Page:Doughty--Mirrikh or A woman from Mars.djvu/171

 “It is finished!” he cried. “May Buddha grant the spell all potency! May the spirits of heaven and earth rest with us! Behold!”

He waved the rod aloft, its polished surface glittering as though studded with gems as it flashed before the crimson  flame.

“Look! Look!” cried the Doctor. “For heaven’s sake! This is several pegs above anything I ever saw!”

But I had seen without his warning cry, for my eyes were following the end of the rod which old Padma was waving  with a monotonous, rotary motion just above the flame.

Slowly about the point of the rod a whitish mist had begun to gather. So thin and shadowy was it at first, that I thought I must be mistaken, that something had come before my eyes; but presently it assumed consistency, taking  an oval shape and seeming to bob up and down, always  following the rotary movement of the rod.

If I had not seen the same thing before, on that night when the body of the adept was brought into the inn, I  might have taken it for smoke, but I had seen and I watched  it with an interest most intense, suspecting what would  come to pass.

Suddenly out from this luminous cloud a hand shot forth—then another, and another. In a moment there were fully a dozen; some large, some small, some the puny  hands of infancy, others the wrinkled, withered hands of  old age. None were white; all having the yellowish tint of the Chinese or Thibetans. Certainly as far as human vision served me, the hands were real; and, stranger still,  all were right hands. Call them the hands of spirits, and you will have to admit twelve individual forms behind them. Padma’s hands they could not have been. My attention seemed particularly drawn toward this point. I saw not a left hand among them—to that I stand ready to swear.

Only for a moment they remained visible, but in that moment the index finger of each hand was directed downward, pointing toward the dish. At last I saw them merge themselves seemingly with the cloud again—next, cloud and  all had vanished, and the rod descended, until it, in turn,  was pointed toward the dish.

Suddenly the flame shot higher, yet I am certain that Padma made no effort to replenish the agents which had  produced it, and which ought to have been long ago