His list, finished, he scanned thoughtfully. It ran:
He seemed not to remember any more. He studied his list, trying to find others to add, new interpretations; but to no avail.
He thought that if he tried increasing and adding radio-frequency tuning and amplification to his speaker-circuit—make it a regular radio, in fact, he might get any possible radio sending if that could account for the silent spaces on the last record.
He made his circuits up, set the electric pick-up over the start of the record; but with the new hookup he got no new slant.
Only one small addition to his list of sounds, bringing his total up to eleven sound-clues—possibly—was the little thump, or thud that the needle transmitted before starting in on the voice with no speaker answering in its silent waits. Roger could get no further.
He took his series of eleven sounds, including the alarm bell and the thump that could have been a tiny flaw of the record just on the sound track, and went to Grover.
“Here are the sounds,” he declared. “Maybe one will clear up all your tangles.”
At least, studying the list, Grover was more alert, less depressed, Roger saw with relief.
He examined the last-made record for the fault that made the odd jarring of its recording. No flaw showed, even under magnification.
“It’s actually part of the record,” he got Grover to add to his list of notes; and then he said to his cousin, “it may mean that the locks went off, somehow, just there.”
“But it doesn’t record the re-locking, so that doesn’t fit.”
“If only we could see any cause for that thumping sound,” Roger reflected out loud. “We might have one more real clue.”
If only he had been able to decode the key hidden there!
After further consideration of the sound clues, and discussion of the uncanny appearance of animals on a film, and other points, and without seeing any light, Grover rose.
“The staff will be arriving any time, now,” said he. “Let’s look up that fellow, Joseph Z. Clark, because I want you to do a little Sherlock-Hawkshaw work if we locate his address.”
They took first the telephone book. He was listed, and his address was in a section of the suburbs given over to large private estates. His business also was listed. He was a jeweler, and the reason he could own an estate was shown by his business address in fashionable Fifth Avenue.
“A man would seem to be a suspicious character loitering around a private estate,” Grover looked up, “but a boy——”
“I could wear my old sweater and cap, and ride my bicycle, and it would be natural for me to rest anywhere along the road, or even go anywhere to ask my way.” Roger caught the spirit of the idea.
“I merely want you to ‘look over the land,’ and see how things look,” Grover insisted. “Then after the staff goes, come back and report. That gives you time for rest between riding out and back.”
“After the staff goes—Do you still think?——”
“I have to think everything and nothing until I get a lead.”
Roger took his time riding the dozen miles to the easily located point of espionage. To get there by mid-morning was best.
The estate itself, walled in with ivy-covered stone, quite an extensive acreage, he reached as the sun approached the zenith.
Near what seemed to be a servants’ gateway he sat down by his reclining bicycle.
From the grass beside the gateway he could see, along the driveway, the beautifully rolled tennis court, the sweep of lovely lawn, from the main gateway, winding up to a grand, white mansion, people moving about on wide verandas or swimming in a distant pool.
“Pretty swell,” Roger told himself musingly. “Not the sort of a place to look for kidnapers or jewel thieves. Unless—as Grover is always so fond of saying: ‘I dig past appearances that can be falsified, to the heart of truth that can’t be changed.’”
He turned it over in his mind. Of course, it would not be past reason that a prosperous man, with a millionaire’s residence, might smuggle gems, even make a man his prisoner to secure a gem with the world-wide reputation Doctor Ryder had ascribed to the Eye of Om.
Om—Roger had looked it up—was the reverent name by which the Tibetans referred to the All Highest, to Our Eternal Father.
It was sometimes spelled A-u-m, also, he had found out.
From his view of the rich, scintillating gem, the unbelievably many, tiny, flat, facet surfaces, turned in every direction, well symbolised the name, the Eye of Aum or Om, the All-seeing Gaze of the Supreme God.
Well, for that jewel, what would not some characters do?
He wondered, gazing idly, behind which window Doctor Ryder might be a prisoner; and he thought how he might discover it.
If the man could look out, he thought, Doctor Ryder might give him some signal.
He stood up, pretending to stretch, facing the house. He got up on the wall, and knew that he was noticed, for a footman moved out toward him. He jumped down, watching the upper windows.
No response. No signal. If only he could be seen from all four sides of the house, he reflected, it might be different!
