, I was no longer there.”

“Where were you?”

“Here.”

“Will you have the kindness to inform me by what means you got here?”

“No.”

“That settles it,” cried the Doctor, roughly. “I knew you couldn’t explain. I’ve nothing further to say.”

​He turned his back abruptly upon Mr. Mirrikh, seated himself by the fire and began to smoke.

He was angry—very angry. In his supreme conceit he had flattered himself that he could show my Panompin friend in the light of a charlatan after the first question or two. In this he had lamentably failed.

Meanwhile Maurice, who had never uttered a word, seated himself again, and now pulled me down beside him; Mr. Mirrikh, however, did not sit down, but just stood there with his hands spread out to catch the warmth, gazing into the fire meditatively. Twice, in the silent moments which followed, I saw him look at Maurice curiously, and once he looked at me.

By this time my equanimity was pretty well restored and I can assure you that I felt quite ashamed of what had occurred. I resolved to settle the mystery of this man once and for all, and I sat there gazing at him trying to assure myself against my reason, that his face was painted as Philpot had claimed, for reason following the dictates of two excellent eyes, told me that it was not. I could not seize him and try the effect of a wet rag upon his chin, though I own that I was itching to do that very thing.

Now Maurice breaks the silence. Just as determined as Philpot, his diplomacy is greater, or his personal sphere more persuasive. He accomplishes with one question what the Doctor fails to accomplish with a dozen.

“You said the other morning that you sometimes smoked,” he remarked, pleasantly. “Won’t you join us now?”

“Thank you. I have no objection.”

He chose a spot near me and sat down, accepting the proffered cheroot and lighting it by the blowing coals.

“You will pardon our friend, I know,” said Maurice; “but one naturally feels a desire to account for the singular experiences we have had in this tower to-night. We are storm bound, Mr. Mirrikh, and, with the possible exception of yourself, all of us have got to stay here till morning. You cannot wonder at our curiosity. Why not gratify it? Wylde is your friend, I would like to be, and as for Mr. Philpot ”

“Oh, count me in,” blurted out the Doctor, “I have not forgotten that Mr. Mirrikh saved my life.”

“Gentlemen,” he said, after puffing meditatively for a moment, “I have nothing but the friendliest feelings toward ​you, nor in fact toward any one else. All God’s creatures are my friends, and in a fashion I try to love them all; for by loving his creatures I adore the Almighty himself. White or black, red or yellow, it makes no difference; men are men, intelligence is intelligence. What is it to me that you are representatives of a race widely different from my own?”

“Your views are most broad and harmonize with mine exactly,” replied Maurice; “but can you wonder at our curiosity——”

“I do not wonder at it.”

“Then gratify it.”

“That would be impossible.”

“Why so?”

“For an excellent reason. The intelligence of neither one of you has been cultivated to the point of understanding any explanation I could make.”

“I beg to differ with you!” cried Philpot. “Try us and see. If you were up stairs how the devil did you get down stairs without running against us? If you were alone up there, how happens it that we hear——”

“Pardon me. You heard me singing.”

“How many voices do you usually keep about you? I’ll swear I heard at least six at once.”

“As I was saying, Mr. De Veber,” continued Mirrikh, ignoring the question; “it is useless for me to attempt to explain what your minds—and I say it without the slightest desire to cast reflection—are incapable of comprehending. You ask me how I passed down from the top of the tower to the bottom without meeting you on the stairs——”

“I beg your pardon, I didn’t ask it,” said Maurice; “but I’d like to.”

“And I would like to answer but I cannot, further than to say that in doing what I did—and I don’t deny that I did it—I simply put into action a force as purely natural as the force of gravitation. Further than this I do not care to go.”

“Prove the existence of such a force by exerting it now,” I said. “By your strange conduct I have been placed in a most ambiguous position. I’m entitled to some consideration on that account if for no other reason.”

“Mr. Wylde! Is it so? I deeply regret it,” he exclaimed, in a tone of concern. “Still I am no charlatan. I cannot ​exhibit my powers for the asking. Why, what is this? Can it be possible! My book!”

There it lay open upon the floor just where I had thrown it. I had forgotten its existence, but now as he leaned back and picked it up I could do no less than make some explanation.

The attempt was a lame one I fear, but he listened in polite silence. I did not tell him who opened the bag, but he seemed to understand instinctively that it was not I.

Just as I ceased speaking, the thunder began crashing again. I remember that there was a particularly fearful clap when he opened the book, and running the pages over hastily began to read.

What he read—and he began it without the slightest explanation—was the report of a committee appointed by a theosophic society in England to examine into the claims of a noted Spiritualist who professed to have been bodily levitated through an open, third story window; not once, but frequently, with the power to control his levitations to a certain extent, although admitting ignorance as to how he was taken, where he went, or by what means he was brought back. The report of the committee was to the effect that they, on several occasions—always in the dark—did actually witness the levitation of this individual. The names signed were those of a clergyman, a noted barrister and a baronet, who to his other distinctions was able to add the M. P. Altogether it was just about the most remarkable reading I ever listened to. If I chose I could furnish names and dates, but as I propose to confine myself strictly to the matters which came under my own observation, I forbear.

“You have heard?” he said quietly, as he concluded. “In your own sober England, Mr. Philpot, precisely what I have done on several occasions with which you may be more or less acquainted, has been done. Need I say more?”

“It would be a trifle more satisfactory if you would,” returned the Doctor seriously. “I have read of this business before. That medium has since been exposed as a fraud.”

“Was the secret of his levitation exposed?”

“No. I understand not.”

Simply the man was caught cheating at some other trick?”

“So far as I have heard that is all. He pretended to materialize a spirit, which proved to be himself.”

​“You see now how wise I am. It would never do for me to claim too much, or I should run the risk of being classed in the same category as this Englishman. I tell you I possess no supernatural powers. What I did was done on purely scientific principles. But it is quite useless for me to attempt to explain.”

He raised the book by the cover and shook it slightly.

Of course I knew what he was seeking for. I was prepared, too. I had the letter in my hand, having taken it out of my pocket unobserved, for he was not looking at me, and I now reached over and laid it upon his lap.

“There is your letter, Mr. Mirrikh,” I began. “I am sorry it has been opened, but——”

“Look here!” cried the Doctor; “there’s no use mincing matters. I opened that letter, Mr. Mirrikh, and I did it in opposition to Wylde’s particular request.”

For a moment there was a dead silence.

To my intense relief, however, Mr. Mirrikh seemed in no way disturbed.

He took up the envelope, removed the letter and hastily perused it. Then restoring it to the envelope again he thrust it into his pocket, and for a moment just sat there blowing the smoke from his mouth in rings. Presently he looked up with a half sarcastic smile.

“You have all read this letter, gentlemen, I presume?”

“I read it aloud,” replied the Doctor.

“Precisely. That amounts to the same thing. May I ask you what you think of its contents?”

He was asking too much. Even the Doctor’s impudence was not equal to repeating the remarks he had previously made.

“None of you speak,” he continued; “so I see that I must manage this business myself. If I chose I could easily avoid the issue by leaving you—Mr. Wylde knows how easily—but I shall not do this. I have long been of the opinion that the day is at hand when many matters understood only by a narrow circle of Oriental adepts, should be given to the world at large. Possibly this is my mission; I have for some time suspected it. Possibly my meeting with Mr. Wylde at Panompin was but the preliminary step toward the fulfilment of this mission; at all events I shall permit myself so to consider it, and——”

“And what?” exclaimed Maurice, eagerly. Philpot had the grace to hold his tongue.

​“And ask you to repeat the question which you put to me on the tower of the Nagkon Wat, Mr. De Veber.”

“What question? I put several—you answered none.”

“I will answer any question you may now ask, freely.”

He arose and stood before us with a graceful dignity that impressed us all.

“Question me,” he repeated. “I am ready.”

“Then in God’s name, tell us who you are and where you came from!” blurted out the Doctor.

He smiled, folding his arms as we had seen him do before.

“Gentlemen,” he said slowly, “your curiosity shall be gratified. I am a man from the planet Mars!”

“Shut the door!”

No wonder the Doctor said it.

The man who can leave the door open when the thermometer stands at 10 degrees Fah. below zero, is lacking in consideration for his fellow man, to say the least.

“Shut the door!” roared the Doctor, a second time. “Shut the door!”

“Maurice! Maurice! Rouse yourself old man!” I called, adding my voice to that of the Rev. Miles Philpot, which needed no addition, being a host in itself.

Maurice De Veber gave a start; turning, he stared at me for a second in a dazed fashion which had become common with him of late, and then, with a sudden movement forward, the very energy of which showed that he had at last reached a realization of the fact that the Doctor and I were rapidly freezing, slammed the door of the inn at Zhaduan.

“I’m sure I beg your pardon,” he exclaimed, turning toward the k’ang, upon which the Rev. Miles Philpot lay sprawled out in the most undignified fashion, when you come to consider his cloth. I sat beside him with my legs doubled under me like a Turk or a tailor, trying to keep from freezing above while being slowly toasted below.

“It’s all very well to beg a fellow’s pardon after you’ve let in several hundred thousand litres of cold air, French measure,” grumbled the Doctor; “what I would like to know is why you opened the door at all?”

Maurice laughed; then out came the inevitable pipe—that ​dear old bit of blackened briar wood which I remember so well.

“Astronomical observations,” he replied lightly; “never in all my life have I seen such a wonderful display. Orion is glorious, Sirius shines with a brilliancy positively amazing, and as for the Pleiades——”

“Oh, hang the Pleiades!” broke in the Doctor. “I understand it now—you were looking at Mars.”

“And fell into one of your dreamy fits,” I added; “in spite of the risk you ran of supplying pneumonia for three.”

“You’ve hit it, George! You’ve hit it. Keep it up. I deserve it all.”

“Keep up nothing,” grumbled the Doctor. “I wish that rascal, Ah Schow, would get back with the argols to start up this fire; we’ll be sure to see the last of it in twenty minutes if he don’t.”

“One wouldn’t think so from the way the k’ang feels now,” laughed Maurice, jumping upon it, and sitting there with his feet dangling down while he lit the pipe. “The temperature is quite Cambodian beneath and decidedly Thibetan above. What we need is equalization. How’s that, Doctor? Ain’t it about so?”

“Upon my word,” grumbled the Doctor, “we need so many things that I’ve given up thinking about them, and take everything as it comes. Most of all we need common sense enough to give up this whole crazy business and start back to Calcutta before it is too late.”

“Hark! What was that?” I exclaimed suddenly.

Outside the hut a shrill cry had sounded.

It was the “sok! sok!” of the camel driver. A sound no one is likely to forget in a hurry who has had the ill-fortune to travel in Thibet.

Maurice leaped off the k’ang and seized his rifle, which stood leaning against the unplastered wall of the inn. As for the Doctor, he displayed the effects of his American training by the quick motion his hand made toward his hip pocket.

“The fun begins, boys!” he exclaimed. “Some one is coming. I felt it in my bones that fate wouldn’t let us have a quiet night here by ourselves.”

We were all three at the door in an instant, almost upsetting Ah Schow, our Chinese cook at the Nagkon Wat, who was in the act of entering with an armful of argols; dried ​camel’s dung, the only fuel obtainable and that universally employed to heat the k’ang in Thibet.

“Sok! Sok! Sok!” came the cry again, echoing back from the rocky walls of the mountain pass which lay below us.

Ah Schow informed us that a caravan was coming up, and experience had taught us that Ah Schow, as a rule, when he made a definite and positive statement, was pretty apt to tell the truth.

And while we stand there at the inn door waiting to prove the statement of our chef, let me make a statement on my own account.

We were in Thibet.

We were three travellers journeying through an unknown land, bound on the craziest quest in which ever man engaged.

If any one wishes to put me down as a lunatic after hearing what I have to tell, why I can only say that I would be the last to blame him. In fact, just about that time I was beginning to work around to the same opinion myself.

Now you will not find Zhad-uan put down upon the maps of Thibet; still less will it pay to look for the deserted inn which we had taken possession of that night, never guessing that the town—it consisted of a lamasery and a dozen or two mud houses—was only five miles further on, just over the mountain, on the other slope.

In truth there are no maps of Thibet of any value. If any one of the few travellers who has succeeded in penetrating the country has given a reliable map to the world I never saw it; as for the ordinary ones in the atlas, no two agree, and I vouch for it that all are equally absurd.

Nevertheless here we were in the land of the Grand Lama in spite of the lack of a map, and not a week’s journey distant from that most mysterious of cities, Lh’asa.

Scores of travellers have tried it, each failing signally; few were ever heard of once they had crossed the Thibetan frontier.

Would our fate be different from those who had gone before us into this mysterious land?

God alone knew, on that night when we three stood at the inn door, listening to the cries of the camel drivers. For my part, although not an obstacle had thus far been put in our path by human hands, I had doubts, grave doubts, whether I should ever leave the land of the Tale Lama alive.

​But how to explain our motives for this singular journey?

I feel that it is a case where preliminary words and finely turned phrases would be wasted, and entire frankness will pay the best.

Here it is then—make the most of it.

I, George Wylde, my friend Maurice De Veber, late American Consul at Panompin, and the ubiquitous Philpot, were supposed to be on our way to the planet Mars!

There! I have said it, and now I feel better. Laugh at us for idiots if you will; put me down as a monstrous falsifier; treat my statement in any way that best pleases you. I can only hold up my right hand and say solemnly: “It is the truth!”

Of course it is scarcely necessary for me to add that my parti-colored acquaintance, Mr. Mirrikh, was at the bottom of it. That goes without saying, I suppose.

I will mention, however, that the beginning of our folly dates from that night when we found ourselves storm bound in the old Siamese tower; from the moment when that levitating individual gravely announced himself as a man from Mars.

And the rest of his story?

Reader, I dare not tell it; but I will mention that at this time I did not know it. It is, however, too utterly improbable to excite belief, even in the mind of a full-fledged 19th Century Buddhist, who, if you were to claim to have been transported bodily from Benares to Boston in twenty seconds, would not doubt your statement in the least.

Yet Mr. Mirrikh made his assertion with such quiet dignity, that while he spoke he almost carried me away with him; almost made me believe in a vast realm of disembodied spirits all about us, controlling our every action, our very thoughts,

“It is quite useless to talk to you Europeans about these things Wylde”—I remember distinctly the very intonations of his voice as he said it—“quite useless, I assure you, for the reason that you look upon this world as the world of causes, while in reality it is only the world of effects, a mere shadowy reflection of the vast realm of the unseen.”

“But,” I answered, “you must make us some explanation. Here you have boldly asserted something which to our minds seems an utter impossibility; that you are an inhabitant of another planet; not satisfied with this, you tell us that ​you propose to return to the earth from whence you came, and then cap the climax by offering to take any one of us along.”

We were still sitting together around the fire in the old stone tower when this conversation took place, for you may rest assured that after the astonishing statement made by Mr. Mirrikh with which the last chapter closed, we had no notion of letting him go until he had fully explained.

But could we have held him if he had chosen to depart?

If experience went for anything, most certainly we could not. I know now, as I knew then, that my friend Mirrikh could have left us instantly if he had so desired—left us in spite of all the bolts, bars or stone walls which we might have interposed.

Few of my readers—if indeed I ever find any—will believe that this is the simple truth; and yet it is so; and what is more, few who have traveled through India observantly will question it.

If a fakir can bring a dog down from a clear sky out of nothingness, or can climb a ladder held upright beneath the vault of heaven, and pulling it up after him, vanish ladder and all, why that which I claim for my man is but baby play. And these statements have been vouched for by unquestioned authorities. I have alluded to them before, but I bring them up again in order that, placed side by side with my claim for Mr. Mirrikh, I may have the right to demand at least equal consideration for both.

I remember well just how he looked at me; remember the curious, far-away expression upon Maurice’s face, which in the light of after events, seemed almost prophetic. Never shall I forget the utter contempt with which the Rev. Philpot treated his claims.

But nothing seemed to ruffle Mr. Mirrikh. In fact as I look back upon all our intercourse, I can now see that the only thing which ever did disturb him was the fear of disturbing others with the singularity of his face and the wild impossibility of his claims. His was the assured calmness and complete unity of purpose which we have been taught to look for in angels; and truth compels me to confess that when long in his presence I was as nothing; as an individual entity I seemed to have been annihilated; never until I knew this man had I been able to grasp the idea of the Buddhist Nirvana, where God is all and all is God. And ​this is the true Nirvana, unrecognized even by the great majority of Buddhists who use the word.

“Friend Wylde,” he said, in answer to my demand; “I am at as great a loss to know how to meet your mental condition as you are at a loss to meet mine; and yet with the exception of a few facts which are the property of my friends the Hindu adepts, there is not a secret I possess not freely yours to-night.”

Here was the Doctor’s chance, and he lost no time in embracing it.

“Look here, my friend, are we all three included in that deal?” he demanded.

“You are.”

Mr. Mirrikh bowed with easy grace.

“And you will answer any question I may ask which does not concern the secrets of the adepts?”

“I will.”

“I’m going to question you.”

“You are welcome to do so.”

“Am I? Wait! First, what do you use to paint your face with, and why do you paint it at all?”

Not by the least look or gesture did Mr. Mirrikh show himself ruffled.

“Examine my face,” he said, in the calmest of tones.

“It is not necessary.”

“Pardon me, but it is necessary. I demand it.”

“Humph! Can’t you see that I understand?”

“Understand what?”

“That some disease has colored your face. I thought it was painted and wanted to try you; but when you consent——”

“Stop! I demand that you examine my face before you ask another question.”

The Doctor hesitated no longer.

“Your face is not artificially colored sir,” he said constrainedly, after he had looked and felt to his heart’s content.

“What do you make out of it?”

“I can make nothing out of it. It is a face built in opposition to any physiological law I know anything about. You have probably had some disease unknown outside of the East.”

“You are wrong. Had you ever been in the planet you call Mars, you would know better. Such faces, though not universal, are common there.”

​“Don’t talk ridiculous rubbish.”

“I beg your pardon—I am only stating a fact.”

