Years have passed.
I write these lines not upon Thibetan territory, but amid the most prosaic surroundings. I am in my bedroom in the house of my friend, Maurice De Veber. As I glance from my window I can see only other windows opposite, while the roar of the city penetrates the lowered upper sash.
Need I say that I am back in New York?
Scarcely.
For the true New Yorker there is but one city—his own.
Mirrikh’s letter proved to be all that he had promised—but no more.
We never came any nearer to Lh’asa than the foot of the mountain.
Without an adventure worth narrating, we were escorted hurriedly to the frontier, and as the Doctor expressed it, “promptly fired across.”
At last we found ourselves safe in Mandalay, from whence the journey to Calcutta was just nothing at all. And I learned from our conductor that to a certainty would we have met death but for that piece of paper which came so strangely into my hands.
At Calcutta, Doctor Philpot left us, and from that day to this I have never seen him, although we still occasionally correspond. The last I heard he was in Australia. He never makes the slightest allusion in his letters to our Thibetan experiences; although he writes in the most friendly spirit, and repeatedly refers to “the pleasant days at the Nagkon Wat.”
One word more. The Doctor is preaching again. He has a charge at Wagga-Wagga, I think it is; I have mislaid his last letter and am not quite sure about the name. If his nature has changed I am not aware of it. Certainly his letters are written in the same light vein which ever characterized the man from the first hour of our meeting upon the tower stairs.
So much for the Doctor.
Concerning Maurice and his companion I have only this to say: he calls her Merzilla and speaks to her in a language which certainly is not one of the tongues of earth.
She is much like ordinary women and can now speak English, but seldom uses it in addressing her husband.
Maurice married her in Calcutta and she signed the