“Private property, son,” said the footman, arriving at the gate.
Some remembrance of detectives who had “taken the bull by the horns” and had “bluffed” people into telling the truth, who had tricked suspected people into revealing things they tried to hide, made Roger act without fully canvassing what the possible outcome might be.
“Private, yes,” he said, grinning mysteriously, “but you’d better ask Doctor Ryder whether I’d be called a trespasser or not.”
His bold stroke brought him a revealing response.
“Huh? Doctor Ryder? Do you know him?”
“I know him,” Roger said loftily, “better than he knows the Eye of Om.”
“The what of who?”
“Oh, of course—I ought not to have mentioned——” Roger pretended to be disconcerted, “I—uh—well, never mind.”
“How comes it you’re out here? Why’n’t you ride right on in if you want the Doctor?”
“I just stopped to rest.”
If Roger’s words were carelessly intoned, his heart was doing speed-pulsations. Doctor Ryder was there!
“Well, all right. They didn’t know who you were, climbing on our wall.” (Ourwall—Roger hid a grin.)
“Guess I’ll walk up. Want to bring my machine?”
Might as well enjoy some of the luxury of having servants to wait on him, Roger chuckled merrily to himself.
“Certainly, sir. You will find Doctor Ryder with Mister Clark, over beyond the pool, at the first tee of the golf links. Or, would you rather be announced?”
“‘Station O.B.Y’s,’” Roger pretended to be a radio announcer, playing on the phrase, “Oh, be wise,” as he shook his head.
“No, thank you. I’ll go see the doctor without being heralded.”
He walked ahead of the servant, across the lawn.
Before he had passed the girls with gay frocks, joking with their escorts, and the quartet of laughing, splashing swimmers, he saw the man he had supposed to be a prisoner.
Doctor Ryder, his bald head and plump frame easily discernible, was certainly as free as the tall, sallow, thin-cheeked, hatless man in white flannels who was swinging a golf club over a ball.
“Why—Roger!” The doctor, turning, recognized him as he approached, “How’d you locate me so soon?”
Roger, coming up, on guard, hiding his surprise at the unexpected freedom of the man, took on a careless air of wisdom.
“Science!”
“Oh, you laboratory people!” Doctor Ryder smiled. “So my voicedidmake a record.” He turned to the other man, “I told you that disconnecting the selenium cell wire wouldn’t stop the sound from getting onto the film, any more than you could stop the motor, even if you did keep it from taking your picture by holding the card by a rubber band snapped over the lens barrel.”
The other man laughed.
“They may have your voice, and welcome,” he chuckled, giving the rather flabbergasted young detective a cheerful grin of welcome, “but they didn’t get my picture, and they won’t have my voice, because—well, young man, how do you imagine I beat that?”
“Wrote your answers,” said Roger after an instant of thought.
The man nodded.
“I told you he was clever—who wouldn’t be under the Mystery Wizard, as his older relative is sometimes referred to.” Doctor Ryder slapped Roger’s left shoulder.
Roger, cautious, eyes alert, saw no signs of duplicity.
The situation puzzled him.
After all of the mysterious, baffling, weird and unexplained circumstances, after the strain and excitement, here was the victim of capture and jewel robbery, about to play golf, laughing, free.
Were “appearances” cheating his common sense? He decided to pretend to accept conditions, but he watched alertly for clues.
“But I expect you are surprised to see this situation,” the man who owned these acres of wealth declared.
Roger could not dissemble well enough.
“No fair keeping him in the dark,” Doctor Ryder prompted. “I was going to telephone, but we had some details to work out over a few holes of Scotch Croquet,” he laughed at his own allusion to golf. “So you sleuthed me anyhow. Well, let’s put our cards on the table.”
“All right,” Mr. Clark—the footman’s identification—said.
“I was getting the Voice of Doom manifestation again when—how, only he can reveal—this old traveling chum, who has gone further in making money than I have in curing spinal disease,” Doctor Ryder was speaking, “stalked into my room.”
“Well, I knew you were in danger,” the other remarked. “So I just went in through a cellar window and up the stairs, and just as the Tibetans were getting the hang of the slotted cable trick to shut off the current so they could walk in, I knocked down the ring-leader.”
Could that have been the thump on the record, Roger asked himself.