“I won’t listen to it,” snapped the Doctor, showing downright temper. “You’re a good one—there’s no doubt on that score—you beat the deck! But when you try to stuff me with that Mars business, you go a shade too far.”

“As you did when you opened my letter and exposed my secret, sir. You have brought this on yourself.”

“By gracious, he has you there, Doctor!” put in Maurice, rousing himself from the reverie into which he had fallen.

“Not that I blame you,” continued Mr. Mirrikh; “under similar circumstances no doubt I would have done just as you did; but when you utterly discredit my statements——”

“Stuff and nonsense! Do you expect a man of my intelligence to believe that a human body can be transported from one planet to another?”

“No, sir. I do not expect it.”

“Then why say it?”

“I did not say it.”

“What am I to understand by that, when you most assuredly did?”

“You may understand whatever you please. The fact remains that to transport a human body from the planet Mars to this earth is quite impossible, as you say.”

“Yet you claim that on Mars it is customary to have faces like yours. You assert that you are a man from Mars.”

“Yes.”

“First you speak one way and then another.”

“I speak consistently, my friend. I was born in Mars, but this body which you see never left this earth, of course.”

“Oh, pshaw! Now we are getting at it,” sneered Philpot. “Some rubbishing re-incarnation nonsense. I thought as much.”

Then it was that he said it—spoke the words which turned the whole tide of my life.

“It is nothing of the sort,” he began, fixing his eyes on Maurice in a way that I have seen Hindu snake charmers fix theirs upon the deadly cobra. “My claim is that while your soul is fast to your body, I can as easily take my soul out of my body as you can pull your hand out of a glove or your foot out of a boot. When I told you that I was a man from Mars I stated the truth; when I told you that I was going to return to that planet and would be pleased to take ​one or all three of you back with me, I spoke the truth again. Nothing could be plainer than I am speaking now; but you do not comprehend me, and it will be useless to attempt to make you understand.”

“Might I inquire if there is any way of getting back again to the earth?” asked the Doctor, with a sneer.

“Oh, yes. You can come back whenever you please.”

“Do you go by balloon, or flying machine; or is it——”

“Stop! You cannot make me angry, so you may as well spare yourself the effort. My race have no such passion as anger. I will simply state that the means by which we go is one of the secrets I have promised to keep. If you decide to accompany me, the means will be furnished at the proper time.”

“Well, I don’t know as I should mind a trip to Mars provided I could get back again. I say, Maurice, how does it strike you?”

“I am listening,” answered Maurice, quietly.

“How long would it take?” inquired the Doctor.

“That,” replied Mr. Mirrikh, “would depend entirely upon how long you cared to remain in Mars; the passage through the realm of spirit cannot be measured by time; it would be no longer than a thought.”

“Oh! We go by way of the spirit world, do we?” Well, my friend, I want you to understand that I, as a clergyman, with every opportunity to inform myself, utterly deny the existence of the so-called soul of man after death.”

It was amusing to see Philpot draw himself up as he made this statement, but it was a positive study to see the expression of pity which came over the face of my singular friend.

“For me to hear you deny the existence of a spiritual world, is precisely as it would be for you to hear me deny the existence of that little island called Great Britain, on the ground that I had never seen it.”

“Prove it! Prove your spirit world!” cried the Doctor, excitedly. “I can argue all night on that point, and——”

“And you will have to argue with some one else then, for I have said my last word. Mr. De Veber, how is it with you?” Will you return with me to Mars?”

Was Maurice hypnotized?

I have often thought so, for he turned a face toward us so altered in its appearance, so radiant with enthusiasm, that I should scarcely have known it as his.

​“Yes,” he answered; “I will go to Mars with you Mr. Mirrikh. When do we start?”

“Let him alone! Take your eyes off him!” I shouted, suddenly springing to my feet as a peal of crashing thunder shook the old tower again. “You shan’t hypnotize him! You shan’t——”

“Sit down, Mr. Wylde! Sit down?”

What was the matter?

Everything seemed swimming before me, and yet all that Mr. Mirrikh had done was to extend his hand.

Was I also being hypnotized?

Then what of the Doctor?

Why the Doctor just sat there as motionless and rigid as the big stone stone Buddha on the other side of the fire, and all because Mirrikh had waved the other hand at him.

I sat down. More than that, I did not get up again, for in an instant I was nobody—nowhere—nothing—simply nil.

The next thing I knew it was broad daylight and there was Maurice just coming through the open door of the tower from which the shawl had been taken down; there also was Doctor Philpot lying stretched upon the stone floor snoring lustily; there was the big stone Buddha with its broken nose, frowning down upon us; there was everything but Mirrikh, and he was not.

Was it all a dream?

Had he ever been there at all? If so, where did the reality end and the dream begin?

Hello, George! So you have waked up at last, have you?” Maurice exclaimed, as his eyes rested upon me. “Time, too, I must say. Your friend has been gone this hour. I walked down to the place where we met the tiger with him. Wonderful man! I’ve made a regular engagement with him George. I am to meet him at the Lamasery of Psamdagong, in Thibet, on the 18th of December. You are to go with me, and Doc shall go along too, if he wants to. I tell you, George, there never was such a glorious proposition made to mortal man. I shall be talked of all over the civilized world; I shall visit every court in Europe; and as for scientific men they will come round me in droves. I shall write a book about it, and——”

“Hold on! Hold on! What in the name of sense are you talking about?” I shouted.

Then came the answer, just as I had expected.

​“Talking about? Why you must know, George. I am talking about going with your friend Mirrikh back to Mars.”

“Hypnotized, hopelessly hypnotized!” I groaned. “Oh! Maurice!”

Was it true?

Had that amazing man from Panompin controlled Maurice De Veber’s will so completely as to make him believe that it was possible to take his soul out of his body, transport it to the planet Mars and bring it back again?

Reader, he had!

Not that he controlled mine or the Doctor’s, but poor Maurice he had hard and fast.

I believe I could have killed Mr. Mirrikh that day, I felt so furious about it; but to kill your fox you must first find it, and I had never seen the man from that time till now.

Nor had Maurice. Yet it seemed to make no difference.

“George, I shall give up my position and am going to Thibet,” he said to me that morning, after we had told the Doctor all. And he did it—strange as it may seem, he did it.

“You are going with me,” he kept on declaring.

He need not have doubted that, if he were mad enough to go himself.

Briefly, we went. I, because I loved Maurice, and the Rev. Miles Philpot went because he wanted to—because he had nowhere else to go.

Maurice was mad. I believed it fully, and I blamed Mirrikh and his hypnotic powers for the whole affair.

What had been told my friend after Mirrikh had hypnotized me, Maurice would not divulge, nor did I ever fully ascertain. All I know is that Mirrikh gave him a letter of introduction to Mr. Radma Gungeet, at Benares, and from this individual Maurice received a document written in several sets of characters, which proved the very open sesame for us into that hitherto inpenetrable land—Thibet.

All we had to do was to show this to the local Buddhist priest, and lo! difficulties vanished like magic.

Now it was quite useless to attempt to turn Maurice a hair’s breadth.

Whatever was said to him, it had transformed Maurice De Veber into another individual.

For myself I had nobody but Maurice now, and I would have died sooner than desert him. As for the Rev. Miles ​Philpot, he would have travelled to Siberia with us so long as the brandy and tobacco held out.

Thus we found ourselves at the inn near Zhad-uan,on the northern slope of the Himalayas, a spot on God’s footstool where never Caucasian, certainly never American, trod before.

There we were, three travelers in Thibet. We had taken possession of the inn and hoped to keep it.

Fancy then our disappointment, when coming up the rocky ascent under the light of those glittering stars, I beheld a caravan, consisting of three camels and their riders, together with a sort of palanquin, borne on the shoulders of four men.

“By Jove! its coming here!” groaned the Doctor. “We shall have to share the k’ang with all that crowd.”

“Dey f’lom Lh’asa!” exclaimed Ah Schow, who had flung down the argols and was standing at our side. “Me tink dey come f’lom Trashilunpo too.”

“How do you tell, Ah Schow?” asked Maurice.

“Dat bed come f’lom Calcutta, boss. Me know!”

Now this same Ah Schow was a wonderful man in his way, I want you to understand. He had lived in Lh’asa, he told us; at all events we were amazed when we learned that to his other accomplishments the fellow added a knowledge of the Thibetan tongue, which seemed to bear out his claim. He was with us for many weeks and through many trials. The only objection I ever found to him was that having once run a wash house on Stockton street, San Francisco, he would call whichever one of us he was addressing, “boss.”

Meanwhile the caravan was steadily approaching and the shrill “sok! sok!” of the camel drivers sounded as if spoken at our very feet, the atmosphere was so wonderfully clear.

The camels came first, loaded with boxes and bales hung about their ungainly hips until it was difficult to tell where the camel ended and the luggage began. Then followed the palanquin and in the rear we could just catch a glimpse of several men mounted on mules coming up the pass.

We could not see the faces of the riders, however, and the light was too uncertain to enable us to tell by their costumes whether they were Thibetans, or Chinese traders from Bootan or Napaul.

To us they looked like so many sheep walking on their ​hind legs, which is not at all strange when you come to consider that they all wore huge sheepskin coats and caps with the wool turned out.

“Come! come! We must attend to the fire!” cried Maurice suddenly. “Poor wretches! They will be fairly frozen by the time they get here. Hurry, Ah Schow, and put more argols under the k’ang.”

Now the k’ang in a Thibetan or Tartar inn, is of such huge import that I must stop to tell what it is like.

Inns, in the Thibetan mountains, let it be understood, are for the most part mere shelters, maintained for the accomodation of travellers, who are expected to provide for themselves. Indeed the traveller may consider it luck even to find a shelter; he must expect nothing else, or certain disappointment awaits him. Does he want the tsamba, or barley meal, which forms the staple of diet all over these regions? If he does, and he has failed to provide himself with it beforehand, then he will be pretty apt to fare badly, for money here goes for nothing. Even if the inn is in charge of the family whose business it is to keep it clean, they will have nothing to sell, but rather will try to buy from you.

Tsamba, vermicelli, or rice, is the kind of diet to which your Thibetan traveller has to accustom himself. He must take his water cask with him; also a copper kettle, a bellows, a ladle, and a pillow, if he wants one; besides these things there are the horses or camels to be looked out for. But all this is not telling about the k’ang.

Picture to yourself four mud walls with the binding straw sticking out all over them in spots; thatch overhead, perhaps, or likely enough more mud, plastered over criss-crossed sticks, with mud pounded hard for the floor.

Such is the average inn interior, all except the k’ang, which is nothing more or less than a broad bench of planks built up against one wall, closed in front with the exception of a small opening to thrust the argols through, and numerous holes to let out the heat. Sometimes this opening is in the outside wall, and to build your fire inside you have to go out of doors.

Usually the k’ang stands about four feet high and takes up three-quarters of the room. Sometimes mats are thrown over it, or bits of carpet, if you have them. In the larger inns, in more populous districts where there are “all modern ​improvements,” you will find in front of the k’ang huge caldrons for cooking soup, their legs bedded in the mud with places for fires underneath, so arranged that the smoke and surplus heat passes under the k’ang and thence by the smoke hole to the outer air.

When the fire is built under the k’ang, the planks above are soon heated and will remain reasonably warm for quite a length of time. Here you sit by day and sleep by night, and if you can accustom yourself to roasting on one side and freezing on the other, you will soon learn, as we did, to make yourself very comfortable on the k’ang.

Bent upon his benevolent intentions, Maurice now lent his assistance to Ah Schow and the argols were soon gathered up and thrown under the k’ang. Meanwhile I had shut the door and the Doctor returned to his comfortable position in the warmest corner.

“May as well secure a seat while it’s possible,” he said. “Just you wait till these people come up and then see how comfortable we’ll be? I tell you there’s no such thing as sleep to-night.”

They were coming. The shouts of the camel drivers grew louder. Anxious to keep the place as warm as possible, we refrained from opening the door again, until the racket outside told us that the moment had arrived.

“Here they are!” cried Manrice. “Let’s do the hospitable, George. We would expect it if we were in their place.”

“Keep the door shut whatever else you do!” roared the Doctor. “As for me I don’t budge an inch for the biggest Lama in Thibet.”

Before we could answer, the door was flung open and in walked one of the K’ambas, or “red-capped men,” as the Chinese call the natives of eastern Thibet.

He was short and thick set, dressed in a dirty sheepskin, cut a la robe de nuit, very bunchy and reaching about to his knees, where it was met by high boot legs of red cloth with thick rawhide soles. He wore nothing on his head, nor did he seem to need it, for his long, tangled hair formed a jet black mat of amazing thickness, falling down over his shoulders and “banged” across the forehead, just above the eyes.

“Peace be with you, my brothers!” he exclaimed—Ah Schow was equal to the translation—“we have brought a guest who will be sure not to crowd you off the k’ang.”

​We bowed in as near Oriental fashion as we knew how. Maurice, through Ah Schow, assuring “our elder brother,” that on the k’ang was room enough for all.

Now, to our surprise, the fellow, instead of being followed up by his companions who were crowding about the open door, retreated, and presently we saw the covered litter, palanquin, or whatever you may please to call it, brought up.

Meanwhile Maurice and I had gone out, and found ourselves facing a staring crowd of fierce looking fellows of which the man I have just described was a fair type.

Evidently they were puzzled to make us out, in spite of the fact that we were dressed in the costume of the Thibetan lamas, wearing the long black cloaks, Chinese trousers and shoes; our appearance was correct except for our hair, which we had cut as short as possible without shaving, something we ought to have done to make the illusion complete. This I ought to have mentioned before, and that I have not done so is an oversight. Of course any one who has ever read a line about Thibet knows how utterly impossible it would be for us to gain admittance to the country in any other dress.

Grouped behind their drivers were the camels, whose mournful cries had aroused our mules in the little stable back of the inn, and they were by no means slow to make their voices heard. Every camel, besides the tremendous load each carried, was hung with bells innumerable and these clanged and jangled with each movement, producing an effect truly Wagnerian; in fact between the bells and the ceaseless chatter of the drivers, even had we been perfect artists in Thibetan, it would have been quite impossible to have made ourselves heard.

“Find out who these people are and what they are going to do,” Maurice said to Ah Schow. “If they’ve got some great man in that travelling house, find out who he is so that we may do the honors of the inn in proper shape.”

This started Ah Schow off to mingle with the crowd, but before he returned with the desired information, the mystery had in part solved itself.

Six long-haired men were crowding around the litter as soon as the bearers let it down.

It was a simple affair—just a sort of hand barrow with four upright poles over which rush mats were thrown.

“Thunder and Mars! Why don’t the fellow get out?” ​exclaimed Maurice. “One would think it was the Grand Lama himself from all the fuss that’s being made.”

“Perhaps he’s frozen,” I suggested, cheerfully.

“Shouldn’t wonder! It must be frightful to ride in this temperature in an arrangement like that. Look, George! Look! Why they are taking him out by the heels. It’s just as you say, he must be frozen. Merciful heaven! That is what the fellow meant by a guest who would not crowd us off the k’ang. They are bringing us a corpse!”

We pushed forward, elbowed by the camel drivers who seemed just as curious as ourselves.

Between them the six men who had pressed around the litter were carrying a human form, so enveloped in sheep-skins that we could not tell at first whether it was man or woman. Only the face was exposed and as yet we were not near enough to see that.

Slowly they walked toward the inn door, the camel drivers moving aside as they advanced.

“Now is our chance for a look, George!” whispered Maurice, as they came past the spot where we had stationed ourselves. “Tell you what, old fellow, if we are to be housed up for the rest of the night with a dead man and a gang like this, I’m for taking to the road again, unless—great God! Look there!”

“What?”

“The corpse—the face!”

“I can’t see the face; it is covered with a cloth!”

“No, no! Not all covered! Look! Look!”

I leaned forward, for now the long haired bearers were in the act of passing us.

Had I been blind that I had not seen before—that I had not guessed?

The corpse was that of a man, the face was one which I, least of all men in the world should ever forget.

“Oh, Maurice!”

I could say no more, for the face seen among the sheep-skins was the face of our Mr. Mirrikh, the man from the planet Mars.

They were gone.

The last camel had departed, the tail of the hindmost mule had vanished over the rocky ridge, a hundred feet or so above the inn, which formed the apex of the mountain pass, Zhad-uan; the shrill “sok! sok!” of the K’ambas was heard no more.

Inside the inn Maurice, Dr. Philpot, and your humble servant stood leaning against the k’ang, contemplating the lifeless body of Mr. Mirrikh, which, still enveloped in its sheepskin covering, lay upon its side at our feet.

Thus we had been standing for a good ten minutes; thus Ah Schow found us still standing when he returned from the stable after feeding the mules with barley, begged almost for its weight in Chinese sapeks from one of the camel drivers of the caravan, for we had seen the last of our own supply. Thus, perhaps, we might have kept right on standing and staring for the rest of the night, but for the Doctor’s habit of rising to the situation, no matter how bad it might be.

“Blow me, boys, if this isn’t the rum go, you know!” he exclaimed at last.” “You could have knocked me over with a feather, Maurice, when you came in singing out that Mirrikh was dead.”

“It’s a serious business, Doctor! A serious business,” replied Maurice gloomily. “You must admit it’s pretty hard on a fellow to have all his plans knocked in the head.”

“Best thing that ever happened you,” I said decidedly.

“Same here!” added the Doctor. “Thank God we’ll see the last of this crazy business now, and start back for Calcutta before we become corpses ourselves.”

But Maurice never answered. Instead, he gave me one of his reproachful looks which always had the effect of turning me to his side.

​“Philpot, are we going to inquire into the business or take it for granted that he is dead?” I demanded.

“Why of course he is dead.”

“Ah Schow says he couldn’t make out what was supposed to be the matter. That human sheep who first broke in on us, just said the body had been given them by some lamas in Bootan, with orders to leave it at this inn."

Now this was all we could make out of Ah Schow’s version of the affair, and we had no doubt he told us all that had been told to him.

