Page:Doughty--Mirrikh or A woman from Mars.djvu/103

 “Talking about? Why you must know, George. I am talking about going with your friend Mirrikh back to Mars.”

“Hypnotized, hopelessly hypnotized!” I groaned. “Oh! Maurice!”

Was it true?

Had that amazing man from Panompin controlled Maurice De Veber’s will so completely as to make him believe that it was possible to take his soul out of his body, transport  it to the planet Mars and bring it back again?

Reader, he had!

Not that he controlled mine or the Doctor’s, but poor Maurice he had hard and fast.

I believe I could have killed Mr. Mirrikh that day, I felt so furious about it; but to kill your fox you must first find  it, and I had never seen the man from that time till now.

Nor had Maurice. Yet it seemed to make no difference.

“George, I shall give up my position and am going to Thibet,” he said to me that morning, after we had told the  Doctor all. And he did it—strange as it may seem, he did it.

“You are going with me,” he kept on declaring.

He need not have doubted that, if he were mad enough to go himself.

Briefly, we went. I, because I loved Maurice, and the Rev. Miles Philpot went because he wanted to—because he  had nowhere else to go.

Maurice was mad. I believed it fully, and I blamed Mirrikh and his hypnotic powers for the whole affair.

What had been told my friend after Mirrikh had hypnotized me, Maurice would not divulge, nor did I ever fully ascertain. All I know is that Mirrikh gave him a letter of introduction to Mr. Radma Gungeet, at Benares, and from  this individual Maurice received a document written in  several sets of characters, which proved the very open sesame  for us into that hitherto inpenetrable land—Thibet.

All we had to do was to show this to the local Buddhist priest, and lo! difficulties vanished like magic.

Now it was quite useless to attempt to turn Maurice a hair’s breadth.

Whatever was said to him, it had transformed Maurice De Veber into another individual.

For myself I had nobody but Maurice now, and I would have died sooner than desert him. As for the Rev. Miles