“They had a copperized gadget, and so I chased the other two, and used the gadget, walked in, and brought my old chum out here.”
“You might have saved us a lot of worry,” Roger spoke abruptly. “We thought all sorts of terrible things about you, doctor.”
“But I said, at the end of the record, that we would go to the safe, and if all was well there we would come here and communicate.”
“The record ran out before it was spoken,” said Roger, and he added:
“Well—did you find the jewel safe?”
“Just as Clark drove us up near the laboratory,” Doctor Ryder informed him, “we saw the Tibetans emerge. How they had worked it is beyond me. But we let them start in a car, trailed it, and when they got out we jumped them, and after a tussle, sure enough!—they had this, so we took charge.”
There, in his palm, lay the great, flashing emerald!
“Matter of fact,” Clark spoke up, “as long as your laboratory Chief won’t help my friend to restore this to Tibet and escape all the danger—and worse—that those Tibetans can stage, I am going to finance his trip back to Tibet, and may even go along.”
“All right,” said Roger, swinging on the soft turf, “I’d better tell Grover to stop worrying himself about your protection and all.”
“You can call from the house—a servant will show you where,” the estate owner suggested, and Roger saw no trickery or exchange of glances to tell him anything was deceptive in their manner. “While you are telling him, if you like the idea, you might ask if he can give a good young radio operator a leave-of-absence to go along. We have had a Roger, the Ear Detective, so far. We’d be willing to pay expenses and salary to a Roger, the Scientist, on our trip to restore a priceless religious symbol.”
Roger’s jaw dropped, sagging with his astonishment.
“Straight goods,” added Doctor Ryder. “The Tibetan priests are bugs about scientific cleverness. You’d be a help.”
“Name your own salary, too,” added Mr. Clark.
Roger may have set his feet on greensward; but to him it was as if he walked on clouds.
But he did not ask Grover over the telephone.
Hewas not so sure about that frank offer.
Brought back to the laboratory in Mr. Clark’s car, with one of the servants delegated to drive the estate carry-all in with his bicycle, Roger got a new surprise.
Mr. Clark greeted their bio-chemist and their electrical specialist, respectively Mr. Zendt and Mr. Ellison, as long-missed brothers.
“We attended the same technical college,” he told Grover.
“And did we have experiences in India?” chuckled Ellison.
To himself Roger thought that here was some likely link with the kangaroo and, perhaps, with the ape of the first startling night’s alarm.
He kept his thoughts behind his lips.
“But why must you restore the Eye, at so much risk?” Grover, put in possession of facts already known to Roger, asked, “Turn it over to those mysterious Tibetans who open safes and enter sealed rooms.”
“That’s the rub,” Clark declared. “Are they genuine priests? Or thieves?”
“The Voice of Doom is a genuine manifestation, apparently,” Doctor Ryder added, “at least, in the mountain temple, I heard something similar to the screaming doom. In some way they produce that noise, on a much greater scale of volume. It is said to be the Voice of Doom, and is supposed to come through the lips of their image of Buddha, as an omen, only when a criminal is being judged by the image, which is to say by the temple priests—or before some calamity such as an earthquake or famine year.”
“But maybe these fellows are using that, and pretending to be priests from the Forbidden Land, to scare us into giving up the gem,” Mr. Clark argued.
Real priests, bent on revenge, he insisted, struck first, spoke afterward, if at all. Or, these might be of some other sect or lamasery, as they called their mountain retreats.
“I can see that,” Ellison agreed.
“It is not from them so much comes the danger to Ryder,” Zendt was also a champion, “More from the hidden menace of the real Doom comes it.”
“If I could get away,” said Ellison, “I’d take back the thing for Ryder.”
“It is my risk. I got into this thing.”
“But why do you suggest taking Roger, Doctor?” Grover asked.
“Several reasons. First: he has proved that he is accurate in discerning the correct interpretation of sounds, which leads to the next: he is clever at photography and other scientific means of getting accurate data. To explain that, let me say that with so much danger if it were known that I meant to get into the temple, a secret way to restore the Eye would be safer.
“There is a hidden way to enter the temple. I do not know it, but I feel that in some way it may be connected with that Voice of Doom, and Roger could photograph, enlarge his takes, study them, and with his sharp eye and keen wit, could no doubt find the secret.”