Strangely enough, it seemed to us, after the body had been brought in, not one of the caravan people would enter the place.

The lamas of Bootan had told them to leave the corpse here, and here they proposed to leave it. Beyond that they had nothing to say.

And it seemed very, very strange to me then, that their arrival should have been so nicely timed as to find us at the inn ready to receive the body. It was, however, to be least among innumerable strange happenings present in my thoughts, before many days had passed.

Now they were all gone and we were alone with our dead; for if not ours, whose was it, I should like to know?

Positively it almost seemed as though Mr. Mirrikh meant to give us another of his surprises; as though the whole matter had been pre-arranged.

“Look here, boys, we’ll soon settle the question!” exclaimed Philpot, after we had indulged in some further discussion. “Let’s pull off some of these coverings and see what our Martial friend is made of. It won’t take me two seconds to tell if he has passed in his checks or not.”

There could be no objection to this idea. Nothing could be more important than to have the question settled once and for all.

We all lent our aid and removed the sheepskin without much difficulty, despite of the fact that it had been securely sewed round the body.

Yes, it was Mirrikh. Not in the dress in which we had last seen him, but, like ourselves, attired as a Thibetan lama, with shaven head, black cloak and all. You may be very sure the Doctor pulled aside the shirt to see if the strange discoloration extended down upon the breast and shoulders, ​but it did not. Below the neck Mr. Mirrikh’s body was almost as white as my own.

Of course the face had been carefully examined first of all. It was half covered with the black cloth mask, just as he liked to keep it, and so cold that at first the Doctor declared that the flesh was frozen, then in a minute changing round and being just as positive that it was not; and we all fell to wondering why it was not, and I can only add that I am wondering still.

Now Philpot’s medical skill came in play beautifully.

“He’s as dead as a smelt,” he exclaimed, after a most careful examination. “There ain’t the slightest doubt about it. What can it mean?”

“Can you distinguish no heart action?” asked Maurice gloomily.

“Not a murmur! Try for yourself.”

Maurice bent over the bared breast and remained with his ear down for fully five minutes, during which time the Doctor was holding his pocket mirror to the lips, trying at the same time to find the pulse, although he had done all this before..

Dead!

Such was the final verdict.

My friend Mirrikh lay a corpse; thrown at our feet, as one might say, in derision of our stupendous folly.

Could we hope to play Hamlet without Hamlet?

Decidedly this was the last act in the drama, just as the Doctor had said. At least that is what I thought when finally, sometime after midnight, I stretched myself out upon the k’ang to try and obtain a little sleep before morning came; for, after a long discussion, we had decided to turn our mules’ noses back in the direction of Bootan with the rising of to-morrow’s sun.

Maurice was asleep already. He had dropped off just as soon as he lay down—something very unusual for him.

Ditto the Doctor; but he always kept one eye open, was continually rousing up, putting a pinch of tobacco into his pipe and puffing vigorously, until the next one knew, with the pipe within easy reach of his hand he would be snoring again.

Ah Schow was asleep too, but then the faithful Celestial never lost an opportunity for slumber.

Why could not I sleep like the rest?

​Why must I lie there as the weary moments dragged by, tossing uneasily upon the k’ang?

Not that I expected to sleep when I lay down; on the contrary, what surprised me was the way the Doctor and Maurice went off and the soundness with which they were sleeping now.

Then I fell to dreaming—waking dreams I mean, for I am ready to make a solemn affidavit that I never closed my eyes that night.

I must talk about these dreams for a moment. I can remember each thought of the many which flitted through my brain, with a distinctness so vivid that it sometimes seems as though some occult influence had photographed them upon the page of memory. I had little belief in the occult then—it is different now.

It appeared to me somehow as if the room was filled with shadow forms—phantoms, if you will—certainly not seen with my natural eyes; yet see them I most assuredly did.

How?

God knows! Let those who can fathom the mysteries of the super-sense explain.

I only tell what happened, I am simply a recorder, and I write my record truly. Make what you like out of it—explain it in whatever way suits you best.

Dreams, dreams, and yet surely it was not all a dream.

I was standing near on the k’ang listening to Maurice’s steady breathing and the Doctor’s occasional snorts, when all at once I saw a form in white flit past me and approach the corpse.

Was I startled?

No! I declare solemnly I was not; and when I tried to move and found that a power over which I had no control held me down, I never made another effort. I could not disturb myself—I tried it and failed; a strange calmness seemed to have taken possession of my soul.

Not like the shadows I had been seeing was this. Oh, no! It was something altogether of a different sort.

It was the form of a woman of tall, stately figure. Her dress was marvellous in its whiteness—“shining exceeding white as snow so as no fuller on earth can white them,” I found myself involuntarily murmuring, quoting from that sacred book which I had ever regarded with contempt. ​Over her head a veil of some filmy material was thrown which practically hid her features. She raised her hands and threw the veil toward me as she glided past—I felt its touch upon my face—it was real!

“Maurice! I must wake Maurice!” flashed over me. “I must know whether these are dreams or not!”

Useless! If a mountain had stood there ready to fall and crush me, I could neither have moved nor spoken a word.

With a quick, gliding motion the veiled woman now approached the body of Mr. Mirrikh, and bending down began making passes over the face, exactly as I have since seen a hypnotizer work upon his subject.

I watched her. Never for an instant were my eyes removed from her. She was wondrously beautiful—divine!

Moment succeeded moment. Still the veiled woman was there—still those slender, snow white hands moved to and fro over the face of the corpse.

Presently a strange thing occurred—so strange that it were better omitted, were it not that I have sworn to keep nothing back.

Now as I watched the veiled form, I perceived that it was growing smaller—growing thin and vapory, just as I had seen Mr. Mirrikh turn into vapor in the alley, at Panompin, on that ever memorable night.

Then, all in an instant, the hands ceased to move and the form sank down upon the floor, an unmeaning mass of white drapery, which for a second seemed to glow with singular phosphorescence, and then——

Presto!

It was gone!

The veiled woman was no longer there!

Terror now seized me. I tried again to move—to reach Maurice and awaken him, but a power incomprehensible still held me down.

I was conscious, yet helpless. My soul was keenly alive to everything, but the power of controlling the body it inhabited seemed to have been taken away.

There was just one thing I could do and that was to keep my eyes fixed upon the particular spot on the floor where the vapory form had vanished.

Soon I beheld a round phosphorescent spot of light, which seemed to exactly fill the space upon which my vision was concentrated and no more.

​Slowly it increased in size, until it was as big, perhaps, as a large cocoanut and of about the same shape.

Now it changed—changed so suddenly that I neither saw nor knew how the change came.

A human head was there—it was the head of a man—it was the head of Mr. Mirrikh—the face was partly yellow—partly black!

Eyes, nose, mouth—every feature was perfect, yet there was nothing but the head resting on the floor.

Suddenly the eyes turned toward me and fixed themselves on my own. Then I saw the lips move, and as distinctly as I ever heard human lips utter sounds, I heard him say:

“Mr. Wylde, I greet you! This is the way we come up!”

Did I answer?

Never!

To save me from death I could not have spoken.

I saw the head rise—saw bust and shoulders form from filmy vapor. Next, he was there on his hands and knees, and then with a sudden spring he leaped to his feet and stood beside his own corpse—a man!

“Turn your head the other way, Mr. Wylde. You have seen all that is best for you to see,” he said in that calm way which I remembered so well.

Now I was as powerless to remain without motion as before I had been powerless to move—my head seemed to turn of its own accord.

“Wylde! Wylde! Wake up! Wake up, man!”

Merciful God, had I been asleep? Was it a dream again? Do not ask me, for I do not know!

All I can say is that I sprang from the k’ang my own master, and found myself facing that man of mystery, weighed down by a sense of awe.

It was Mirrikh—Mirrikh in the flesh—Mirrikh alive—the same Mirrikh who had talked with us in the tower.

I turned my eyes, seeking the corpse.

It had disappeared.

​

I said nothing about it to the Doctor, but I told Maurice all.

I was almost sorry that Mirrikh had not stayed in his sheepskins, that the caravan had not made a miss of it and dropped him somewhere else, for the next day found us mounted upon our mules plodding over the mountains, with their noses pointing toward Lh’asa instead of Bootan.

Words cannot express the utter amazement of Philpot and Maurice when they awakened to find my friend Mr. Mirrikh alive and seated comfortably on the k’ang by my side.

“Gad! No! I say, no! It can’t be!”

The Doctor was first to wake.

“What is the matter?” Mr. Mirrikh asked with his accustomed calmness.

“The matter! Great heavens, he wants to know the matter! Why man, you are dead! If you ain’t you ought to be, or I’m in the first stages of softening of the brain.”

But Maurice was different.

Perhaps he was only half awake, though, at the time. It was after Ah Schow, who had been awakened by the Doctor’s racket, gave one yell of terror at the sight of our guest and went flying out of doors. Ah Schow, be it understood, was a firm believer in ghosts, and of course he took Mr. Mirrikh for one. Indeed, I was not quite certain on the subject myself!

I can see that dear boy now, just as he looked when he started up. His eyes rested on the Doctor first, then they passed to my adept.

“Mr. Mirrikh!”

“Yes.”

“Not dead?”

“I am here, my friend. I have kept my appointment!”

“I knew it! Doctor, I told you so! I knew he would not fail us!”

​He was wild in his enthusiasm—mad.

Then the Doctor!

I fancy I see him now, fumbling unsteadily in his tobacco pouch with that stub of a pipe he always smoked, his eyes fixed upon Mr. Mirrikh, to whom Maurice was pouring out words in the way he used to do, which I had tried in vain to make him do of late.

“I say, look here; give a fellow a show, will you, De Veber? Do you find it more convenient, Mr. Mirrikh, in traveling in this blasted country to freeze yourself like a side of beef and be forwarded by fast camel express?”

Mr. Mirrikh laughed shortly.

“Now, Doctor; now, Doctor! he exclaimed. “You are not sorry to see me alive, I trust?”

“I have nothing to say about that one way or the other,” replied the Doctor in his most positive fashion. What I say is this—and I stick to it—when I examined you last night you were dead.”

Again the adept gave his peculiar laugh.

“This is a strange country, Doctor,” he said lightly. “The strangest part of it is to see a dead man get hungry. I am most horribly hungry just now, so let us postpone further discussion till after breakfast, if it is all the same to you.”

But the discussion was not renewed.

The Doctor seemed to feel that he had made a blunder which would lower him in our estimation as a general “knowledgist,” and showed a disposition to drop the matter. As for myself, I maintained profound silence; not only on the subject of this marvellous resurrection, but likewise on all that Mr. Mirrikh told me after it took place.

Not that this amounted to much, I was full of amazement when he seized my hand and said warningly:

“Now Mr. Wylde, you have been brought face to face with a mystery which it has been the good fortune of but few of you earth dwellers to see. Be careful! No casting pearls before swine! I was determined to give you this satisfaction and I have done it; but such mysteries are not for all.”

It took me many minutes to collect myself, but I caught the spirit of his warning words, and was ready for him at last.

“What have you done? What does it all mean?” I demanded. “Who gave you the power to transcend the laws ​of Nature, to conquer death, to make yourself as a God?”

“You are wrong at the very outset,” he replied. “There is but one God, our Father Eternal in the heavens, and did you but acknowledge Him, you would be a happier man. Neither I nor any of His creatures can transcend the laws which He has ordained from the beginning; some understand them better than others—that is all.”

“You were not dead then?”

“No. Of course not. God alone has power over life and death.”

“But——”

“Stay; do you know anything of the philosophy of the Buddhist adepts?”

“Very little.”

“Then to try to explain what you have seen is hopeless. To comprehend these things the mind needs long and careful training. Believe me when I say that this is but a tithe of the mysteries which I will reveal to you before we finally part.”

“Would that we might part now and forever—that your spell was removed from that dear boy,” I replied, bitterly.

“Do not say so. He has his work to do, you have yours.”

“Would that we had never met.”

“We were destined to meet. God willed it.”

“At least I was powerless to prevent it; but I earnestly beseech you to release my friend from the glamour you have cast over him, and go your own way.”

“No; I cannot. It is not to be.”

“It should be so if I could make it so.”

“That you cannot do!”

“I know it. I have tried.”

“And failed.”

“Hopelessly failed.”

And yet you do not seem to feel as hardly toward me as I should expect.”

“I have tried to do so, but even there I fail, and I do not know why I should, unless it is that you have cast some portion of your spell over me.”

He laughed softly.

“My dear sir, to hear you talk, one would think I was some cheap magician. I could no more cast a spell over you than you could cast one over me.”

“I am assured to the the contrary. The experience of the last hour proves to the contrary.”

​“You do not believe that you saw what you actually did see?”

“No. I refuse to believe it. I utterly reject it.”

“Do you know the full meaning of what you saw?”

“Yes.”

“You do not.”

“I beg your pardon, I do.”

“I repeat, you do not. Mr. Wylde, let me tell you something. It will surprise you when I inform you that one hour ago I was in Benares in the private apartments of my friend, Radma Gungeet, whom I understand you have met since I was with you last.”

“That I know to be false.”

“On the contrary, you know nothing about it; moreover it is true.”

“But your body——”

Bah! What is this earthly body? I speak of my astral body, which envelopes the soul, my real self. I am no more bound to this body than you are to the black gown you wear at the present moment, which, by the way, becomes you immensely. Why, I have not been with this body before for months. I dreaded the journey to this place and sent my body on ahead—that is all.”

“And it is quite enough!” I cried angrily. “I will hear no more of it. You have deluded me in some way. I am at a loss to tell how, but listen to your theosophic rubbish any longer, I won’t.”

He sighed, and turned away muttering:

“Useless, useless! They cannot understand. Will the time never come?”

This ended our conversation, for just then the Doctor woke up and the fun began.

Morning dawned—another day was upon us; after a long and heated discussion we were on the move again.

Not that Mr. Mirrikh joined in the argument. He said nothing, but walked out into the open as soon as I began it, remaining there until it was over.

The discussion was between Maurice, the Doctor and myself.

“It is no use, George; let that man be what he may, I shall go on,” Maurice had said. “He has made certain promises to me, set up certain claims. So far he has kept his promises and established his claims, and I propose to stick ​to him. You, if you like, can return to India. Please yourself.”

“I shall never return without you, Maurice,” I replied. “The future has nothing in store for me. Where you go, I go. At least I shall have the satisfaction of being at your side when the day of disaster comes, as come it surely will.”

He pressed my hand with unusual warmth, and that was the last of our discussion.

Soon Ah Schow brought the mules around to the door and we started down the mountain.

As there were only three mules, Mr. Mirrikh rode double with Maurice as far as the town of Zhad-uan, where a fourth was purchased, after which it was easier travelling, though it was all hard enough.

A hundred miles lay before us, Mr. Mirrikh said, and we took it for granted that he knew.

Now as I had been contemplating writing a detailed account of the manners and customs of this unknown land, I was not a little disappointed to learn that our way for the entire distance lay through an utterly desolate country; little less, in fact, than an endless series of broken mountain chains, sandy deserts and barren plains.

Zhad-uan was the frontier town of the region, and after a short stay we were on the road again.

Now from the moment we left the inn, Mr. Mirrikh conducted himself in every way like a human being—whether or not he was one, I had begun to feel grave doubts.

My philosophy was completely shattered, and even the Doctor was silent on the subject

To the outward observer we were simply four black lamas travelling with their servant. To ourselves we were a mystery—all except the Doctor, and I honestly believe that in spite of his protests he was glad of the decision to advance. I will do the man the justice to say that the advice he had offered to the contrary was expressed solely for our good.

We had with us everything needed to make us as comfortable as circumstances would permit; tent, cooking utensils, canned meats and vegetables. No one interfered with us, and I came to the conclusion that no one would to the end.

Not that we passed unchallenged.

​At Zhad-uan, for instance, we were stopped and hurried before the Chinese governor of the town.

I thought that Mr. Mirrikh would take the initiative and suggested it.

“Show your passport,” he said. “Nothing else is necessary.”

I exhibited the paper to a fat mandarin with a tremendously long moustache, who sat before us on a bamboo chair, eating watermelon seeds and listening sleepily to his assistant who was interrogating Ah Schow.

It resulted just as usual. We had been through the same scene many times before, until now it had grown quite familiar.

The mandarin put on a pair of huge horn spectacles and glanced at the mysterious paper; his face giving no expression of his thoughts as he folded it up and handed it back.

“Peace be with you my lords lamas!” he said. “The way lies open before you—pass on.”

Easier said than done, for there are few countries on the face of the globe more difficult to travel in than eastern Thibet.

We were two days at Zhad-uan, staying at the hotel of Faith and Perseverance—so its name, translated, reads.

It required more faith than I possessed to make a hotel out of it, but there was a place for us to lie down and sleep, and that was about all we had looked for. Of course we had to cook for ourselves.

Down here in the valley the weather was warm and comfortable, but all around us we could see rising the snow capped peaks of the northern Himalayas, so we knew what we had to expect.

We started at daylight, presenting quite an imposing appearance as we rode through the crooked streets out of town.

Men stared, women and children crowded to the doors of the low, smoke begrimed houses; not a few beseeched our prayers as we passed, for Ah Schow, the rascal, had given it out that we were lamas whose prayers were most powerful, especially in healing the sick.

In fact we were often called upon to pray by these people and for that purpose each of us carried a copper prayer wheel which we ground industriously when occasion required, always winding up with the assurance that Buddha had heard and would grant the request.

​All that day over the plain, resting at night in our own tent at the foot of the loftiest mountain I had yet seen.

Morning found us ascending the foot hills, and by noon we reached the beginning of a pass between two snowy peaks, the bed of some ancient river certainly, where huge boulders and masses of broken rock lay heaped in inexplicable confusion with a narrow trail winding in and out.

This was our road, according to Mr. Mirrikh—we were trusting entirely to his guidance now.

“Seems to me it would have paid you better to have made one jump from Benares to Psam-dagong,” I said in a sarcastic moment.

