THE FIRE BATHERS
Our little wrinkly-skinned host did the honors as far as the door, and I thanked him for the demonstration; but the Gray Mahatma seemed displeased with that and ignoring me as usual, turned on King in the doorway almost savagely.
"Do you understand that whoever can do what you have just seen can also accomplish the reverse of it, and transmute gold into baser metal?" he demanded. "Does it occur to you what that would mean? A new species of warfare! One combination of ambitious fools making gold—another unmaking it. Chaos! Now you shall see another science that is no fit pabulum for fools."
We came to a door on our right. It was opened instantly by a lean, mean-looking ascetic, whose hooked nose suggested an infernal brand of contempt for whoever might not agree with him. Just as the others had done, he met the Gray Mahatma's eyes in silence, and admitted us by simply turning his back. But this door only opened into another passage, and we had to follow him for fifty feet and then through another door into a cavern that was bigger than any. And this time our host was not alone. We were expected by a dozen lean, bronze men, who squatted in a row on one mat with expressionless faces. They were not wearing masks, but they looked as if they might have been.
This last cavern was certainly a blow-hole. Its round roof, blackened with smoke, was like the underside of a cathedral dome. No effort seemed to have been made to trim the walls, and the floor, too, had been left as nature made it, shaped something like a hollow dish by the pressure of expanding gases millions of years ago when the rock was molten.
The very center of the vast floor was the lowest point of all, and some work had been done there, for it was shaped into a rectangular trough thirty feet long by ten wide. That trough—there was no guessing how deep it might be—was filled almost to the brim with white-hot charcoal, so that obviously there was a means of forcing a draft into it from underneath.
"Now," said the Mahatma, turning to King as usual and ignoring me, "your friend may submit to the test if he wishes. He may walk on that furnace. He shall walk unscathed. I promise it."
King turned to me.
"What d'you say?" he asked. "I've seen this done before.[2] It can be done. Shall we try it together?"
I did not hesitate. There are times when even such a slow thinker as I am can make up his mind in a flash. I said "No" with such emphasis that King laughed. The Mahatma looked at me rather pityingly, but made no comment. He invited the two of us to sit down, so we squatted on the floor as close to the trough as we could go without being scorched. There were no screens or obstructions of any kind, and the only appliance in evidence was an iron paddle, which the man who had admitted us picked up off the floor.
He took that paddle, and without any preliminary fuss or hesitation walked straight on to the bed of white-hot charcoal, beginning at one end, and smoothed the whole glowing surface with the paddle, taking his time about it and working with as little excitement as a gardener using a rake. When he had finished the end of the paddle was better than red-hot—a good cherry-red.
The hairs on his legs were unscorched. The cotton cloth of which his kilt was made showed not the slightest trace of burning.
As soon as he had sat down the other twelve advanced toward the fire. Unlike him, they were stark naked. One by one they walked into the fire and traversed it from end to end with no more sign of nervousness than if they had been utterly unconscious of its existence. Then they turned around and walked back again.
"Is it the men or the fire?" King demanded.
"Neither," the Mahatma answered. "It is simply knowledge. Any one can do it, who knows how."
One of the men approached the fire again. He sat down on it, and went through the motions of bathing himself in the white-hot flame, turning his head repeatedly to grin at us. Then, lying down full-length, he rolled from end to end of the furnace, and walked away at last as casually as if he had come out of a bath. It was perfectly astonishing stuff to watch.
"If this isn't superstition, or mesmerism, or deception of some kind, why do you insist on all this mummery of soot and ashes for my friend and me?" King demanded. "Why do you use a temple full of Hindu idols to conceal your science, if it is a natural science and not trickery?"
The Gray Mahatma smiled tolerantly.
"Can you suggest a better way of keeping the secret?" he answered. "We are protected by the superstition. Not even the Government of India would dare arouse the superstitious wrath of a people by inquiring too closely into what goes on beneath a temple. If we were to admit that what we know is science, just as wireless telegraphy is a science, we would not be safe for an hour; the military, the kings of commerce, the merely curious, and all the enemies of mankind would invent ten thousand excuses of investigating us."
"Where did you learn English?" King demanded.
"I am a Ph.D. of Johns Hopkins," the Gray Mahatma answered. "I have traveled all over the United States seeking for one man who might be trusted with the rudiments of our science. But I found none."
"Suppose you had found the wrong man—and trusted him?" King suggested.
"My friend," said the Gray Mahatma, "you are better known to us than we to you. You are a man incapable of treachery. You love India, and all your life you have striven to act always and in all things like a man. You have been watched for years. Your character has been studied. If our purpose had been to conquer the world, or to destroy the world, we would never have selected you. There is no need to speak to you of what would happen if you should commit treachery. There is no risk of your explaining the secret of our science to the wrong individual, for you are not going to be taught it."