“A last reason,” Mr. Clark added, “is that he can operate a radio-telephone, as well as send wireless code. We might want the former, if two parties, separated, needed to keep in constant touch. The latter, short-wave sending and receiving, could keep us in touch with the outside world—even with you, Mr. Mystery Wizard Brown.”
Put that way, there seemed less to make Roger uncertain.
What an adventure!
“If you could spare that husky, loyal general assistant, Potts,” suggested the doctor, “we could ask no better guardian for your cousin.”
There was much to be considered; there was much apparatus to be designed and assembled, including compact, tiny cameras, hand-operated generator to supply current where electricity never had been used, light, but powerful step-up transformers: there had to be clothing and other traveling needs in sparsely settled Tibet to be planned.
Time, though, coupled with a spirit of eagerness, helps in such plans, and it was soon time to say good-bye, to wave from the moving train, to hear Tip shout, “At last we got everything coagulated. We’re off!” and to settle back in a parlor car seat until time to go into the diner.
Across America, and on the ship bearing the party toward the International Date Line in the Pacific where one day changed to another by the simple process of crossing the imaginary line—the way that the astronomers had worked out to adjust Time to the sun’s progress—and even when they landed in China, only slight evidence had been noticed that the effort to secure the gem was still alive in some one’s mind.
Doctor Ryder felt that it indicated that the Tibetans had really been the ones after the Eye; and the ransacking of a despatch box, in their hotel room in San Francisco, he thought, had been the work of an international jewel thief.
Roger, while they crossed the Republic of China from Shanghai, had plenty to interest him, and so did Potts.
That loyal if uneducated guardian voiced his astonishment at the unusual sights and experiences.
“No wonder they say these people are backward,” he told Roger. “They do everything hind-side-first. Men wear skirts and women wear pajamas. They build a station where there ain’t any railroad at all, and have roads where there ain’t any traffic to use ’em.”
“Well, to them that is their way. They think our way is back-ways.”
“It is all in the point of view,” Mr. Clark took part in the chat. “Everything depends on how you look at it. The moon looks far off if you reverse your telescope, yet a star looks closer from the right end of the same instrument.”
“I don’t care,” Tip was stubborn about his idea, “Theyarea backward race. Look at that!”
“That” was a rickshaw boy, drawing his two wheeled carriage with two American tourist women in it. The boy deliberately swerved and ran across the street just in front of the automobile, the traveling companions and Roger were using. The driver had to stand on his brakes.
“They think devils chase them, and if they turn right-angles and run in front of something,itruns over the devils that can’t turn corners.” Potts was disgusted.
Other strange customs—strange because different from American habit—kept them alert and amused as they progressed toward the place where arrangements had been made for the party to join a caravan that was on its way across Tibet bearing tea and other Chinese goods. It seemed safest to go into the restricted territory as if bent on passing through it. Camels, with great fuss and grumbling, swift ponies with many whickers of eagerness to gallop rather than walk or trot, got under way and Roger, swaying on his Ship of the Desert, bound, seemingly, for the Kybur Pass and India, smiled as Potts found his curious steed inducing a seasickness that made him prefer to walk a good part of the time, unless the pace was too swift, when Tip rode and suffered.
As arranged, at one of the halting places, during the night, the quartet, met by guides and bearers as arranged for by the caravan leader, quietly forsook the caravan, and rode, on wiry ponies, into darkness and a land over which brooded the mysterious, terrible Himalayas.
Far away, in a city laboratory, with Roger’s chum, Billy Summers, an expert radio “op,” Grover tuned a set, amplified, increasing output strength; and then, as Roger, in the Tibetan night, increased his own signal power as Tip ground at the generator, each knew that with the other all was well. Yes. Just then!
Across the Tibetan plain, with its sparse vegetation and occasional small and always distant group of rude huts surrounded by the grazing herd of the tiny community, the party made its way uneventfully.
Steadily the ground grew higher. Constantly the Backbone of the World, the great, forbidding, brooding Himalayan range, was a larger part of the landscape ahead.
The guides, through an interpreter whose English was almost minus, but who could understand Doctor Ryder’s pantomime and few recalled Tibetan phrases, had agreed reluctantly that they would avoid settled parts and keep away from villages. His hesitation was due, as was explained, to the greater danger of being set upon by bandits, or rough peasants who amounted to the same thing. Yet that experience came.