“And left you to struggle with all these dangers alone?” he replied. “You do not do me half justice, Mr. Wylde.”

“Do you mean to say that you knew you would meet us at the inn?”

“Most certainly I did.”

“And your body?”

“Was delivered there by my orders, of course.”

“Upon my word you timed it well then.”

“Such was my intention.”

“How did you manage?”

“No matter now. The Doctor is trying to overtake us. We will talk of this some other time.”

Maurice’s mule was decidedly the best, and, as usual, had gone ahead. Mr. Mirrikh and I followed, while the Doctor and our Celestial cuisiniere had fallen behind.

“Do you know, Wylde, we are running head first into a snow storm?” called the former as he spurred up the slope. “What do you think about it Mr. Mirrikh? Am I not right?”

The adept surveyed the clouds, which for some time had been gathering.

“There certainly is a storm approaching,” he said at length. “I have been blind not to notice it before.”

“I saw it half an hour back,” said the Doctor, proudly, “and I’ve been trying ever since to force this lazy brute along so as to overtake you. Is Maurice far ahead?”

I pointed upward. There, fully two hundred feet above us, was Maurice mounted on his mule, moving at a snail’s pace it seemed, but it was rapid compared with our own.

“We ought to warn him. What are we to do, Mr. Mirrikh?”

​“Do the best we can. There is a guard house at the summit of the pass—we can spend the night there.”

“Yes, and be most deucedly uncomfortable till morning. You say there is no town between this and your lamasery?”

“None.”

“Of course you know?”

“I should know. I have passed this way before.”

“Seems to me,” said the Doctor, in his most sarcastic manner, “that when I get ready to drop down on Jupiter, I’ll take devilish good care to select a better place to fall in than Thibet.”

“You will find no such place on the planet Jupiter as Thibet;” replied the adept, calmly.

“Oh, dear! Is that so? Of course you know.”

“I have been there.”

“I find no more difficulty in believing that assertion than some others you have made.”

“That I come from Mars for instance?”

“For instance!”

“Jupiter,” continued Mr. Mirrikh, paying no attention to the Doctor’s offensive manner, “is now passing through a geologic age corresponding with the earth’s Tertiary period. There it is all summer, all—I beg your pardon, Mr. Wylde. For once I forgot myself. You do not like to hear me talk of these matters. I will stop.”

“Go on, if you wish,” I replied. “I have nothing to say, except that you must not expect me to believe you.”

“Oh, don’t stop! Don’t stop!” said the Doctor. “I’m deeply interested. No doubt you’ve been to Mercury and Saturn as well as old Jove; like as not a comet or two has been honored by your presence. It will be worth all this mad journey has cost friend George, to have your personal experiences on the other side of the moon!”

And so it went all through the first part of the time we travelled with Mr. Mirrikh; yet I never saw the man out of temper or even ruffled once.

Usually he and Maurice kept together, the Doctor and I being left to keep each other company as best we could.

Long and earnest were the conversations those two held. What were they talking about? I never knew—do not know now.

The Doctor was right about the snow storm.

That night saw us imprisoned in the guard house at the ​top of the pass with a perfect blizzard in full operation outside.

Of course if I was writing a book of travels in Thibet it would be scarcely en regle to shift my scenes thus abruptly; but this is not a book of travel, and although my notes are fairly bursting with incidents, I am trying in my feeble way to treat of the occult, and to the occult my story must be confined.

I ought, however, to say a descriptive word about these guard houses, which, like the inns already described, are found all over Eastern Thibet. Although actually a Chinese institution, and supposed to be kept in repair by the government—they are intended to be on all the great roads at a distance of two miles apart—it is only once in awhile you meet one in shape to afford even shelter from a shower, and that is why the Thibetans, who know by sad experience what it is to depend upon the Chinese government for anything, have established the inns and try to make them what the guard houses should be but are not.

The guard house we had come upon was, however, one of the best of its class. Picture to your mind a square, box-like structure, about twenty feet each way, one story in height, built of mud and whitewashed. There was a large door in front and two rooms within, opening off each side of the hall which was supposed to accommodate our mules, and I must confess did, and very comfortably too. The rooms were small and each had its window and k’ang, while in addition was a wooden bench running around the walls and painted bright red with Thibetan characters cut in the wood, meaning, according to Mr. Mirrikh, “the sublime ruler of the Flowery Kingdom, trusted sincerely that his elder brother might enjoy a comfortable night’s rest.”

Outside, the walls were decorated with rude paintings, dragons, horsemen and grinning gods with huge moustaches being scattered freely over the whitewash; on the walls within were pictorial representations of sabres, bows, arrows and spears, supposed to take the place of armed soldiers to defend the traveller from the robbers with which all Thibet is infested, though, strangely enough, we never encountered them once.

“By Jove, quite Chinese, you know!” exclaimed the Doctor, when he saw these pictured weapons. “They are to scare the robbers off!”

​Such was actually their purpose; but the only purpose they served that night was to amuse Maurice, who spent a good hour studying them while dreaming over his pipe.

This was after we were comfortably housed and supper eaten. Meanwhile the storm, of which we had already had a taste, being in it half an hour before we reached the guard house, was raging furiously outside.

The Doctor as usual, had laid down to sleep on the most comfortable part of the k’ang, Mirrikh was seated crosslegged facing him, busy writing in that same little book about which I had made such a stir in the old tower at Ballambong. I was pacing the floor lost in thought apparently, but actually watching the man as he wrote. I had watched him before and more than once I questioned him about those strange characters and the language they represented, but I never succeded in getting any information worth recording here.

“It is my native language,” he replied, the first time I asked him. “You cannot understand it, Mr. Wylde.”

“Learned on Mars?” was my incredulous query.

He assured me that it was so, and probably my manner of receiving the statement was what prevented me from getting further particulars. Often since I have wished that I had acted differently and learned something definite about the matter; but I neglected my opportunity and can only add that upon another occasion he told me the characters were entirely arbitrary and in no sense an alphabet, being rather stenographic—each expressing a word, several words, a thought.

How the wind howled! I can hear it now! Nor was it any wonder, when you stop to consider that we were, as I learned later, over 11,000 feet above sea level; fortunately we were under the shelter of a lofty peak which towered far above us on the northwest, and what was more to the point, a perpendicular wall of rock at least one hundred feet high rose directly behind the guard house—the location had been chosen, no doubt, for that very cause.

Cold? Well, make no mistake on that score! The k’ang was almost useless to one three feet away. I had sent Ah Schow out to throw an extra sheepskin over my mule who was far from being in condition, poor brute, and was just wondering why he did not come in again, when all at once Mr. Mirrikh leaped from the k’ang with a startled cry.

​“Merciful heavens!” he exclaimed, “this is terrible!”

“What?” cried Maurice, turning suddenly around.

“Got a fit, Mirrikh?” asked the Dortor, lazily, never stirring from his comfortable roost on the k’ang.

For the moment the adept did not answer, but just stood there with his eyes fixed on nothingness, an expression of unmistakable horror mingled with deep pity plainly pictured upon his face.

“What is it? What is the matter? Speak,” persisted Maurice.

He sighed and raised his head slowly. Then up came one hand which was brushed before his eyes.

“Gentlemen,” he said, with more agitation than I ever afterward saw him display, “we are needed outside. There is human life in peril; if there is yet time I propose to save it; who will go?”

“Go where? What can you mean?” I exclaimed.

“I mean that on a ledge a little off the road on the other slope of this ridge there is at this very moment a woman—she is freezing rapidly—she sits beside a man—I think the man is already dead, or at least dying—he is an old man—I can see his grey hair—he—ah! She calls! She calls! Come! Come! Wylde! Come Mr. De Veber—before it is too late.”

He threw his cloak about him, over that drew a sheepskin coat and rushed to the door, nearly falling into the arms of Ah Schow who was just coming back from his visit to the mules.

“Out of my way!” he shouted. “Why do you block my path? De Veber are you never going to make a move?”

Maurice seized his gun and was ready, for he had not removed any of his outer wraps.

“Mad! Mad! Ye Gods! I’m buried with a lot of lunatics!” cried Philpot, “For heaven’s sake don’t you desert me, Wylde. I had some hope that you and I, at least, might get back to civilization again.”

“I’m with Maurice,” I answered hurriedly, and losing no time rushed out to face the storm.

I never saw it snow as it snowed that night. I have encountered many a blizzard in the Far West, to say nothing of my experience on the Pacific Railroad, which, of course, it would be out of place to dwell upon here, and I only allude to it to show that I am not unfamiliar with blizzards. I repeat, the worst I ever saw was that night among the mountains of Eastern Thibet.

When I was outside the guard house there were Maurice and Mr. Mirrikh waiting for me amid a whirl of whitened flakes, which already covered them so completely that it was hard to tell which was skeepskin and which snow. I believe I failed to mention that we had all provided ourselves with the sheepskin coats of the country at Zhad-uan. Big clumsy things they were, too, and worn with the woolly side out. It was by advice of our adept that we purchased them—I never fully appreciated the necessity until now.

They were waiting for me and it is well they were, otherwise I might never have found them, for a camel would have been invisible five feet away from the door.

“We want a lantern!” cried Maurice. “George, you are nearest, go back and get one, like a good fellow.”

“We do not need it,” interposed the adept. “My powers of vision are quite sufficient. “Come! Come! We are wasting time.”

“Impossible!” shouted Maurice, and even then I could scarcely hear him. “You nor no other man can see in a whirl like this.”

“Friends,” he answered. “I see by a vision of which you know nothing. Every moment is precious: for God’s sake come!”

I had gained Mausice’s side by this time, and with my mouth close to his ear begged him earnestly not to go—or at least to insist on the lantern.

Somewhat to my surprise he listened to the latter part of my proposition, though utterly rejecting the former. The ​lantern was procured, all three of us returning to the guard house for that purpose. How well I remember the Doctor’s vigorous protest against our mad folly when we started out the second time.

“We must keep together,” said the adept, “so perhaps after all it is better with a lantern, it will be a help on that score, if no other. Give it to me. We shall have to go single file. It is not so far.”

Think of the folly of it! Where were we going and why? I find myself at a loss for words to explain the feelings I experienced when we moved away from the guard house in the face of the storm, wallowing in snow already knee deep.

We had heard no cry for help, had seen nothing, knew nothing to make it appear that our mad venture had any object. We were acting entirely on the bare claim of this singular individual to a superhuman sight. Bitterly I cursed the strange influence which he had come to exercise over Maurice, but for my friend’s sake I struggled on, firm in the belief that we had started on a fruitless quest.

It was useless to try and talk, for only by shouting could we make ourselves heard. The fury of the wind seemed to increase every moment. The snow whirled against our faces with blinding intensity, yet in spite of it all we started down the mountain road by the way we had come.

Mr. Mirrikh went first, Maurice followed, I, keeping as close to my friend as possible, brought up the rear.

On our left rose a wall of rock towering high above our heads; on the right yawned a precipice over the edge of which one false step might precipitate us to an awful fate. All this I had seen before darkness settled over the mountain and remembered it but too well. Ten minutes passed—it seemed as though we had been fighting the storm for hours. Raising my voice to the highest pitch, I called to Mr. Mirrikh and implored him to return.

“Courage!” he shouted back. “Courage, Mr. Wylde! It is but a few steps! Do you remember that big white boulder you examined on the way up and pronounced an evidence of glacial action—it is there.”

“We can’t be far from that now,” cried Maurice. “It was only a few minutes before we reached the guard house after we passed it.”

“We are close upon it!” he called. “Just a little more ​effort, friends! Ha! What was that? Now you will believe that I told the truth!”

It was a human voice—a cry!

Faintly it fell upon our ears, but it was real.

“Coming!” shouted Mirrikh.

I remember thinking it a pity none of us understood Thibetan that we might convey some hope to this perishing soul, but the adept with all his wonderful powers assured us that he knew no more of the tongue than we did ourselves.

Of course I objected no longer, but spoke words of cheer to Maurice, who was certainly the weakest physically of the three.

I was lost in wonder at the whole strange business. How had Mirrikh known? What was the secret of this power thus to project his vision indefinitely? I thought of clairvoyance, second sight and similar things, which until then, I had considered only so many different names for humbug and chicanery. Never before had I realized how little I understood the latent powers within every man as on that memorable night.

Again the cry and again we shouted back encouraging words. It began to look as though we were going to accomplish something after all.

“Keep well up to the left!” said the adept. “The snow is gathering on the edge of the precipice—one false step and we are lost.”

“It can’t be a great way now,” said Maurice, “and I am thankful for it. Fact is, George, I’m pretty nearly used up.”

Twenty paces brought us to the white boulder. We came upon it suddenly; almost before we knew it there it was rising before us amid the whirl of snow.

“Is there any one here?” shouted Mirrikh, flashing the lantern about.

Then for the first time I heard that voice which was to have such power to move me later on.

“Help! Oh help us! We are perishing!”

Though spoken with a very marked accent, the words were in our own language. It is hard to express the effect this produced on me, and I am sure with Maurice it was just the same.

“George! It is a woman! She is speaking English!” he shouted, as we pressed forward after the adept, who had already reached the rock.

​It stood to the left with a space of perhaps six feet between it and the perpendicular wall against which the path was cut. A huge detached mass of white quartz, at least five feet in height and eight or ten in length, it offered some slight shelter from the storm.

There, in that narrow space, sat a young woman with a sheepskin drawn about her, bending over another sheepskin which lay at her feet, half buried in the snow. It covered a human form—a man. There was the grey head resting in her lap, and the feet projecting below that woolly covering. Still and silent it lay, and I seemed to know intuitively that all hope was idle. Truly death stalketh in the storm.

Not that my mind dwelt upon this—not that it was even remembered in the instant that followed.

As the adept’s lantern was flashed behind the rock and his voice spoke words of cheer, the woman’s eyes were raised and her face turned upward.

“Merciful powers! ” cried Maurice; “it’s that same girl we met on the road back from Ballambong!”

“Yes, it was she.”

Walla Benjow was the name we came to know her by from that fearful night.

Fate had again thrown her in our path.

Now in these later days, when I have learned to believe in an all-wise protecting Providence, I feel certain it was foreordained that we should meet.

Three days passed. We were still at the guard house. At last the storm spent its fury and the sun rose upon a wondrous scene. As far as the eye could reach in every direction the whole face of the country lay buried under a covering of snow deeper than the height of an ordinary man.

Never have I viewed a grander sight. It was as though we had been raised above Nature and could look down with a calm and critical eye. Here we saw her exhibited on a ​scale extended to distances bounded only by the mighty barriers of the Himalayas. All was bold and colossal; deep mountain gorges, towering peaks, awful precipices and beetling crags all rounded off and changed into a thousand fantastic shapes by the whirl of the drifting snow.

It was a sight to make a man think of his own insignificance and God’s greatness, if, happily, by education or conviction he is able to comprehend what I do in some measure now, but did not then, the mighty mystery of the infinite; the loving Father who doeth all things and doeth all things well.

We stood on a rocky eminence about a hundred feet above the guard house, Dr. Philpot and I. Looking off we could see to an interminable distance on all sides, for we were at the very summit of the ridge, and our way lay down to the whitened plains below, where far, far in the distance, on the beginning of the next rise, we could faintly discern a cluster of low, square-built structures, with a gilded dome above them. This, our adept had informed us, was our destination—the lamasery of Psam-dagong.

“What a frightful country,” growled the Rev. Philpot as he and I were returning from our point of observation, shortly after daylight that morning. “Do you know, Wylde, it’s my humble opinion that we shall never succeed in reaching the lamasery. By Jove! I’d give something if we had Mirrikh’s levitating powers and could with one jump throw ourselves back into the big courtyard of the Nagkon Wat. Summer is what I’m sighing for now.”

“You don’t wish it any more than I do then,” I replied gloomily.

“I suppose nothing that either you or I could say would move Maurice in the least.”

“Nothing. He is completely under that man’s influence.”

“Wholly so. His individuality seems submerged in Mirrikh. Each day only adds to it. Why, he hasn’t even got eyes for that delightful creature you picked out of the snow storm, when a child could see that she is dead gone on him.”

“How absurd!” I replied tartly. “The girl is all sorrow over the loss of her father. Maurice is sympathetic by nature which attracts her toward him—that is all.”

He gave me a curious look—a look which set me to ​wondering if he possessed some small share of the adept’s powers and could read the thoughts then uppermost in my mind.

“Nothing absurd about it,” he answered, digging his heel into the thick crust which now covered the snow everywhere. “I’m no fool, Wylde. No man has studied the fair sex more carefully than I have. Let me tell you a secret. The girl is in love!”

“With Maurice?”

“With Maurice.”

“Don’t talk ridiculous nonsense, Doctor!”

“Ta, ta! Don’t you get mad, my boy, for we can’t afford to quarrel. By Jove! I guess we’d better drop the subject; though, if I chose, I could add a corollory to my problem—but I won’t.”

I gave him a look, but he had turned his head away and was lightly humming an air from La Grande Duchesse.”

“You fool,” I thought. “You had better take care!”

But my thought did not refer to the Doctor. On the contray, its reference was wholly to myself.

“We won’t talk any more about it,” I said quietly enough. “The question we are most interested in now is the crust. Is it strong enough to bear us? Are we going to start to-day or remain housed till another storm catches us.”

“Here comes old double face!” exclaimed the Doctor. “He’s running the whole business. Let him decide.”

It was Mr. Mirrikh. As we rounded a projecting corner of the overhanging ledge, we saw him approaching. His face was bare, for he had abandoned the mask the day we left Zhad-uan, there being no particular advantage in wearing it for our benefit, and I am sure it must have been a nuisance at the best.

Had he heard?

There was no reason why he should not have heard, for he was close upon us. I gave the Doctor a nudge of warning, but too late. Still if he heard he showed it by no sign.

“Good morning, Wylde; good morning, Doctor!” he shouted. “Glorious morning, is it not? The rain last night has done the work for us. Almost never rains at this season in Thibet, so we may take it as quite a miracle. There is now nothing to hinder us from making a start.”