"Well, what of my friend Ramsden?" King asked him.
"Your friend Mr. Ramsden, I think, will never again see the United States."
"Why?"
"He has seen too much for his own good. He lacks your mentality. He has bravery of a kind, and honesty of a kind; but he is—not—the right—man—for—our—purpose. He made a mistake when he came with you."
King looked straight into the eyes of the Gray Mahatma.
"You think you know me?" he asked.
"I know you better than you know yourself!"
"That's possible," said King. "Do you suppose I would tell you the truth?"
"I know it. I am sure of it. You have too much integrity to deal in lies."
"Very well," King answered quietly, "it's both of us or neither. Either we both go free, or you do your worst to us both. This man is my friend."
The Gray Mahatma smiled, and thought, and smiled, and looked at King, and then away again.
"It would be a pity to destroy yourself," he said at last. "Nevertheless, you are the only chance your friend has. I have no enmity against him; he is merely unsuitable; he will be the victim of his own shortcomings, unless you can rescue him. But if you make the attempt and fail, I am afraid, my friend, that that will be the end of both of you."
It was rather like listening to your own autopsy! I confess that I began again to feel horribly afraid, although not so much so that I cared to force King into danger on my account, and once more I made my mind up swiftly. I reached out to seize the Gray Mahatma by the throat. But King struck my hand up.
"We're two to their many," he said sternly. "Keep your hair on!"
The Mahatma smiled and nodded.
"A second time you have done well," he exclaimed. "If you can keep the buffalo from blundering—but we waste time. Come."
King put his hands on my shoulders, and we lock-stepped out of the cavern behind the Mahatma, looking, I don't doubt, supremely ridiculous, and I for one feeling furiously helpless.
We entered another cave, whose dome looked like an absolutely perfect hemisphere, but the whole place was so full of noise that your brain reeled in confusion. There were ten men in there, naked to the waist as all the rest had been, and every single one of them had the intelligent look of an alert bird with its head to one side. They were sitting on mats on the floor in no apparent order, and each man had a row of tuning forks in front of him, pretty much like any other tuning forks, except that there were eight of them to each note and its subdivisions.
Every few minutes one of them would select a fork, strike it, and listen; then he would get up, dragging his mat after him with all the forks arranged on it, and sit down somewhere else. But the tuning forks were not the cause of the din. It was the roar of a great city that was echoing under the dome—clatter of traffic and men's voices, whistling of the wind through overhead wires, dogs' barking, an occasional bell, at intervals the whistle of a locomotive and the rumble and bump of a railroad train, whirring of dynamoes, the clash and thump of trolley cars, street-hawkers' cries, and the sound of sea-waves breaking on the shore.
"You hear Bombay," said the Mahatma. Then we all sat down in line.
It was actual physical torture until you were used to it, and I doubt whether you could get used to it without somebody to educate you—some scientist to show you how to defend your nerves against that outrageous racket. For the sounds were all out of adjustment and proportion. Nothing was in key. It was as if the laws of acoustics had been lifted, and sound had gone crazy.
At one moment, apropos of nothing and disconnected from all other sounds, you could hear a man or a woman speaking as distinctly as if the individual were up there under the dome; then a chaos of off-key notes would swallow the voice, and the next might be a dog's bark or a locomotive whistle. The only continuously recognizable sounds were a power station and the thunder of waves along the harbor front, and it sounded much more thunderous than it should have done at that season of the year.
The tuning of an orchestra does not nearly approximate the confusion; for the members of the orchestra are all trying to find one pitch and are gradually hitting it, whereas every sound within that cavern seemed to be pitched and keyed differently.
"This is our latest," said the Mahatma. "It is only for two or three hundred years that we have been studying this phenomenon. It may possibly take us two or three hundred years more before we can control it."
I wanted to ask questions, but could not because the cursed inharmony made my senses reel. Nevertheless, you could hear other sounds perfectly. When I struck my hand on the rock floor I could hear the slap at least as distinctly as normal; possibly a little more so. And when the Gray Mahatma spoke, each word was separate and sharp.
"Now you shall hear another city," he said. "Observe that the voices of cities are as various as men's. No two are alike. Sound and color are one and the same thing differently expressed, and the graduations of both are infinite."
He caught the eye of one of the men.
"Calcutta!" he said, in a voice not exactly of command, yet certainly not of deference.
Without acknowledging the order in any other way, the man got on his knees and picked up an enormous tuning fork, whose prongs were about three feet long, and he made some adjustment in the fork of it that took about five minutes. He might have been turning the screw of a micrometer; I could not see. Then, raising the fork above his shoulder, he struck the floor with it, and a master-note as clear as the peal of a bell went ringing up into the dome.