At dusk, as they ate tinned food and the natives laid aside packs, cared for the wiry ponies and made camp, the chief guide discerned the approach of a dozen riders, galloping their sturdy mounts in a cluster toward them.
Tip, with a grunt, snatched at his revolver. Mr. Clark, almost in a snarl, ordered him not to show it.
“We must be diplomatic,” the man added; and Doctor Ryder agreed.
“Roger,” he said to the excited, trembling young scientific representative, “can’t you get something ready that might startle them or look like magic?”
Roger, in spite of his misgivings, thought hard.
“Come here, Tip.” Together, conferring, they unpacked equipment.
As the silent, but menacing horsemen deployed and surrounded the camp, the youth drew on, hastily, heavy rubber gloves.
Tip, not too sure that he ought to be so far from his charge, obeyed stern orders to carry out Roger’s instructions, and in the tent, sat by the handle of the generator. The small electricity-producing unit, much more powerful, though no heavier than an automobile battery-generator, had its handle and flywheel geared at a high ratio, so that moderate turning rate gave the armature its correct impetus for best results.
From it, unseen in the darkness that came on, a wire ran to a spot where Roger crouched, apparently busy with cooking utensils.
The bandits dismounted, and the group advanced, completely surrounding the white men, who wore the native coats of rough texture but who did not attempt to disguise their race.
The natives of the camp were evidently expecting the raid, and Roger was sure that either the chief guide or an aide had betrayed them.
It was too late to avoid the encounter and recriminations were not wise.
“You give all money,” the interpreter told Doctor Ryder as the leader of their adversaries spoke in guttural phrases.
“Tell him we are scientists, going to study the great rocks. Tell him that we have no money, and bid him go, before we ask our young magician, who is close in the councils of the Gods, to smite them.”
The interpreter apparently gave the interpretation faithfully, from his gestures toward Roger; but the man he addressed gave a harsh laugh.
He spoke to his men and they roared and shouted in mockery.
“Bid him go, then, and try his strength to capture that small youth who cooks the broth that gives him the strength of the Mountain Gods.”
As Clark gave the phrases, he glanced at Roger.
Probably, Roger thought, the man was afraid that he would fail at this critical moment. Be afraid. Or show nervousness.
The bandit leader guffawed, and strode rapidly, and menacingly, in Roger’s direction.
“It’s your move, son,” Roger mentally admonished himself. “Steady.”
To Tip he called, very low, “Get set.”
Tip called back, “Say when.”
The bandit strode close.
“Om, man-u, pad-mi, om,” muttered Roger, using the prayer so familiar to all Buddhists in Tibet.
The man paused, looking a trifle surprised at the sound.
Roger, upsetting a pan of water on the earth, rose, standing near the wet space.
In words taught him by the interpreter, he spoke.
“What do you seek?” his phrase demanded, and his voice he kept very steady, even stern.
“You!”
The man, depending on surprise, made a quick grab, as Roger laid aside a fork and with apparent aimlessness, paying no heed—outwardly—took in his right hand a big iron ladle to stir the boiling soup.
As if unaware of the plan to attack, he went on, “Om man-u pad-mi om,” knowing that the first utterance had started Tip to whirling his generator armature.
The man made a grab. As though turning, Roger maneuvered so that his ladle was just where the man made the grab—but Roger was beyond the wet spot on which the man stepped.
Stepped up to stronger voltage, carried along the wire fixed to the ladle handle held in his rubber-gloved hand, Roger was immune to the current that had better conductivity through the man standing on wet earth.
As his hand closed on the metal, with a startled, frightened howl, the bandit writhed and was convulsed, more by surprise than by any vast voltage. It was enough to jar, not enough to harm.
But he could not let go.
“Cease firing,” Roger called, amused as the man was contorted by the tingling, nerve-throbbing current that he could not understand.
The others, standing with mouths agape, saw their leader fall back, in awe, rubbing his arms. He spoke abruptly, staring at Roger unbelievingly. Then he drew back, and discussed his experience in guttural grunts and abrupt gestures.
Roger, knowing that the generator was still, stirred the soup nonchalantly while the interpreter, on whispered instructions, put a brave front on the situation and demanded that the group go away before all should feel the stronger wrath of their super-man.