“How long will it take us to reach the lamasery?” I inquired by way of answer.

​“That depends. If the crust continues to bear the mules all the way, we can make splendid time—I should think a day and a night ought to do it.”

“Camping on the snow,” groaned the Doctor.

“I fear so. When I passed here before it was summer, and I remember no inn, not even a guard house, in fact, until we reached this point.”

“In which case we may as well make the best of Ah Schow’s breakfast,” I added, for the adept had turned back with us and we were now near the door of the guard house, before which Maurice was pacing up and down, smoking his pipe on an empty stomach, as I had begged him in vain not to do at least a hundred times.

After that we all went in and sat down around the bowl of smoking tsamba and a few trifles of our own in the way of canned goods to help it out.

There were four of us now, besides Ah Schow, when before there had been only three.

The fourth was Walla Benjow, the girl we had taken from the storm.

And the fifth—the father?

Dead, and lying in the shallow grave, which we, with immense difficulty, had managed to dig in a sheltered spot behind the guard house wall.

I remember, and with a shudder, even now, just how he looked when we brought him in and placed him on the k’ang. His head hung down, his arms seemed glued to his sides, his face was as white as wax, and the half open eyes glassy, with little icicles hanging from his nostrils and the corners of his mouth.

But I do not think he was dead then; at least the Doctor assured us he was not, and once, I will swear, I saw his eyes roll upward and fix themselves on me with a ghastly stare.

He must have ceased to suffer though, long before that, for he was frozen stiff when we found him. Old blood flows slowly—this man’s had ceased to circulate within a few minutes after we laid him on the k’ang, although we all did what we could for him; even the Doctor, roused to sympathy, exercising all his skill, which was by no means slight.

What a singular procession we must have formed when Philpot opened the door and we filed into the room.

Mr. Mirrikh, whose strength was stupendous, carried the ​girl in his arms and showed no sign of fatigue, while Maurice and I were staggering with the father between us, almost winded, hardly able to get him along.

I could write pages about it all, but where would be the use? Enough has been written already to answer all practical purposes; matters of graver import await, and I must hasten on.

We buried the father, but we saved the daughter. Saved her for what?

Merciful God! I cannot think of it without a shudder. But I anticipate and must return.

She suffered much, poor child. Her frozen limbs and hands were but the lightest of it. Her grief for her father was pitiful to see.

Did she recall us?

She did, and from the first. Some time elapsed before we could question her; there was the weeping to be over with, and hunger had to be satisfied, of course. We got to it at last.

Her’s was a strange story. It ran thus:

Walla Benjow was the daughter of a tribe which inhabits the southern slope of the Kuen-lun mountains, a region far to the north of where we were, into which no European has ever set foot. As different from the Thibetans as they are from the Tartars who surround them, these people have dwelt in their mountain homes from time immemorial—even their name, which I am not going to give, is unknown to the civilized world.

At an early age this girl had been stolen from her parents and carried south, ultimately reaching Mandalay, where by a singular combination of circumstances she had fallen into the hands of an American merchant, a Mr. Julius Archer, whom I have since learned was a Philadelphian, long established in business at Mandalay.

You see I took particular pains to investigate this matter afterward and had the satisfaction of proving the entire truth of Walla’s claim, which was that she had lived ten years with the Archers; at the first as nurse to their children, later as companion. Fortunately or otherwise, Madam Archer conceived a violent fancy for her, and went to considerable trouble to educate the girl, and I must admit that she succeeded admirably, for Walla could not only read and write English, but had been instructed in other branches, ​and—but enough. I cannot dwell on this matter in detail. Sufficient to add that Mrs. Archer died, and Walla, at the age of eighteen, found herself adrift. What might have been her fate God alone knows, had she not one day run against her father in the bazaar!

To the girl it seemed amazing and it was so in very truth, for the distance between Mandalay and the Kuen-lun country is over a thousand miles. Yet this was a small part of the journey the old man had undertaken, travelling always on foot and alone. For years he had been a wanderer and for what? Simply that he might find his daughter, the child of his old age, and take her back with him to the mountain home where her mother lay in an untimely grave; with even that better than living mad, as she had lived from the hour her daughter disappeared.

This was all, except that Walla’s heart was tender and her joy at seeing her father great.

Together they started on the long journey back to the Kuen-lun, the old man still in his character of an itinerant trader, Walla as his companion. For safety she resumed the native dress—or rather undress, and swore by her father’s gods, whom I fancy she had never wholly forgotten, not to speak to any man by the way but to pass as a mute, for such in Siam and Cambodia are treated with peculiar respect.

The incident of our meeting had been brought about by an injudicious display by the old man of a handful of gold—his all.

Somehow the rough wood cutters gained the idea that he had more concealed and undertook to beat the poor girl until he should give it up. Luckily we saved her then and, as she told me afterward, she would have spoken but for fear that her father might be detained—the one thing they dreaded most.

After that they toiled on, moving steadily northward, braving a thousand perils before they reached Thibet. Furthermore we learned that the reason we had not encountered them on our road was because they had approached the mountains by way of a town to the west of Zhad-uan.

And yet, reader, if you could have seen Walla Benjow as I saw her that night in the guard house, in her Chinese dress with the dirty sheepskin wrapped about her, with her ​nose frozen and her large eyes red and inflamed from excessive weeping, you would have wondered at it.

At what?

Well, here goes—I may as well make a clean breast of it. Remember I had seen her before and almost in pura naturalibus. I was in love with the “China girl” as the Doctor liked to call her—that was all.

Walla! Walla! Ah! how much power the mere mention of your name had to move me then! But one word in self-justification and then on to other matters. Even the Rev. Philpot admitted that never in all his wanderings had he seen beauty equal to Walla Benjow’s, and that is saying a great deal.

As for the character of the poor child I need only say here that she was all affection and most gentle in her manners. Still I never dreamed of the intensity of passion of which she was capable, and I am sure Maurice didn’t; furthermore—but I have said too much already. Let what remains develope itself.

Ten o’clock that morning saw us on the road again. Walla accompanied us, of course, for we had promised to do what we could to send her on to her relatives in the Kuen-lun country.

I remember how I fought against my feelings all that day. How amazed I was at myself for even permitting them to arise within me; I who had married and suffered; I who had sworn that no woman’s face should ever again cause me a minute’s thought. Do not be amazed when I confess the nature of those disturbing sentiments for the Doctor has already hinted at it.

Jealousy! Just think of it. I was jealous of Maurice.

“Ha! ha!” sneered Philpot, as he caught me looking toward them on one occasion when they were riding double on Maurice’s mule. “Ha! ha! You’re a fine philosopher, you are! Didn’t you tell me you’d had enough of the women? Can’t you see that those big eyes ain’t turning your way? Be as I am, man! I wouldn’t waste a moment’s thought on the prettiest piece of femininity that ever stepped.”

I turned on him then and administered a scathing rebuke. Heavens! I wished most devoutly I could echo his sentiments before we saw the great gate that admitted us to the lamasery of Psam-dagong.

It was just at sundown. The thermometer must have ​been far below zero. We had enjoyed snow, rain, almost spring-like warmth and piercing cold all in the space of a few short days.

For hours we had seen the lonely group of buildings standing before us on the foothills of a mountain chain whose height far exceeded the range we had just crossed.

Nowhere else, not even in the Far West have I seen distances so deceptive. In that clear atmosphere twenty miles is nothing to the eye. Take it all in all we accomplished the journey with surprising ease as I came to know later; nevertheless our sufferings were intense.

Picture to yourself two broad ravines, one filled with large trees, the other horrible in its desolation, between which lay a narrow tongue of sloping land extending back toward the snow-clad peaks, which towered above us to stupendous heights.

It was on this projection that the lamasery of Psam-dagong stood, a cluster of square, white dwellings, flat roofed, with one pretty tower a little off the centre, rising above them, gilded and glittering with a thousand colors in the setting sun.

Once a famous shrine, the lamasery of Psam-dagong, about a century ago, became practically deserted, the Tale Lama at Lh’asa having so ordered it. Why this was I propose to explain in the chapters which follow, and need only add here that when I was at Psam-dagong it was little better than a mass of ruins, presided over by one old lama, of whom more anon.

But I am rambling on about these matters which, though of the highest interest to us at the time, are really quite immaterial in comparison with what follows. Let me break the spell by recording the end of our long journey at once.

Our ascent from the plains below was discovered by those in the lamasery, and upon reaching the gates we found ourselves challenged by a young lama of the yellow order, who bowed low before us.

“Peace be unto you, my lords lamas!” he said, in that subdued tone which one sometimes observes among Catholic devotees, “may your days be days of happiness and your nights be nights of peaceful sleep. What is your business at the holy house of Psam-dagong?”

I do not know what answer Mr. Mirrikh made him, for he spoke in Hindustanee, and Ah Schow, who translated the ​lama’s greeting knowing nothing of that tongue, remained silent.

Not that it matters. What is more to the point his answer was evidently acceptable, for the young lama threw the gates open and we rode into a wide enclosure.

At last we were at Psam-dagong.

Morning! Morning among the mountains! The rising sun gilds the snow-clad peaks of the lofty Himalayas, they throw back its rays like so many huge reflectors, the plain below us glitters as though strewn with gems.

Standing in the embrasure of one of the tower windows of that ancient shrine of Buddha, I contemplated the scene in silent reverence. As the world’s natural Creator rose to view, I seemed seized with some measure of my friend Mirrikh’s enthusiasm, filled with the thought that it was but a reflection of the spiritual Creator of heaven and earth, whose existence in a less enthusiastic moment I would have denied. Instinctively I removed my hat and bowed my head before it, a mocking laugh echoing through the tower as I did so. The Doctor had caught me in the very act.

“Good! Very good, my bold agnostic!” he exclaimed in his most sarcastic tones. “So we have turned sun-worshiper, have we? What is there in the atmosphere of this strange land that transforms sensible fellows like my friend Wylde into soft-pated fools?”

I reddened, and only with difficulty restrained the lie which sprang to my lips. Something seemed to prevent me from denying the act, as I would have done.

“Pshaw! It was only a passing fancy, Doctor. I was thinking of sun-worshippers, I own, and I have the habit sometimes of acting out my thoughts.”

“Flimsy, ” he retorted. “Wylde, your excuse is gauzy in the extreme, it won’t wash! You are tarred with the same ​stick as our friend De Veber. The next I shall hear you will be in the clutches of that precious humbug, Mirrikh, and fancy yourself on the road to Mars.”

“By the way, have you seen Maurice this morning?” I asked anxiously, and not without good reason, for since we rose from the frugal meal spread by the young lama who had received us, I had seen nothing of Maurice. Mr. Mirrikh had taken him by the arm and departed immediately after our arrival.

There had been trouble about Walla, also.

The rule of the lamasery admitted no females. At Mr. Mirrikh’s earnest solicitation it had been disregarded, but poor Walla was conveyed away to some remote part of the great enclosure, and I had spent a sleepless night in consequence of it all, the Doctor and I occupying a small room together, lying in our blankets upon the hard stone floor, for even here I saw no sign of beds.

“No, I have not seen Maurice,” replied the Doctor, “and upon my word I begin seriously to wonder if we shall ever see him again.”

“For God’s sake what have you learned?” I exclaimed, grasping his arm.

“Nothing, nothing!” he replied hastily, and then speaking quite seriously for once, he continued:

“The fact is, Wylde, I like this business less than ever, and for the first time begin to feel serious alarm as to what may be our fate. Of course, so far as I am concerned, I have no one but myself to blame. I have traveled everywhere; Thibet is an unknown land and I was anxious to see it. Moreover, I confess to you I had some curiosity to follow up our man of mystery and see the end of his preposterous claims; yet, now that I am here, I tremble for our safety. We are in a country governed by a religious hierarchy of the most tyrannical description. Intelligent as these lamas are in some things, they are still but half savages. Let us suppose, for argument’s sake, that Mirrikh really possesses some occult knowledge of which the world is ignorant. Are we to witness the display of this knowledge and afterward be permitted to leave this place alive?”

“God knows!”

“Nobody knows but the powers which control this lamasery. Don’t let the glamor of our strange journey throw ​you back into the trammels of superstition. Speak as you believe, man, and say nobody knows.”

“But what are we to do?”

“God knows—plague on it! You see how catching it is. No matter though, your question brings me back to my object in seeking you. Come, Wylde, we are sent for, and, as our only safety lies in appearing to chime in with these people, we must respond at once.”

“Who has sent for us?”

“I cannot say. That young lama—the only one we have seen so far—came to me directly you got up from breakfast, before Ah Schow had cleared away, and told me to call you at once. I’ve had a great hunt for you, old fellow, until at last I thought of your predilection for towers and sunrises, and here I am.”

“And you saw no one on your way through the courtyard?”

“Not a soul. How is it with you?”

“Just the same. The place seems utterly deserted.”

“That’s what Ah Schow says. He slept in the stable with the mules, but, as you say, has not seen a soul.”

It was certainly very mysterious. A vague sense of uneasiness oppressed me as I descended from the tower, and, in company with the Doctor, crossed the open courtyard with its flanking of low, white buildings, toward the door from which I had emerged.

But let me pause a moment in description before I proceed.

The lamasery of Psam-dagong, as my memory serves me, must have covered a space a thousand feet on the line of the slope by perhaps five hundred feet across.

Somewhere near the centre of this enclosure was the temple, which was but a small affair built of a greyish stone, with the tower into which I had penetrated unmolested separated from it; all around the sides, backed up against the high wall which surrounded the place, were low-roofed buildings of what I, as an American, should call adobe, dried mud whitewashed, really quite Mexican in their appearance; each had its door and single window made up of innumerable little panes of glass of fantastic shapes. Scattered through the enclosure were a few trees of enormous proportions and immense age evidently, but their species was quite unknown to me.

​As we crossed this court the Doctor remarked on the general deserted aspect, and called my attention to the fact that I had previously noticed, namely, that up against the doors of almost all these detached buildings the snow lay banked.

It was quite obvious that Psam-dagong was no densely populated lamasery such as the good Abbe Huc, the only explorer who has given us a substantial record of his Thibetan experiences, tells about.

Afterward I came to know that ten souls were all those walls encompassed, but on that morning when the young lama conducted the Doctor and myself back across the court and into the temple, all was mystery, and I felt that the unknown lay before us. Since then, though years have passed, I can truthfully say that the happenings in the lamasery of Psam-dagong are enveloped in a veil of mystery still. But to return.

Through the low stone door way, above and about which wound a trailing dragon, carved in bold relief; through a dark and narrow passage, paved and musty smelling; through another door, and then into a large apartment, dimly lighted and shadowy, the “joss house,” the Doctor called it, for there was a huge gilded Buddha rising at the back with tall candles burning before the altar, which was laden with offerings of the faithful, gifts of the wild tribes of the adjacent mountains who, at certain seasons, seek the lamasery to prostrate themselves before this image, the representative of their God.

Now I do not know what I expected to find upon entering this place and still less am I able to record the Doctor’s thoughts, What we found was Maurice De Veber and the mysterious Mr. Mirrikh awaiting us. I beheld my friend with a sense of indescribable relief.

They were standing upon the tesselated pavement before the image talking in low tones together, while beside them, upon his knees, with his head bent until it touched the pavement, crouched a man, wearing the yellow dress of the order which controlled this shrine, a man of great age evidently, for his features were as dried and wrinkled as a withered apple, and the ring of hair which surrounded his tonsure, snowy white.

This is what I saw upon the occasion of my first visit to the temple.

​And while speaking of the temple I want to say that I never met with the slightest opposition on the part of the lamas to my penetrating any part of the shrine. If there exists any holy of holies at Psam-dagong I never discovered it. Though firmly set in their own belief, I invariably found the lamas most charitable toward the belief of others. They knew perfectly well what and who I was—there was never any secret made about it. I know that as a race the Thibetans have no wish to be exclusive; it is their Chinese masters who have built up and maintain the wall of mystery which surrounds this strange people—that the day is not far distant when it will be broken down I believe as firmly as I do that the breaking will be of vast benefit to Thibet.

No sooner had we crossed the threshold than Maurice rushed toward me with open arms.

“George! My dear fellow! How contemptibly shabby you must think me for deserting you!” he exclaimed, “and I owe you an apology too, Doctor. The fact is, I——”

He paused suddenly, for Mr. Mirrikh’s eye was upon him. I shuddered as I saw its steady gaze transform Maurice, for the moment at least, into a being as cold and emotionless as himself.

“Gentlemen, good morning,” said the adept, extending his hand to each of us in turn. “Mr. De Veber, I must inform your friends of the object of this meeting. If we are to start for Mars at midnight there is no time to waste.”

Why did I bear it thus tamely? Why did I not launch forth my real sentiments against that man? Why had I ever remained silent? Why was the Doctor as dumb as myself?

God knows! All that I can say is that it was ever so from the first moment his will took that of Maurice De Veber under subjection.

He seemed to know when we were about to speak, to read our thoughts and in a measure control them. While we were with him these things did not strike me as they strike me now. I look back in wonder and ask myself the why and the wherefore, but no answer comes.

Now he checked Maurice in his intended communication, and equally we were checked in asking him further for it.

Maurice drew his arm through mine and pressed it affectionately. As for Philpot, he stood there looking absolutely stupid.

Such was the power of this man Mirrikh over minds sane ​at the least. It was not the first time he had exercised it on mine nor was it to be the last.

Just then the old lama before the altar arose and bowing low, speaking words of salutation not intelligible to me, approached the spot where we stood.

Mirrikh took upon himself the ceremony of introduction and I am free to admit that he performed it in an entirely graceful way.

Now we knew that this was the Lama Superior of Psam-dagong, Padma by name. According to Mr. Mirrikh his years numbered more than a hundred, nor do I doubt it; certainly he bore all the appearance of a man of unusual age.

“Children, I greet you. Welcome to Psam-dagong!” he said in Hindustanee, and for the first time I heard that gentle voice which later I grew to love so well.

