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.