They did draw aside, conferring. But they would not go. They took their mounts, but sat on guard.
Roger, eating with his companions, suggested that if they could demonstrate some visual marvel, such as a picture projected onto a light-colored tent side, it might frighten away the men.
The guides did not think they would be bothered, the interpreter said. The men would not go. They would stay on guard, and by keeping the party surrounded, not molesting for fear of more harmful acts, but still preventing them from moving, the bandits would wait for instructions from some one in higher authority. A messenger had ridden away.
Shortly afterward, while they sat around their fire of native fuel, they saw, approaching, the messenger and another tall Tibetan who dismounted and approached. He wore the recognizable garb of a Lama.
“Show me your magician,” he commanded.
Roger, assuming a brave air, arose.
“Come,” the man beckoned, “you will show me your wonders. I will show you mine.”
“Better go,” whispered Clark. “He will take you just where we want to get. Take Tip, and a radio, the battery set. And keep in touch.”
If the urging of the jeweler and of Doctor Ryder seemed like sacrificing Roger, they assured him that it was not so.
The lama, they declared, was interested in anything seeming to be occult or mystifying or a use of hidden forces. His attitude was not menacing. Rather, it seemed friendly.
And he was a lama from the very temple they sought!
“What a break!” Tip, whose companionship the man readily agreed to, as Tip carried the portable battery, compact five-tube set, telephone instrument and spare B. battery, spoke under his breath.
“This will coagulate everything, make it easy,” he added.
Roger, somewhat excited at the prospect of going into strange adventures, being “on his own,” nodded.
The man’s attitude was respectful and friendly. The bandits stayed around the camp, but the interpreter said that if the youth satisfied his companion of his abilities, it might free them, might even help them to reach their objective.
The lama had evidently been at a village not very far away: they had only to walk to that, and then, with much show of veneration for the lama, their holy man or priest, the villagers furnished ponies.
Roger, mounted and riding beside his friendly captor, with Tip and his apparatus on another pony and on a led carrier-animal, noted the tiny prayer-wheels by the ascending roadside, saw the other lamas they met with their prayer-wheels and prayer-papers, observed the reverent attitude of the peasants herding cattle or grazing sheep, and felt a renewed confidence in the outcome.
The lama could not converse with him, but the universal language of look and gesture served very well between them.
In due course, after riding up steeper and steeper paths, into the craggy, ravine-and-cliff torn mountains, they came to a great, dreary, uninviting stone monastery wherein the lamas stayed, studying, praying and conducting the strange rites of their religion.
“If you ask me,” muttered Tip, scanning the looming pile of stone, “We are a long way from the lab. What’s all them little windmills for?”
“Prayer-wheels,” Roger told him. “They say their prayers with them.”
“Well if you think I’m going to end up by spinning one of them whirligigs, you’re wrong. Tell this bird I’m incontrovertible.”
“You’re what?”
“Incontrovertible. I won’t change my religion.”
“Not convert-ible. I see. Still the same old Tip, far though you are, as you say, from Grover’s dark-room. But they seem to look up to this man who brought us. He’s sort of bossy, too, and they mind.”
They were made as comfortable as the rude conditions of the cold, harsh life the lamas led would allow.
Roger was glad that Tip was not separated from him. They were both given one cell, a gloomy, but not prison-like cell that looked out through its narrow window over a vast, tumbled, fissure-creased series of crags and ravines, cliffs and snow-covered peaks.
It was as though the Creator of the world had flung this wild mass of rock helter-skelter, in a long backbone, to hold the world together.
Simple, not too palatable food was ungrudgingly served, and their conductor visited them several times to see that they needed nothing he could offer.
The radio-telephone, answered by Doctor Ryder, reassured them. The bandits had been sent away by abrupt orders from another lama. Not a can of food or a bit of apparatus had been disturbed or taken.
The communicating sets worked well, and things were not so bad.
The gaunt, silent, stern-faced lamas served them without comment or objection; and Tip and Roger were allowed to roam at will through most of the corridors, rooms, cells and even were permitted to attend the chanting devotions of the men in a huge chapel-like place. But that, they were certain, was not the “temple” because there was no Buddha of the stature they expected, or with a spare Eye either missing or replaced by an imitation.
But nothing advanced. Nothing happened. Days dragged by.