There was something inexpressibly sweet in the old man’s very presence. A sphere of love, truth and purity seemed to surround him, yet to our eyes he looked simply a very old and ugly specimen of a Chinaman.

I noticed, however, that Philpot was not affected by him as I was; while to me his presence was pleasing, the Doctor drew away his hand in ill-concealed disgust.

Our adept saw it also and began in English immediately.

“Listen Mr. Wylde, and you too, Doctor;” he said, “the time has now come when we must have a definite understanding. We are at what you may justly consider the most remote corner of the earth. We are here for a distinct purpose. I need not tell you what that purpose is.”

“We are here because we are fools——” the Doctor began, when he was suddenly checked by that same mysterious influence which Mr. Mirrikh seemed to possess the power to exert by the mere raising of his hand.

“Argument being quite useless, I have determined to put a stop to it,” he said; “that I have power to do so you are probably both aware by this time. Wylde you shall do the talking in this matter. Doctor, I beg your pardon, but do you see that fine piece of carving above the Buddha?”

Involuntarily the Doctor raised his eyes in the direction indicated, the adept with a movement of the hands quick as thought itself, making a pass before his face.

After that the Doctor’s eyes were never lowered, never wavered a hair’s breadth until we were ready to leave the ​shrine, and the will of our strange conductor removed the hypnotic spell.

“I am sorry, Mr. Wylde, to have to resort to such means,” he said, “but time is precious, and you know what the Doctor is. I don’t even dare to allow you full freedom of mental action. I presume you perceive that your will is to a certain extent in subjection to influences over which you have no control.”

“I do,” I answered simply, wondering at the supreme quietude which seemed to have seized my soul.

“You attribute it to the action of my will, doubtless?”

“I do.”

“You are mistaken. Let me impart a truth. I am exercising no control over you whatever, nor am I over your friend Maurice, as you believe.”

“If not you, who then?”

“Intelligences in whose existence you do not believe; the immortal souls of men once clothed with a material body like your own.”

I found myself incapable of reply.

Evidently he expected none, for he immediately continued:

“Have no fear. Nothing shall be done to injure you. As for De Veber, he consented to this step of his own free will. I am quite powerless to prevent him from carrying it out; indeed I have even urged him to withdraw.”

“And I have refused, George, utterly refused;” spoke Maurice. “I would not back out under any circumstances; I am going to Mars.”

“You hear,” said the adept, “and this is what our chance meeting at Panompin has done for our friend. Pity the spiritual side of your nature is a blank page, Mr. Wylde; were it otherwise I could tell you so much that would interest you.”

“George!” burst out Maurice, with something like his old enthusiasm; “it would amaze you. I am wild with anxiety to see this experiment tried. I——”

Again he suddenly paused and was dumb, and yet Mirrikh never looked at him, but I thought I saw old Padma make a slight pass in his direction. Possibly this was imagination, for Padma could not have understood his words.”

“You see,” said the adept, “they will not let him speak.”

“Who do you mean by they?”

​“The pitries—spirits as you call them. I employ the Hindu term.”

“I call them nothing, for I deny their existence.”

“Your denial of the world of causes falls flat with one whose vision is so constituted that he sees that world and its inhabitants all around you, as plainly as you see me.”

“Meaning yourself?”

“Meaning myself, of course.”

“I deny it utterly. I am willing to admit your powers as an adept; to allow that you understand Nature’s laws as I do not, but further than that I will not go.”

He smiled pityingly; a smile which at another time would have driven me furious but had no power to disturb me now.

“No, no; it is useless,” he said. “Your Western minds cannot grasp it. A few to some slight extent are in the effort, and what is the result? Your scientists berate them furiously and dub them lunatics. Yet the time is at hand—close at hand.”

“The time for what?”

“The time, sir, when men shall know that there is a living God who through His spirit messengers rules the existences of His creations. Shallow thinkers, blinded by the vaporings of their own conceit, alone can teach a world without a Creator; a universe without an ever-existing primal cause. But come, enough has been said. What interests you is how I came from the planet Mars, or rather how I propose to return to it. Follow me now and you shall be told.”

The spell was broken, I rubbed my eyes like a man awakened from a dream.

He recalled the Doctor by a slight movement of the hand, and—but I cannot dwell upon this. Philpot assured me afterward that to him those moments were moments of utter oblivion, and that covers the ground.

“Lead the way, good Padma,” said Mr. Mirrikh in Hindustanee.

The lama smiled in his gentle way; lighting a bronze lamp of antique pattern, he led us by a trap door behind the gilded Buddha, down a flight of stone steps to a large, square apartment under ground, a room which occupied the entire space of the temple walled up on all sides, save one, with stone.

“This,” said the adept as we entered, “is the gate through which we depart for Mars.”

​We did not discuss it, the Doctor and I—we could not.

For the next half hour we were content to let Mr. Mirrikh do the talking, translating for the lama most of the time, for old Padma was acting as master of ceremonies. I believe now that the adept rendered his words truly, although at the time I could scarcely credit it.

It was a wonderful place, that underground chamber, and yet at first glance there was nothing to be seen except a huge, oblong block of marble as white as the snow above, occupying a central position on the stone floor.

It was seven feet long and three feet four inches wide, in one side there was set a little door of solid gold; but for this it was an unbroken block.

I have alluded to the three blank walls and hinted that the fourth was different. It was to this fourth wall that Padma directed our attention first.

This was divided into square spaces and reminded me much of the public vaults in the cemeteries at New Orleans. Filling each space was a section of hard, polished wood—ligum-vitae, I think, at all events it was intensely black and very heavy—into which was fixed a bronze handle with a gilded Thibetan character above. There were eighty of these sections altogether, and space left for fully twice as many more. Padma, laying his withered hand upon one of the gilded characters, proceeded to explain.

“These, my children, are the resting places of the bodies of those souls who seek to visit us from the planets in our solar system. In former years when this lamasery was first consecrated for that holy purpose, we scarcely had three bodies in at a time, but now there are only two out. Ah, they care not for this world, these planetary spirits. It is inferior to all others of our system, so what wonder? Behold!”

He grasped one of the handles and pulled, seeming to exert more strength than I believed him capable of. Slowly an oblong box moved forward, working on stone rollers. One glance sent me back with a shudder, for there, reposing in the box, was a human body wrapped in cloth, swathed about like an Egyptian mummy. Only the head was visible, and what startled me most was the face, which, though that of a middle-aged man, and by no means unhandsome, was of a color decidedly greenish, or perhaps I had better say greenish-yellow. If I had been told that it was the face ​of a man who died of jaundice, I would have found it easier to believe than Padma’s next words.

“This, my children, is the body used by the dwellers on the planet Mercury, the character you see here imprinted indicates that fact; and here in this compartment we have one from the planet next nearest to the sun.”

“Thought Mercury was nearest the sun,” groaned the Doctor helplessly.

Padma pulled the next handle above, returning the unfortunate Mercurian to his place.

I looked again. Maurice, who still held my arm, displayed the most intense eagerness as the coffin came out.

“I saw all this last night, George,” he whispered. “Ain’t it wonderful? What is there that man cannot accomplish after this?”

“What indeed?” I thought. “If man can wipe out the vast distances of interplanetary space, who is to say that his ambition shall pause even there? That it shall not aspire to a similar extinction of the stupendous breaks between our solar system and its neighbors. Clearly nothing! The thought, however, was paralysing. Was I yielding to the influences about me and becoming a believer in the claims of my friend Mirrikh? Not yet!

But to the second coffin—I might almost say sarcophagus, for it was as heavy as stone.

The adept had the lamp now, and he held it in such a manner that its light fell full upon the still, cold face before us. The heavily bearded features were of a deep bronze tint, verging toward that reddish patination which one sometimes finds on the coins of ancient Greece and Rome. The nose was aquiline and very prominent, the mouth large and sensual, while the forehead was contracted in a curious manner, giving the head a pointed appearance, strongly reminding one of the heads on the mysterious monuments in the ruined palace at Palenque.

“Of this race we have admitted none for many years,” said the old lama quietly. “They are a fierce and vicious people. The last that occupied this body wrought so much evil that our gracious lord, the Tale Lama, sent imperative orders that they should in future be prohibited from taking on the earthly form.

He pushed the coffin back into place and moved to the next handle beyond.

​Now we were shown the body of a young man whose face was white and of surprising beauty.

“Saturn is the meaning of that character, friend Wylde,” said the adept, pointing to the gilded criss-cross of lines on this coffin.

“And each contains the body of a man from a different planet in our solar system?”

“Yes, and no. Each contains a body inhabited at some time by a human soul whose dwelling place was on a different planet. These bodies, however, are entirely of this earth.”

“But how are they preserved?”

“You shall soon know. Let us finish our inspection first.”

“I say, look here!” broke in the Doctor, “how many planets do you make? There are coffins enough here to do the business ten times over.”

“You forget the asteroids,” said the adept. “Besides, there is your own and other moons.”

“All inhabited?”

“All inhabited or destined for inhabitants. God creates nothing in vain.”

“This is madness! Driveling idiocy!” Philpot murmured.

No attention was paid to him, however. Our singular inspection went straight on.

Coffin after coffin was opened.

We were shown men from Venus, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, the asteroids, many moons, and other planets still further distant from the sun than the last named, for which our astronomers will ever search in vain.

This is according to Mr. Mirrikh, of course. For my part I neither assent or deny. I simply record what happened.

All were in human form. All were perfect men, and though all differed in appearance, the differences were no greater than those of men on this earth.

One, said to be of our moon, was dwarfish with an enormous head and a great deal of black, shaggy hair. Another, in a box labeled Venus, was just the reverse, being of huge proportions with a face as black as a Jamaica negro, and cruel, repulsive features; but there were two from this planet, the other being a man of ordinary appearance and white.

One thing I observed, namely, that the further removed from the sun the planet, the more refined and intellectual ​appeared to be the face. I spoke of this to Mr. Mirrikh and his answer confirmed my observations.

“It is so,” he said; such is the rule. The sun is the centre of all planetary life, but it is at the circumference of every solar system that the highest intellectual development is found.”

But there was one handle which the old lama had thus far left untouched. Odd, too, that not until now did I think of it. We had been shown no man from Mars.

I moved forward and touched it.

“And this—why was this one omitted?” I asked.

The adept smiled and said something to the lama in Hindustanee.

Approaching my side the old man pulled the coffin forward. It came easily and no wonder, for it was empty.

“My place, gentlemen,” said Mr. Mirrikh, calmly; “thank God this body will soon be in it. This is for Mars!”

But there was but one other empty. None of the planets, however, were unrepresented. The vacant coffin bore characters which the adept claimed indicated one of the asteriods, he could not speak its English name.

“And is the body which should fill it now animated by a soul and walking about this earth?” I inquired.

He answered that it was so.

Impossible, indeed, will it be for those who may read this part of my narrative to comprehend the reluctance with which it has been penned.

Believe it no one will, of course; but believe me when I say that had it been possible to have left it unwritten and still rendered intelligible that which is to follow, it would never have been told.

It was over. We stood beside the altar; my friend Mirrikh had begun to speak.

“Mr. Wylde, after what you have seen you have an undoubted right to the explanation which yours or any other intelligent mind will naturally demand. Here are your questions—I know them before they are uttered. The agent which is capable of producing this separation of the spiritual and the material, of the soul and the body; what is it? Is not that the first?”

“It is,” I replied. “You have stated it correctly.”

“You have seen those bodies—they are not phantasies—they are facts?”

​“Either facts or I am hopelessly mad.”

“You are the same level headed American you were when I astonished you at Panompin, my friend. Now what you most wish to know is why those bodies do not follow the law of nature and decay?”

“You have said it.”

“And know you shall. Listen. You, in that truly liberal spirit which I have from the first admired; have been willing to admit the existence of natural forces of which your western science may be ignorant.”

“I have never denied the possibility of such forces.”

“No; more liberal than the so-called learned of your race you never have. Mr. Wylde you now stand face to face with the workings of just such a force. It is an invisible, imponderable gas; as elementary as oxygen, but utterly unknown outside of adept lore. This gas is generated under certain natural conditions within the earth itself, and is of such rare occurrence on this particular planet that the knowledge of its existence has hitherto been confined to the few. In fact it occurs in two places only, so far as is known, the cavern within which we are now standing being one.

This aroused the Doctor whose dazed condition had scarcely changed.

“You are speaking of the unknown and deadly gas mentioned by Huc, as occurring in the valley of Bourhan-bota,” he exclaimed suddenly.

“It is the same,” replied the adept. “That is the other place referred to; doubtless it is but another outlet for the same deposit—at least it is so believed. The good Abbe heard of it, but by the common people its peculiar properties are quite unknown. Whoever ventures near that valley dies to all appearance. In truth the unfortunate is in the same condition as those bodies we have just seen.”

“Alive?” I cried. “They cannot be alive?”

“They are not alive nor are they dead. They are the bodies of lamas who have inhaled the gas during the centuries the lamasery has been consecrated to this lofty purpose. The souls which left them to seek other planets have long since passed beyond the realm of matter into the realm of spirit—they will never return. Since then most of these bodies have many times been animated by other souls. One may be thus animated at any moment and spend years on ​this earth, subject to all natural laws, you understand; even the inevitable law of death.”

“Should such a thing happen how would the soul make its presence in the body known?”

“Padma would know.”

“But how?”

“How did I know the girl was perishing in the snow that night? Mr. Wylde I think I have answered all your questions now.”

“But your answers only call up a thousand more,” I exclaimed. “Why have these bodies not decayed? That still remains untold.”

“Once this gas is inhaled the body never decays until it is buried in the earth—sometimes when certain chemical properties are lacking in the soil, not even then.”

“Its name?”

“In Hindustanee, Zambri.”

“Meaning nothing to me.”

“Of course not. How can it?”

“And once this gas is inhaled, the spirit can leave the body?”

“It must leave it in obedience to a natural law as inexorable as that which brings a stone thrown upward back again to the ground. The spirit then seeks the point upon which its mind was last fixed, but it can return at will after a few hours have passed, for in that time the fumes of the gas lose their full effect; or, on the other hand, it can remain absent for years and still return. All rests with the will. The body will not decay unless the gas is either recombined or expelled. Does this open your eyes?”

“It opens a train of thought simply incomprehensible. But suppose the spirit wills to go to Mars, for instance, what——”

“What will it do for a body there?”

“You anticipate my question.”

“I anticipate because you are treading on ground which I cannot permit you to enter. It is sufficient for you to know that you earth dwellers alone of all mankind are ignorant on this subject. On no planet in our solar system to which a spirit thus freed might project itself, are such transmigrations not of common occurrence. The spirit is guided by God’s loving forethought, incarnated or disincarnated. A receptacle will be provided for it; once at its destination ​it will walk that earth in a body precisely similar to the one it left behind—made so, in fact, by its own will.”

“And it would be otherwise were it to project itself to a distant point on this earth?”

“Unfortunately, yes. The same conditions do not here obtain.”

“And does this explain the different appearances of these bodies? None of them resemble Thibetans.”

“You have hit it. Originally all were Thibetans. They have been transfigured by the planetary spirits who in turn have occupied them. This act causes pain and takes time; therefore the bodies are kept separate ready for use of spirits from each inhabited earth or moon. I took this body just as I found when I came from Mars. You begin to understand?”

“My amazement only increases. Do not ask me to believe.”

“It would be useless to expect it.”

“One question more.”

“Ask it.”

“Why is all this kept a secret? Why is this place practically abandoned? Why is not all the world made to share

in this alleged wonderful knowledge? Why——”

“Stop—stop! Don’t multiply your questions so! Know, my friend, that he who pronounced a little knowledge a dangerous thing, was the very king of kings among philosophers. The adepts learned the truth of this maxim by sad experience. The secret was put to evil uses, and for excellent reasons Psam-dagong stands to-day the deserted shrine it is.”

“And this is your great secret!” I cried. “This is the fate toward which you have been gradually drawing that innocent boy by your devilish arts! Could I admit the existence of spirits at all, I——”

“Stop, George! For God’s sake stop!” interposed Maurice. “It is all my own doing, not his.”

“You are mad, Maurice!”

“No, no! I have weighed all the consequences. I am going, George; you will wait for me and I shall return!”

“But these are the ravings of a lunatic! Be sensible, Maurice! Be yourself. These bodies are nothing but the embalmed remains of poor fools, who, like ourselves, have been inveigled into this place for some hellish purpose ​beyond our comprehension. Delusion! delusion! What else can it be but delusion? Granted a soul, is it yet in the nature of things that such a journey could be accomplished. God help me! I shall hear next that we can migrate to other planetary systems—that we can fly to the end of the universe——”

“Which,” interrupted the adept with that same immeasurable calmness, “has, like the God who made it, neither beginning nor end!”

“I am the alpha and the omega!” muttered the Doctor, “the beginning and the end!”

He was staring at us helplessly, picking a shred of cloth into little pieces. As he pronounced these words he began humming one of those grand old Gregorian chants which, no doubt, he had listened to in his own pulpit a thousand times.

What ailed the man?

I shuddered as I looked at him. He was worse even than before,

The adept seemed to read my thoughts.

“Don’t be alarmed. It is nothing,” he said. “It is necessary to keep his tongue still—that is all.”

“Hypnotized? ”

“If you like the term. The truth is he is controlled by a spirit, at my request.”

“God help us all!” I murmured. “I wish some spirit at my request would pick us up bodily and throw us in the middle of the Sahara, rather than we should stay one instant longer under your cursed influence, my heathen friend!”

But it was not to be that I could arouse his anger.

As toward myself, truth compels me to say that the man never appeared different than the calm philosopher of the Nagkon Wat, nor did he outwardly toward Maurice. And, although God alone can read in their entirety the intentions of any man; although I may wrong the adept most grievously, I believed then, and I believe it still, that his was the will which drove Maurice forward to his fate.

“Granted for argument’s sake that it was all true,” said the Doctor; “admitted that the stupendous claims of this man rest on a solid foundation; that the ravings of Swedenborg are cold facts; that the re-incarnation theories of Reynaud and Kardec have a leg to stand on; that spirits exist, invisible and intangible, bobbing about like so many shuttle cocks in the insuperable abysses of interplanetary space; admitting it all, even at the expense of making a pair of blooming idiots of ourselves, what are we going to do about it, George Wylde? That’s what I want to know.”

