Seizing him by the shoulders, I tried to arouse him, exclaiming:
"For heaven's sake! What is the matter?"
My words had no effect, so I shook him roughly.
Then he slowly began to come to his senses. His lips moved, without any sound passing them. But presently he found voice to murmur, as if talking in his sleep:
"It has come! The Seuen-H'sin—the terrible Seuen-H'sin!"
An instant later, with a great effort, he drew himself together and spoke sharply to the chauffeur:
"Quick! Never mind those addresses we gave you! Rush us to the Grand Central Station! Hurry!"
As the car suddenly swerved into a side street, I turned to the doctor.
"What's the matter? Where are you going?" I asked.
"To Washington!" he snapped in reply. "As fast as we can get there!"
"In connection with this earthquake terror?"
"Yes!" he told me; "for—"
There was a pause, and then he finished in a strange, awed voice:
"What the world has seen of this devil 'KWO' is only the faintest prelude to what may come—events so terrible, so utterly opposed to all human experience, that they would stagger the imagination! This is the beginning of the dissolution of our planet!"
CHAPTER III.
THE SORCERERS OF CHINA
"DOUBTLESS you never heard of the Seuen-H'sin."
The speaker was Dr. Ferdinand Gresham, and these were the first words he had uttered since we had entered our private compartment on the midnight express for Washington, an hour before.
I lowered my cigar expectantly.
"No," I said; "never until you spoke the name in a momentary fit of illness this evening."
The doctor gave me a swift, searching glance, as if questioning what I might have learned. Presently he went to the door and looked out into the passage, apparently assuring himself no one was within hearing; then, locking the portal, he returned to his seat and said:
"So you never heard of the Seuen-H'sin—'The Sect of the Two Moons'? Then I will tell you: the Seuen-H'sin are the sorcerers of China, and the most murderously diabolical breed of human beings on this earth! They are the makers of these earthquakes that are aimed to wreck our world!"
The astronomer's declaration so dumfounded me that I could only stare at him, wondering if he were serious.
"The Seuen-H'sin are sorcerers," he repeated presently, "whose devilish power is shaking our planet to the core. And I say to you solemnly that this 'KWO'—who is Kwo-Sung-tao, high priest of the Seuen-H'sin—is a thousand times more dangerous than all the conquerors in history! Already he has absolute control of a hundred millions of people—mind and body, body and soul!—holding them enthralled by black arts so terrible that the civilized mind cannot conceive of them!"
Dr. Gresham leaned forward, his eyes shining brightly, his voice betraying deep emotion.
"Have you any idea," he demanded "what goes on in the farthermost interior of China? Has any American or European?
"We read of a republic superseding her ancient monarchy, and we meet her students who are sent here to our schools. We hear of the expansion of our commerce along the jagged edges of that great Unknown, and we learn of Chinese railroad projects fostered by our financiers. But no human being in the outside world could possibly conceive what takes place in that gigantic shadowland—vague and vast as the midnight heavens—a continent unknown, impenetrable!
"Shut away in that remote interior—in a valley so little heard of that it is almost mythical—beyond trackless deserts and the loftiest mountains on the globe—this terrible sect of sorcerers has been growing in power for thousands of years, storing up secret energy that some day should inundate the world with horrors such as never have been known!
"And yet you never heard of the Seuen-H'sin! No; nor has any other Caucasian, except, perhaps, a chance missionary or two.
"But, I tell you, I have seen them!"
Dr. Gresham was becoming strangely excited, and his voice rose almost shrilly above the roar of the train.
"I have seen them," he went on. "I have crossed the Mountains of Fear, whose summits tower as high as from the earth to the moon, and I have watched the stars dance at night upon their glaciers. I have starved upon the dead plains of Dzun-Sz'chuen, and I have swum the River of Death. I have slept in the Caves of Nganhwiu, where the hot winds never cease and the dead light their campfires on their journey to Nirvana. And I have seen, too—" there was a strange, entranced look on his face as he spoke "I have seen the Shadow of God on Tseih Mwan and K'eech-ch'a-an! But in the end I have dwelt in Wu-yang!"
"Wu-yang," he continued, after a brief pause, "is the center of the Seuen-H'sin—a wondrous dream city beside a lake whose waters are as opalescent as the sky at dawn; where the gardens are sweet-scented with a million blooms, and the air is filled with bird songs and the music of golden bells.
"But forgive me," sighed the doctor, rousing himself from his ecstatic train of thought; "I speak in the allegories of another land!"
We were silent for a time, until finally I suggested:
"And the Seuen-H'sin—The Sect of the Two Moons?"
"Ah, yes," responded Dr. Gresham. "In Wu-yang the Beautiful I dwelt among them. For three years that city was my home. I labored in its workshops, studied in its schools, and—yes; I will admit it—I took part in those hellish ceremonies in the Temple of the Moon God—to save myself from death by fiendish torture. And, as my reward, I watched those devils at their miraculous business—the making of another moon!"
We smoked a moment in silence. Then:
"Surely," I objected, "you do not believe in miracles!"
"Miracles? Yes," he affirmed seriously—"miracles of science. For the sorcerers of China are scientists—the greatest that this world has yet produced. Talk to me of modern progress—our arts and sciences, our discoveries and inventions! Bah! They are child's play—clap-trap!—beside the accomplishments of this race of Chinese devils! We Americans boast of our Thomas Edison. Why, the Seuen-H'sin have a thousand Edisons!
"Think of it—thousands of years before Copernicus discovered that the earth revolves around the sun, Chinese astronomers understood the nature of our solar system and accurately computed the movements of the stars. The use of the magnetic compass was ancient even in those days. A thousand years before Columbus was born their navigators visited the western coast of North America and maintained colonies for a time. In the year 2657 B.C. savants of the Seuen-H'sin completed engineering projects on the Yellow River that never have been surpassed. And forty centuries before Christ the physicians of China practised inoculation against smallpox, and wrote erudite books on human anatomy.
