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.