And in very truth the Doctor had propounded a weightier question than any of the astounding propositions of my man Mirrikh.

What were we going to do about it, sure enough?

“We can’t pick Maurice up bodily and run away with him, don’t you know,” continued the Doctor. “If the thing were possible why I’d be the first to do it, but the rub is, Maurice is a man and he won’t go.”

“And a very positive one, let me tell you.”

“Aye! Don’t I know it? By the living Cæsar! I pity him. I never realized the power of this hypnotism business as I do now.”

“You would, if you could have seen yourself, Doctor—you acted like a man clean gone with paresis.”

“Thank God I remember nothing at all about that part of it.”

“But you saw the bodies—you heard our talk.”

“In a half dazed way, yes. It is all a blur in my mind, Wylde; like a dream a fellow wants to remember and can’t, don’t you know? Heavens and earth! If we could only get away from this infernal place. What do you say to you and me——”

“Don’t you suggest leaving Maurice!” I interrupted, frowning darkly. “If you have any plan to propose which will rescue that poor boy from Mirrikh’s clutches, why out with it; otherwise——”

​I paused abruptly, for a bell had sounded, a deep toned gong of enormous size which rested behind the gilded Buddha in the temple above us. Its clang sent a thrill of horror to my heart.

Instantly five yellow forms sprang to their feet and ranged themselves about the white altar, for we were again in that subterranean mausoleum beneath the shrine.

It was far on toward midnight; the day following our arrival at the lamasery was closing. Without, the cold was intense and the stars shining in that rarified atmosphere with a brilliancy of which few who read these lines can form the least idea.

We had seen nothing of Maurice since we left the vault hours before, nor of Mr. Mirrikh, nor of the girl Walla; even old Padma had vanished, and the only person who we could discover was the young lama, Ni-fan-lu. We had pushed through the deserted houses in the court, prowled about the temple, and explored the tower. Locked doors we found, and these probably concealed the objects of our search, but we knocked here and there—pounded on them—waiting in vain for a reply.

You see we had come back into the temple shortly after the termination of the conversation narrated in the previous chapter.

The Doctor was himself again as soon as we had passed the image, where Ni-fan-lu awaited us.

“Be brave my friends! ” said the adept. “Have patience to endure to the end. Think of what a glorious mission will then be yours, to father these stupendous and hitherto unknown truths!”

“Farewell, George!” added Maurice, wringing my hand. “Doctor, all good go with you! Once again before I take the final leap we shall certainly meet.”

I would have detained him, but I could not.

Let me show myself in all my weakness, I wept, I pleaded with him; by all the ties he held dear, I begged him to pause before it was too late.

Useless—quite useless!

“Don’t be absurd, old fellow! What are we here for?” was his only reply.

It was not like him. Though he never displayed the affection for me that I had foolishly shown toward him, he had ever been considerate of my feelings.

​But as he turned away and walked arm in arm with the adept through the dim interior of the shrine, amid armored gods and green and red dragons, I felt a strange calmness creep over me, and I simply stood there with the Doctor on one side and Ni-fan-lu on the other, watching them as they went out of sight.

Night came on.

Still it was the Doctor and I, with occasionally Ah Schow and always Ni-fan-lu, whose stupidity was as vast when he did not want to talk as was his shrewdness when he did. Poor Ah Schow, who really tried to do his best to draw some information out of him, particularly on the subject of Walla had given up long ago in despair.

And so hour succeeded hour, until Ni-fan-lu, returning after a brief absence a little later than eleven o’clock, announced that we were sent for and were to go to the temple at once, which proved to mean that horrible mausoleum beneath it, for it was thither he conducted us and here we were.

Not a little to our surprise we found five yellow lamas seated upon the floor cross-legged as we entered.

They bowed to us respectfully, bobbing their shaven heads like so many porcelain mandarins, but they did not speak. Ni-fan-lu made a sixth and stationed himself at the foot of the stone staircase. On the other side of the long room, lying in a dark corner, was what I then took to be a bundle of sheepskins thrown down carelessly; in fact it was not easy to get a clear view of anything, for the only light was that shed by the small bronze lamp resting on the altar, where I had seen old Padma place it after he closed the last of the coffin drawers, whose gilded hieroglyphics were now staring us out of countenance. Wondering what all this portended, the Doctor and I just resolved ourselves into a ways and means committee and stood there talking together in low tones, when all at once, clang! went the great gong in the temple above and I felt instinctively that the critical moment was at hand.

“Gad, George! It’s too late! We can do nothing!” exclaimed the Doctor. “The long and short of it is they’re going to sacrifice that poor wretch. It’s all a part of their devilish heathen dogmas—I know!”

Alas for the narrow bigotry of our vaunted age of light! As if no poor wretch has ever been offered up as a sacrifice by the priests of Christ!

​I shuddered, but made no answer. I was not my friend’s keeper. Mad or sane, he was a free agent according to his own statement, and I had no word of pleading or protest to offer which had not been already spoken. The die was cast. Maurice must go his own road.

Now as I raised my eyes I saw him descending, and found myself lost in wonder at the calm, determined look which overspread his handsome face.

First came old Padma, bearing in his hand an object which looked like a huge, golden ear-trumpet. Maurice followed, his black cloak trailing on the stones as he descended. Mr. Mirrikh came last, looking precisely as he always did.

As they advanced, the yellow lamas arranged themselves on either side of the altar, three and three, for Ni-fan-lu now joined the others. The Doctor and I alone seemed out of place. Now Maurice saw us at last and breaking away rushed toward me.

“Oh, George! My friend!” he burst out; “it is only you who stands between me and the most supreme happiness at this moment! I feel so sorry for you, George!”

I drew him aside and spoke for his ear alone; nor did any one show the slightest disposition to interfere.

“Is there nothing that I can say to move you, my boy? I whispered, controlling myself to an extent I would not have believed possible a moment before.

“Nothing, old friend, nothing.”

“What has this man told you that you are holding back? What is it that gives you the courage to pursue this mad adventure to its end?”

“I cannot reveal it, George—I have sworn not to. One thing I will say though, and I want you to understand it definitely. I shall be back here inside of a month—he has promised it, and you, George, must promise me to wait.”

“Maurice,” I answered, pressing his hand most affectionately, “I swear to you that so long as your body remains in the condition of the bodies in those boxes, I shall never leave it until I, myself, depart for that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.”

“I knew it, old fellow! I knew it! But for you, George, I could not muster up the courage.”

“Not that I expect, if you persist in your purpose, ever to see your body reanimated,” I added sadly; “but while ​there is a doubt, I am with you. My belief is that unless you instantly exercise all the force of your will to throw off the glamor this man has cast over you, my dear boy, you are hopelessly lost.”

“No, George, no! It cannot be. I am favored as never man was favored before—I am going to Mars and I shall return.”

“Maurice! Maurice! Will nothing arouse you?”

“I don’t want to be aroused.”

“There is just the trouble. You——”

“Stop, George! This is all old ground, there is no profit for either of us in treading it again. Good-bye, old friend. God bless you! Good-bye!”

He tore himself away, though I tried to stop him. The next I knew he was shaking hands with the Doctor and the man Mirrikh had hold of me.

The instant his hand touched mine it was as though I had experienced a powerful electric shock. Through my brain some subtle magnetic current seemed darting—the same sensations shot down my back and into my legs and feet. I would have sprung toward Maurice, but to my horror found myself rooted to the floor with my eyes fixed upon his eyes and my tongue helpless; I could no longer speak.

“Farewell, friend Wylde,” he said, pressing my hand warmly. “Pardon me for rendering you powerless to defeat our plans. I have left you your intelligence, however—you shall see us go!”

I tried to speak—to curse him. Oh God! how hard I tried—how utterly I failed!

“Do not fear!” he added. “I swear to you by God eternal that Maurice De Veber shall return!”

Still I struggled—struggled with all the strength of my will—still I failed.

Now he withdrew his hand and raised it theatrically; mine, released, falling helplessly to my side.

“Write!” he said, a rapt expression overspreading his countenance. “Write and let the world know! Farewell, my friend! Farewell!”

He moved toward the altar before which old Padma now knelt in silent prayer.

My eyes followed him; though helpless physically, my brain was unaltered in its activity.

An immeasurable passivity seemed to have settled over ​me. No longer struggling, I watched with intense interest all that occurred.

As for the Doctor I knew later that he was in precisely the same condition. As I saw him then he stood there like a statue, motionless and silent. Could either of us question the reality of the occult after this?

For the space of a few moments all was silence. Maurice and the adept were kneeling at the altar by the lama’s side, evidently in prayer.

Presently they arose and faced us. The critical moment had come at last.

Now music soft, sweet and low, sounded through the subterranean chamber. It was produced by the six lamas; each held a small, one-stringed instrument, closely resembling the Chinese banjo, and as they struck the strings in concert it seemed to me that never had I heard such harmony—it was divine!

Meanwhile, Padma had taken up the trumpet-shaped implement and having opened the little golden door in the side of the altar, pressed the flaring mouth against it. To my surprise it remained fixed in its position after a moment, as though held by suction. Instinctively I seemed to understand that the little door communicated with the cavern beneath the temple; that this was the means by which they were to inhale the mysterious gas. Once in place the golden tube stood up about as high as a man’s waist, and I saw that the end was plugged. All appeared to be in readiness now, and old Padma drew back, murmuring some unintelligible sentences—his eyes were turned toward the adept—he pointed toward the tube with a wave of his wrinkled hand. Again Mr. Mirrikh spoke.

“Maurice De Veber, think well before you take the final step,” he said in clear, distinct tones. “What your friends refuse to believe, you know to be the truth. No persuasion of mine has urged you to this act. Say the word and I start on my long journey alone.”

There was no sign of wavering in Maurice’s voice as the answer came.

“I am going with you! ” he replied quietly. “Do not let us prolong this painful scene.”

“It is enough,” said the adept. “Friends, once more farewell!”

He stepped forward, bent over the tube, removed the ​plug, and fixing his mouth about the aperture drew three long, deep inhalations, after which he calmly restored the plug and stood aside.

“It is your turn now,” he said. “Have courage! Remember, there is a good God above us all!”

Helpless! Oh pitying Father! Why was I so helpless? How gladly would I have risked my life to rush forward and drag Maurice from the fatal spot!

Nor was I alone in my desire. Unknown to me there was present in that room another whose feelings were as intense as my own.

She came with a rush. She dashed between the lamas, sending Padma reeling back against the altar. With her long, black hair streaming behind her, she prostrated herself at Maurice’s feet.

“Ye gods!” I thought; “it is Walla!” For I now saw that what I had taken for the pile of sheepskins in the corner was none other than the girl whose life we had twice preserved.

“No! No! No! ” she cried, in tones so vehement that in spite of the spell which bound me I trembled. “No! you shall not! You must not! I love you! Oh, God, how I love you! Save him! Save him! Let it be me instead!”

Jealousy—mad jealousy seized me. I thought less of Maurice than of Walla Benjow, then! She go! Never! I struggled with my helplessness, struggled fearfully, and I think I had almost won the victory when I saw that it was too late.

Padma seized her. A few quick passes over that shapely head and the girl had ceased to rave.

Meanwhile Maurice never said anything. I saw and understood the look of amazement which came over his face—he had not even dreamed of such a possibility as this.

“Be good to her, George!” he called. “Good bye again old fellow! Good bye!”

It was done!

Unhesitatingly he removed the plug and inhaled the fatal gas!

Loud twanged the strings, and the voices of the lamas burst forth into a wild chant.

Vanished now was the power I had almost gained. Sight and hearing alone stood by me—I listened and looked—I saw Mr. Mirrikh sinking slowly to the stone floor.

​His eyes were closing, his face had assumed a deathly whiteness, and—oh God! Maurice was going down, too! In an instant both lay prostrate at the altar’s foot.

Once I thought he looked toward me as the lids descended; there was deep affection in the look—there was also supreme confidence that I would keep my word and stand by him to the last.

Again my eyes were for him alone, but I think my brain must have been obscured, for I saw, or thought I saw, that the form of my friend was growing thin and shadowy, just as I had seen in the case of the adept in the alley at Panompin.

Was it this, or was it that a thin, white mist surrounded Maurice? It seemed to be gathering all about him—it was assuming the shape and outlines of a man. Presently it separated itself from the body entirely, rose up and stood above it, looking down.

Now there were two Maurices!

Wonderingly I sought the adept.

It was the same with him, but that I had seen before. He stood above his own body a perfect man.

“George, farewell! I am off for Mars!” spoke the old familiar voice as distinctly as I ever heard it speak; and I saw those shadowy forms rise together, slowly at first, then more rapidly, moving faster and faster, until

Heavens! Was it then but a dream after all?

I was quite myself again and standing close to the altar, upon which, cold and still, lay the body of Maurice De Veber, stretched out at full length.

The light burned low, the music had ceased, the yellow lamas had vanished; I saw only Padma and the Doctor at my side.

And Maurice? I had sworn never to leave that body!

Was Maurice alive or dead?

“Shades of Paracelsus!” cried the Doctor. “If this ain’t the most amazing thing I ever saw?”

The Doctor stood on the opposite side of the altar looking at me. In spite of the vigor of his exclamation, he appeared to be calm and collected. I saw that he had pulled Maurice’s shirt open and was feeling about inside, trying to find the heart.

“Thank God you are yourself again,” I murmured. “It’s all over now, I suppose.”

“You mean with Maurice?”

“Of course! Who else?”

You forget, brother Wylde, that there still exists an individual of the name of Philpot—besides, there is the girl and yourself.”

“Waste no words now, for heaven sake! Only tell me if he is dead.”

“Just what I am trying to find out, my dear fellow. Be patient a moment and we shall see.”

For fully ten minutes he labored, displaying, as he had done in the case of Walla’s father, a method in his work which bore out his claim to some medical skill.

Anxiously absorbed, I watched, unable to turn my thoughts until at length he drew back and boldly pronounced his dictum.

“It’s no use, talking, Wylde; Maurice is dead.”

And the Doctor believed it—nor can I blame him. I often wonder how I had the hardihood to face him down as I did.

“It makes no difference what you or any one else say!” I cried passionately. “I will never leave that body until Nature sets her final seal upon it! Where’s the other one? Where is that scoundrel Mirrikh? What——”

“Hush—sh!” he interposed. For God’s sake restrain yourself and remember that we are entirely at the mercy of these people. Look behind you—we are not alone.”

​His words produced their effect, for they brought me to a realizing sense of the fact that if I meant to stay by Maurice I had to keep in the good graces of the powers which controlled the lamasery. There was Walla, too! Had I forgotten her?

Yes, Walla was there. When I looked around I saw her.

She lay crouched all in a heap at the foot of the altar where she had first flung herself.

In an instant I was at her side and strove to take her in my arms, but she repulsed me. Murmuring some broken words in an unknown tongue, she pushed me away.

I staggered back and stared around the place. Again that strange magnetic current went darting through my brain.

Behind her kneeled old Padma, turning a silver prayer wheel, its monotonous click ringing out sharply in the stillness. The body of the adept, however, had disappeared.

I passed my hand before my eyes as though that would banish the strange sensations which were oppressing me. “I must be calm,” I reflected. “I must restrain myself and act only for the best.”

“Oh Jerusalem! If I only had a smoke!” groaned the Doctor. “It might steady my nerves a bit. Would you think me a perfect ghoul if I felt in Maurice’s pocket for his tobacco bag, Wylde? There’s his flask, too.”

“There is no necessity. He gave both to me this morning to give to you,” I answered, producing the articles in question.

“Laus Deo. The country is safe! Give me just one moment to fire up and I’ll argue with you for the rest of the night.”

He filled the pipe with a hand which trembled visibly. He was badly shaken, no doubt of that, but he seemed to revive after a pull at the flask.

Meanwhile I stood stroking back the curls from Maurice’s brow, dreaming. Picture after picture presented itself before me with a vividness that made me almost wonder why I doubted the sincerity of those who claim clairvoyant sight.

I was back at Swatow. For an instant I even thought my wife stood before me, holding in her arms the babe we had buried on the other side of the globe. I was on the steamer—I saw Maurice, as I had first seen him; careless, gay and handsome. I was in the old consulate at Panompin—we ​were discussing metaphysics. I was again the negative, he the positive. It was all his effort that I should be aroused from my lethargy, lifted out of myself! Then before me rose in all their massive sublimity, the triple towers of the Nagkon Wat. I saw the big Buddha of Ballambong. We were in the old tower storm-bound. Mirrikh—that horrible Mirrikh—was forming as a whitish cloud at my feet; when suddenly—snap went the Doctor’s match; the flame flared up above the pipe bowl, and my visions vanished with the smoke.

“Now I can talk,” said the Doctor, satisfiedly. “Nothing like it when you are rattled. Wylde you have got us into a horrible mess.”

“I know it. I wish I might have died before I ever met Maurice.”

“Oh, bosh! To the dogs with your sickly sentiment. I want to review the situation that we may get out of this infernal scrape if we can.”

“I am listening.”

“First of all, do you know what was done with Mirrikh?”

“No.”

“Ah! Then I am ahead of you there. Thought I was able to throw off their infernal magnetism first. I either dreamed it, or I saw the lamas put it in the empty coffin in the niche—the one he said it belonged in—the one marked for Mars.”

“Oh this hypnotism!” I murmurmed. “Doctor, why could you not resist it? You, with all your boasted strength of will?”

“Wylde, you were hypnotized, too.”

“I don’t deny it. But with your will it might——”

“The devil! The smallest of them seem to have power over me. Hope that old crow Padma don’t understand what I am saying. Say, Wylde, did you see it all?”