The explanation came when their captor, or host, brought them into a sort of general community room, where he presented them before a very sedate and reserved and cold-visaged old man. Roger, however, did not feel any fear, because the man’s eyes seemed to hold some deep, broad-minded tolerance. He looked kindly.
To their amazement he addressed Roger in halting, but clear English.
“You come far.”
“Yes, sir,” Tip spoke first.
“You come for what?”
Tip hesitated.
Roger came forward.
“This man and I are with a scientific expedition.”
“Have you secured permission to enter our land?”
“I suppose so,” Roger, himself, was not too certain about the details of that official permit that Doctor Ryder said he had gotten.
“You understand something of science?”
Roger admitted it, not boastfully.
Their things were all brought in.
“Show me, and tell me.”
Roger, trying to use short words and simple explanations, demonstrated the radio-telephone, and its purpose of distant communication.
He did not want to explain the tiny camera, and put it into the case with the spare battery, pretending that it was part of the apparatus therein. The watching chief lama and the venerable visitor gave no special attention to it and Roger was glad. He had it in case they got near the temple and he could try to discover, from its pictures, later enlarged, how the secret way into the edifice, if one existed, was manipulated.
Contriving to “raise” his other friends, by the set, Roger allowed the lama and the other to hear the reply to his guarded declaration that they were being well nourished, made much of, and so on.
When the men seemed satisfied and the paraphernalia of radio was removed, the gentleman at the head of the lamas considered Roger and Tip thoughtfully.
“Indeed great progress has been made in your America,” he said, to Roger, while the lama sat silent. “Even you, not more than thirteen, surely, accomplish what would be wizardry to our own peasants—and yet this Forbidden Land holds locked in her bosom the destinies of tomorrow’s science, and knowledge of forces that your America does not dream of. It is a strange old world.”
“Yes, sir,” Roger agreed, not knowing how else to respond, then:
“How do you come to know our language, sir?”
“Your own sacred Book tells of the—is it not the Tower of Babel?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And is there not the word that prophets, as fire descended upon their heads, spoke ‘with many tongues’?”
“Yes, sir——”
“We, in Tibet, have methods for reproducing many miracles—as they would seem to you, for all of your scientific wisdom. Let me show you.”
As though understanding what was to come, the lama approached, and under the steady gaze of the other, seemed to assume a trance-like fixedness of expression. Standing, his body was still rigid, but he did not sway or totter or fall.
Presently, as Roger and Tip watched, knowing it might be hypnotism, but still marveling at the produced result, they heard:
“I am in a great laboratory.” And the man used perfect English, not even slightly inflected as had been that of the other, “There is an office with a pair of desks. At one, a woman typewrites. At the other, Grover Brown interviews his staff, and tells what Roger has sent him by the Morse code and which he ‘picked up’ on four stages of radio-frequency and three audio.”
It was almost weird, uncanny. Of course, there might be such a thing as mind-reading—but——
“In the chemical division, a man, Zendt, experiments with tissue, and a new—to him—process for causing a medicinal reaction by the application of Ellison’s sun-lamp.
“But here—Roger fails to tell completely of his mechanism. He forgets to explain the tiny camera with which he hopes to discover a secret way into our temple——”
If Roger’s face was controlled in time, perhaps Tip’s was not.
The older man smiled, a little wryly.
“That will do.” He clapped his hands sharply. The lama, with a somewhat dazed look, flexed his muscles and stumbling to a seat, collapsed on it. Magic? Trickery? Roger had no time to decide.
“If you are so anxious to learn our secrets of the temple,” remarked the old man, “you shall have them. Indeed, you shall even hear——”
Roger grew tense as he paused and then finished:
“The Voice of Doom! Come!”
With an abrupt change the atmosphere seemed to be charged with electricity. Of course, thought Roger, trying to remain cool, it was merely his fear of the outcome that made his nerves tingle.
There was no time for any choice of action.
Rising, the old man moved toward an arched opening at one side of the stone chamber. Tip, fierce-eyed, loyal, beside Roger, realized as he tugged at his empty holster that in some clever way he had been disarmed. A glance behind him showed the mocking lama, holding his own weapon. Tip gauged the chances of a leap, shrugged. It was useless. Monastery attendants were at all the open doorways.
“Buck up!” he whispered.
“It may not be so bad,” Roger tried to reassure them both.