“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.”