We compared notes for the space of at least ten minutes. Let me say briefly that all I saw, the Doctor saw, and more. He heard the voice, too, as it called that last farewell; and like myself, after that he seemed to lose consciousness completely. Next he knew he was standing by the altar looking down upon Maurice’s body just as I had done. In short, his experience was the exact duplicate of mine with the exception that he saw the adept’s body put in the coffin, and a few minor points.

​I believe we might have kept on talking indefinitely, had not the sudden cessation of the clicking prayer wheel turned our attention to Padma, who was in the act of rising from his knees.

“Speak to him, Doctor!” I whispered. “Beg him to release that poor girl from the hypnotic influence. It breaks my heart to see her so.”

The Doctor tried it in Hindustanee, and if I may believe his assertion, got along splendidly.

“It’s no use to interfere with his plans, George,” he said, after a moment. “He says the girl is all right. He claims that she is a powerful sensitive, and more amazing than all; he swears—what do you suppose?”

“Don’t keep me in suspense, I beg of you, Doctor.”

“He says he is going to show us Maurice and Mr. Mirrikh in the astral body. We are to see them on their road to Mars.”

“In other words, he is going to hypnotize us again.”

“I’m afraid so, and by the living Cæsar! if he tries it I’ll smash him. Hold on, George! What in thunder is he about? This reminds one strangely of the Black Art!”

Pausing before Walla, Padma was tracing about her on the stone floor an imaginary circle, using for the purpose a slender brass rod, which he drew from beneath his cloak.

He made no effort to disturb us; not even by those now dreaded mesmeric passes, but kept his eyes steadily fixed upon the stones, as he slowly walked three times about the girl, chanting in a low voice.

Why did we not interfere?

Do not ask me. We could not. Put it down to cowardice if you wish, but I hold the occult influences which seemed to pervade the place, responsible for it. We did not—that is enough.

Now our whole attention seemed to concentrate itself on the old lama, with an intensity which banished all other thoughts.

He moved away to a distant part of the room, and though I tried to follow him with my eyes, I found I could not, for they were closed as though by a hand drawn suddenly down over my forehead. I want it distinctly understood that I felt the touch of this hand—that it was real and no way the outgrowth of my imagination. The Doctor had the same experience, only he swore afterward that the hand which ​closed his eyes was a child’s hand, and I know the one which touched me was big and rough—the hand of a full grown man.

Suddenly our eyes opened of their own accord, and there was Padma before us again. He now held a large, oval bowl of solid gold, chased in curious pattern and filled to the brim with a liquid of the most intense black. It’s surface, as he set it down at Walla’s feet, instantly became as smooth as glass, and I could see the face of the girl reflected in it. I thought of Doctor Dee and his wonderful stone, of the magic mirrors of the Arabian Nights, and I thought I understood.

“Say, Wylde,” whispered the Doctor; “I’ve been over this ground before in India. There’s something in it. You’ll see.”

Once the bowl was in place, our eyes closed again.

“Wonderful!”

This time I felt the child’s hand, and the Doctor swore by all good and holy, that the hand which touched him was a man’s. Indeed he clapped his own hand to his head and tried to grasp it, but failed, of course. When our eyes next opened, there stood old Padma again with a small brazier, a bronze dish and a basket of charcoal at his side. Now who could longer doubt the diablerie of the whole affair?

The old lama placed the brazier at some little distance from Walla, and stood the dish upon it, having previously lighted the coals beneath.

So much did the brazier resemble the tripod of such common occurrence upon ancient Greek coins, that I began wondering if it could by any possibility be a relic of the Bactrians. That it was from a Greek model there can be no doubt.

By this time the Doctor was growing cool again; so much so that he ventured to question Padma about his preparations.

The old lama muttered a few words in reply, to me, of course, wholly unintelligible, and after that paid no further attention to either of us, but went straight on with his work.

“By Jove, he’s a good one!” said the Doctor.

“What does he say?” I whispered.

“Well, it amounted to telling me to mind my own business, George. He says if we keep still we shall see Maurice. Of course you understand that this is the black magic of the ​East. It is simply a hallucination produced by the reflex action of a strong will upon a weaker one. All these preparations are mere clap-trap. I saw the same thing at Benares some years ago.”

“You mean white magic, do you not? Black magic is turned against a man, not for his benefit.”

“Bah! It’s all equally rubbish, black or white—but let us watch him. We may discover some part of the trick.”

Watch! There was no need to urge me. I could not have taken my eyes off Padma had I tried.

He had been blowing the coals while the Doctor was speaking, and now as they burst forth into flame he laid aside the little brass-backed bellows used for the purpose, and drew from beneath his loose robe a small box of beaten gold. This he opened and placed upon the altar in close proximity to Maurice’s head. It was a curious old affair, about four inches in length by three across, and an inch and a half deep, the top and sides were covered with cabalistic figures, beaten up in high relief.

From this he took a small vial not unlike a homœopathic medicine bottle, and removing the stopper flung its contents into the dish. Instantly a lambent flame shot up, resembling the flame of alcohol, which, for all I know, it may have been. Returning the bottle to the box the lama next took out a small packet, which proved to be a greyish powder wrapped up in Chinese rice paper. A little of this was also thrown into the dish, and immediately the flame changed from blue to an intense crimson. I thought then it was the strontium light, and but for the singular fact that during fully half an hour the flame continued to burn uninterruptedly without further addition either from the bottle or the packet, I might think so still.

“That’s it! That’s it!” whispered the Doctor. “Wait, Wylde! He’ll surprise you in a minute. Once you get your attention fixed on that flame he’ll make you believe you see your grandmother—you’ll see.” But not yet was I fascinated by the flame.

Now Padma moved toward us and with an imperious wave of the hand bade us follow him.

He took us across the room to the side where the corpses were stored, seized one of the handles and pulled.

Slowly the heavy box moved from its niche and we beheld the body of our adept lying within, swathed in white ​just as were the others shown us the morning before. Only his face was visible; that never to be forgotten face, yellow above, black beneath. I can see it before me now with terrible distinctness, wearing that same calm, peaceful expression which under all circumstances it ever wore. The eyes were closed, and when I placed my hands upon it the flesh was icy cold. In all respects it resembled the face of a corpse.

Closing the drawer, Padma now led us to the altar and pointed to Maurice.

“Touch the face,” he said quietly, “You will find it like the other—yet he lives! ”

We both touched it. Here was the same clammy coldness, and my heart, which was beginning to feel a ray of hope, again sank in despair.

Could I doubt that Maurice was dead ? Could I credit the aged lama’s claim?

Meanwhile the flame in the dish was blazing away as brightly as ever, shooting upward in slender tongues of crimson light.

Motioning for us to resume our places before the tripod, Padma stood over poor Walla and began making passes about her head.

Merciful God! How I inwardly cursed him! I was powerless to raise a finger to stop it or to speak a word, yet in all else I seemed entirely master of myself. Did my own curiosity as to what was to come, afford the lever by which my will was controlled?

A moment or two of this, and then Padma was at the tripod again, bowing reverently before the flame. I saw his face touch it—I saw him actually kiss it. The tongues of fire shot up all about him, played through the fringe of snow white hair surrounding his tonsure, shot about his eyes, covering his whole face in fact, and yet he was not burned.

For several moments this continued, the Doctor pressing my arm in silent awe.

Suddenly the lama straightened up again and moved back to Walla’s side. The girl, meanwhile, had never changed her position nor even raised her head. Taking her hands he placed them against the sides of the bowl which contained the black liquid and there they remained.

Again flitting back before the tripod, the aged lama raised his voice in. solemn chant, his eyes fixed upon a small scroll which he had taken from the box and unrolled.

​Later we knew that this was written in the ancient Persian tongue, and as the Doctor was afterward permitted to copy it, I am fortunately able to give the translation here.

“The sun! the sun! Creator! Lord,
⁠God, almighty! Show thy face
⁠and let the earth rejoice.
⁠The moon! the moon! Child
⁠of the earth! Storehouse of
⁠magnetic forces whose face
⁠is forever hidden; bend
⁠thy malevolent gaze not
⁠upon us lest we, thy
⁠brethren, wither and die.
⁠Spirits of the heavens conjure!
⁠Spirits of the earth conjure!

“The stars! the stars! Suns,
⁠worlds, moons innumerable! Oh east,
⁠where is thy beginning?
⁠Oh west, where is thy
⁠ending? North, thou art
⁠not. South, thou never wast.
⁠The comets! the comets!
⁠the flaming swords! Mighty
⁠messengers from the
⁠Omnipotent! Renewers
⁠of magnetic forces; from one
⁠thou takest that thou mayest
⁠give to another, equalizing all.
⁠Spirits of the heavens conjure!
⁠Spirits of the earth conjure!

“The earth! the earth! The
⁠sea! The desert without
⁠water! The rivers! The
⁠mountains! the lofty
⁠mountains! the mountains
⁠of the east, the mountains
⁠of the west! Stand
⁠not between us, oh thou
⁠mighty makers of many
⁠waters, for we would pursue a fleeting soul.
⁠Spirits of the heavens conjure!
⁠Spirits of the earth conjure!

He paused. Seizing the brazen rod he pointed down to to the surface of the black liquid in the dish which Walla’s shapely hands still clasped, seeming to trace upon its surface certain mystic signs.

​“It is finished!” he cried. “May Buddha grant the spell all potency! May the spirits of heaven and earth rest with us! Behold!”

He waved the rod aloft, its polished surface glittering as though studded with gems as it flashed before the crimson flame.

“Look! Look!” cried the Doctor. “For heaven’s sake! This is several pegs above anything I ever saw!”

But I had seen without his warning cry, for my eyes were following the end of the rod which old Padma was waving with a monotonous, rotary motion just above the flame.

Slowly about the point of the rod a whitish mist had begun to gather. So thin and shadowy was it at first, that I thought I must be mistaken, that something had come before my eyes; but presently it assumed consistency, taking an oval shape and seeming to bob up and down, always following the rotary movement of the rod.

If I had not seen the same thing before, on that night when the body of the adept was brought into the inn, I might have taken it for smoke, but I had seen and I watched it with an interest most intense, suspecting what would come to pass.

Suddenly out from this luminous cloud a hand shot forth—then another, and another. In a moment there were fully a dozen; some large, some small, some the puny hands of infancy, others the wrinkled, withered hands of old age. None were white; all having the yellowish tint of the Chinese or Thibetans. Certainly as far as human vision served me, the hands were real; and, stranger still, all were right hands. Call them the hands of spirits, and you will have to admit twelve individual forms behind them. Padma’s hands they could not have been. My attention seemed particularly drawn toward this point. I saw not a left hand among them—to that I stand ready to swear.

Only for a moment they remained visible, but in that moment the index finger of each hand was directed downward, pointing toward the dish. At last I saw them merge themselves seemingly with the cloud again—next, cloud and all had vanished, and the rod descended, until it, in turn, was pointed toward the dish.

Suddenly the flame shot higher, yet I am certain that Padma made no effort to replenish the agents which had produced it, and which ought to have been long ago ​consumed. Higher, and higher still it rose, growing broader at the same time, until the whole room was as bright as day; and the strange part of it was, the flame now had lost some of its crimson tint and become whiter, more like an electric light.

“The dish, Wylde! For God’s sake keep your eyes on the dish, man!” cried the Doctor.

My eyes fell to the surface of the black liquid; it was as smooth and motionless as glass, and, in spite of its opacity, I found, to my amazement, that I could look into it to what seemed unfathomable depths.

As I gazed no word was spoken; the Doctor’s eyes were as firmly riveted as my own.

I seemed to be looking off into immeasurable space, with the sun, as a huge fiery globe hanging above me, radiating its heat and light in mighty puffs, like some breathing monster, and yet I was shivering with the very intensity of cold.

Nor did the light of the molten orb seem to illuminate. It was as though I was in darkness looking at the light. I could see all the stars of heaven shining with surpassing brilliancy—all, did I say? No; not all. The planets were wanting among the others, they were with me. I seemed to be an atom floating helplessly among them. They were all whirling forward through space with incredible rapidity; it was like gazing at a huge orrery, for each planet was of proportions so prodigious that I felt they must be seen in their proper size.

Mercury—aye, and the disputed Vulcan within its orbit—Venus, Mars, the Earth, asteroids by hundreds, mighty Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and even far off Neptune, all were there. Beyond Neptune rolled three others, enormous in their proportions; two of them had rings like Saturn, nor was there one among all the number unattended by its moon or moons.

Now suddenly all vanished, and I saw nothing but the dish, the girl, old Padma and his rod, but yet the spell remained unbroken—my gaze was still transfixed.

Again Padma moved his rod, and once more I was uplifted among the spheres.

Precisely what I had seen before I saw now, but I seemed to have assumed a different point of observation—I was between the earth and Mars!

Now I saw them!

​Of course I was hypnotized—of course it was but the action of old Padma’s will! Still I saw them—saw them with a distinctness fairly appaling. It was Maurice De Veber and the mysterious Mr. Mirrikh—they were floating through space, side by side.

Nor were their forms dim and shadowy as I had seen them last; on the contrary, they were clothed as black lamas, precisely as they had been clothed when they stood at the altar’s foot, and they were to my vision as real and substantial as myself. It was the same Maurice—the same Mirrikh, not altered one whit.

They did not appear to see me, or to be moving of their own volition, but just carried forward like specks of floss before the summer breeze; yet their movements were not erratic, but, on the contrary, seemed to be directed toward one particular point, and that a huge globe of reddish hue, except at the poles, where I could detect vast fields of snow and ice.

Now a singular change took place, for once my gaze was fastened upon those two moving figures no effort of my own will was sufficient to detach it. Whether I would, or whether I would not, still was I forced to follow on through realms of boundless space.

Vast æons of time seemed to have been accomplished. It was as though centuries had passed since we came to Psam-dagong, and still we traveled on.

But not in vain!

Oh no! We were approaching our destination. Mars was growing nearer now.

Long ago it had ceased to look the shining object it had at first; and I knew that huge as the planets had seemed in my previous vision, their proportions were as nothing compared with the reality, for now Mars appeared larger than all rolled into one.

Clouds began to form where previously I had not perceived them, and my vision was in a measure obscured, but only for a moment; before I knew it, I had penetrated the clouds, and the roundness of the earth beneath me was lost. Now it was as I fancy an aeronaut must feel when gazing down from a height a few thousand feet.

“Maurice!” I shouted. “Oh, Maurice, it is glorious!”

He did not seem to hear me, for he never turned his head, though I could perceive by the expression on his face ​that he was fully alive to the beauties of the mighty panorama which was unrolling itself to my gaze.

Mountains of vast height, stretches of dense forest, fertile plains through which rivers coursed; and then the seas, long land-locked gatherings of reddish water, extending as far as the eyes could reach; yet the prevailing color of the land was green, just as on our earth; but when wonderingly I glanced back at the clouds behind me, I saw that they, like the water, were of a dull, red color, and it flashed upon me that I had solved a mighty problem which has preplexed the astronomers of every age.

On, and still on! Nearer and nearer we approached the surface of the planet. We were descending upon a city beside which London is but an infant. I could see the people swarming through the streets. Here Mr. Mirrikh and his parti-colored face would be no novelty, for every face I saw was of the same mould, half black—half yellow; otherwise the people were like the dwellers on our earth except in the matter of dress, which was, with the men only a simple girdle of some dark cloth about the waist, while the women wore a loose gown of blue material, gathered in about the hips and thence dropping to the feet.

So intent was I in watching them that thus far I had scarcely comprehended the fact that I felt interest in other things.

Suddenly a voice seemed to speak in my ear, sounding like the voice of Mr. Mirrikh.

“Look at the city, friend Wylde! Never mind the people.”

Strange that I had not thought of this before!

Still I gazed, my eyes roaming here and there, each individual structure seeming to separate from the others and impress itself on my brain with incredible rapidity.

Houses like ours they were not. For the most part they were low, square structures, ranged along broad streets, not close together, but with gardens between. I saw no building of any elegance; no vehicles, no animals of any kind; no sign of market place, churches, shops or any sort of business, Suddenly in their roaming my eyes seemed to fix themselves upon one huge building which I can only compare with the Mormon tabernacle at Salt Lake City; it was of but one story, and covered an amazing extent of ground; just a vast, oval roof of snowy whiteness, supported on tastefully carved columns, ornamented with birds, flowers and ​intertwining leaves. Without exaggeration I should place the longest dimension of this enclosure at a mile.

Suddenly my gaze was drawn from it and I looked around for Maurice and his companion. To my horror I discovered that I had fallen behind.

Then I saw them settling down toward the roof of this mighty temple; for an instant they rested there, and seemed to me to vanish through it as though it were nothing, and were gone.

“Maurice! Maurice! Oh don’t leave me, my friend!” I shouted, when, as with the wave of an enchanter’s wand, all had vanished and I was back in the chamber, staring into the inky blackness of the bowl, with the Doctor beside me, Walla at my feet and old Padma starting up with every expression of terror overspreading his wrinkled face.

At the same instant a wild, piercing cry echoed through the enclosure, and following Padma’s gaze, I saw Ni-fan-lu come dashing down the stairs.

“Dshambi-nor!” he was shouting. “Dshambi-nor!”

“Great God!” gasped the Doctor, seizing my arm with trembling hand; “this is sorcery with a vengeance! I don’t know what you’ve been about, Wylde, but I have been to the planet Mars!”

I could not answer him. Old Padma had his ear before I was able to speak, and was uttering hurried words.

“Dshambi-nor! Dshambi-nor!” yelled Ni-fan-lu, as he came rushing up to us.

“For mercy sake, what is it?” I gasped; a vague sense of uneasiness creeping over me, for I could read something of the truth on the Doctor’s face.

“Brace up, old man! Pull yourself together!” he answered hastily. “As near as I can make out we are in danger of flood. A lake has broken loose somewhere in the mountains behind the lamasery, and a few million gallons of ice water are about to be dumped upon us—that’s all!”

By this time Ni-fan-lu was grovelling at Padma’s feet, repeating his cry. I flung myself toward the altar and had one arm about Maurice’s body as it came.

“Dshambi-nor! Dshambi-nor! Dshambi-nor!”

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article  Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.