Page:Doughty--Mirrikh or A woman from Mars.djvu/154

 our comprehension. Delusion! delusion! What else can it be but delusion? Granted a soul, is it yet in the nature of things that such a journey could be accomplished. God help me! I shall hear next that we can migrate to other planetary systems—that we can fly to the end of the  universe”

“Which,” interrupted the adept with that same immeasurable calmness, “has, like the God who made it, neither beginning nor end!”

“I am the alpha and the omega!” muttered the Doctor, “the beginning and the end!”

He was staring at us helplessly, picking a shred of cloth into little pieces. As he pronounced these words he began humming one of those grand old Gregorian chants which,  no doubt, he had listened to in his own pulpit a thousand  times.

What ailed the man?

I shuddered as I looked at him. He was worse even than before,

The adept seemed to read my thoughts.

“Don’t be alarmed. It is nothing,” he said. “It is necessary to keep his tongue still—that is all.”

“Hypnotized? ”

“If you like the term. The truth is he is controlled by a spirit, at my request.”

“God help us all!” I murmured. “I wish some spirit at my request would pick us up bodily and throw us in the middle of the Sahara, rather than we should stay one instant longer under your cursed influence, my heathen friend!”

But it was not to be that I could arouse his anger.

As toward myself, truth compels me to say that the man never appeared different than the calm philosopher of the Nagkon Wat, nor did he outwardly toward Maurice. And, although God alone can read in their entirety the intentions of any man; although I may wrong the adept most grievously, I believed then, and I believe it still, that his was  the will which drove Maurice forward to his fate.