Page:Doughty--Mirrikh or A woman from Mars.djvu/31

 expected, when looking down into the courtyard of the  Nagkon Wat I saw the mysterious Mr. Mirrikh standing at  the head of a short flight of steps between the columns of a  massive portico.

As we gazed, he lifted his eyes toward the tower and saw us.

Raising his hand he waved it lightly in our direction, bowed, and passing into the shadows of the door-way disappeared.

I possessed that great gift, “a facile pen.”

How I would like to describe that glorious sunrise in the elegant and finely rounded periods of Bulwer; to discourse  upon the antiquity of that mighty and mysterious temple  with the confident assurance of a Lenormant or a Lyell.

Or even were I gifted with the power of stringing flowery phrases, how poetic could I grow about the balmy air, the  thrilling songsters whose notes now began to fill the forest,  the nodding palms and delicious odors wafted past us on our  lofty perch with each breeze that blew.

But pshaw! I am neither poet nor novelist; history I hate, and science I abhor. I am only a plain, every day American; a little brushed up by foreign travel, perhaps;  but neither brighter nor better read than the average of my  race.

Thus, as Maurice De Veber truly remarked, I am incapable of comprehending the mystical; my mind and thought methods are unadapted to the tenets of Buddhist theology.

Even now that my knowledge has advanced in this direction; even now that I know of that knowledge and must believe because I know, because I have seen and heard, I  find myself still incapable of so expressing my thoughts to  others as to carry conviction with my statements. But after all, that is a gift, and one which few men possess.

Here was I brought face to face with a man and a mystery. A man more mysterious even than the temple in which we