The effect was almost ridiculous. It made you want to laugh. Everybody in the cavern smiled, and I daresay if the truth were known we had discovered the mother-lode of comedy. That one note chased all the others out of the dome as a dog might chase sheep—as the wind blows clouds away—as a cop drives small boys off the grass. They actually scampered out of hearing, and you couldn't imagine them hiding close by, either; they were gone for good, and that one, clear master-note—the middle F—went vibrating around and around, as if scouring out the very smell of what had been there.
"That is the key-note of all nature," said the Mahatma. "All sounds, all colors, all thoughts, all vibrations center in that note. It is the key that can unlock them all."
The silence that followed when the last ringing overtone had gone off galloping in its stride toward infinity was the most absolute and awful silence I have ever had to listen to. The very possibility of sound seemed to have ceased to exist. You could not believe that there could be sound, nor remember what sound was like. A whole sense and its functions had been taken from you, and the resultant void was dead—so dead that no sense could live in it, unless fear is a sense. You could feel horribly afraid, and I'll tell you what the fear amounted to:
There was a feeling that these men were fooling with the force that runs the universe, and that the next stroke might be a mistake that would result like the touching of two high-tension wires, multiplied to the nth. You could not resist the suggestion that the world might burst in fragments at any minute.
Meanwhile the fellow with the tuning fork fiddled again with some adjustment on the thick portion of its stem, and presently whirling it around his head as the old-time warriors used two-handed swords, he brought it down on one of a circle of small anvils that were arranged around him like the figures on a clock-face.
You could almost see Calcutta instantly! The miracle was the reverse of the preceding one. The ringing, subdivided, sharp, discordant note he struck was swallowed instantly in a sea of noise that seemed not only to have color but even smell to it; you could smell Calcutta! But that, of course, was mere suggestion—a trick of the senses of the sort that makes your mouth water when you see another fellow suck a lemon.
You could even hear the crows that sit on the trees in the park and caw at passers-by. You could hear the organ in a Christian church, and the snarl of a pious Moslem reading from the Koran. There was the click of ponies' hoofs, the whirring and honk of motor-cars, the sucking of Hoogli River, booming of a steamer-whistle, roars of trains, and the peculiar clamor of Calcutta's swarms that I can never hear without thinking of a cobra with its hood just ready to raise.
In the sea of noises in the dome one instantly stood out—the voice of a man speaking English with a slightly babu accent. For exactly as long as the reverberations of those two tuning forks lasted, you could hear him declaiming, and then his voice faded away into the ocean of noise like a rock that has shown for a moment above the surface of a maelstrom.
"That is a member of the legislature, where ignorant men in all-night session make laws for fools to break," said the Gray Mahatma.
Signing to King and me to remain seated, he himself crossed the floor to where the master-tuner sat, and squatting down beside him began picking up tuning forks and striking one against the other. Each time he did that some city sound or other distinguished itself for a moment, exactly as the theme appears in music; only some of the vibrations seemed to jar against others instead of blending with them, and when that happened the effect was intensely disagreeable.
At last he struck a combination that made me jump as effectually as sudden tooth-ache. Some of the other sounds had affected King more, but that particular one passed him by and tortured me. Watching with his head a little to one side the Gray Mahatma instantly began striking those two forks as rapidly as if he were clapping hands, increasing the vehemence with each stroke.
If I had stayed there I would have been stark mad or dead within five minutes. I felt as if I were being vibrated asunder—as if my whole body were resolving into its component parts. I lay on the floor with my head in both hands, and I daresay yelled with agony, but I don't know about that.
At any rate King understood and acted instantly. He seized me under the arms and dragged me face-downward to the door, where he had to drop me in order to find how to open the thing. Having accomplished that, he dragged me through into the passage, where the agony ceased as instantly as the ache does when a dentist pulls an abscessed tooth. No one sound reached us through the open door. However immature that particular branch of their science might be, they had learned the way of absolutely localizing noise.
The Gray Mahatma came out smiling, and ignoring me as if I was not there.
He opened another door, not requiring to knock this time, and led the way along another passage that wound through solid rock for what can hardly have been less than a quarter of a mile.
King had dragged me out of that dome of dins in the nick of time, and my head was recovering rapidly. By the time we reached a door at the end of that long passage I could think clearly, and although too weak to stand upright without holding on to something, was sufficiently recovered to know that the remainder would be only a matter of minutes. And we spent three or four of the minutes waiting for the door to open, which it did at last suddenly.
A man appeared in the opening, whose absolutely white hair reached below his shoulder-blades, and whose equally white beard descended to his middle. He wore the usual loin-cloth, but was usual in nothing else. He looked older than Methuselah, yet strong, for his muscles stood out like knotted whip-cords; and active, for he stood on the balls of his feet with the immobility that only comes of ableness. The most unusual thing of all was that he spoke. He said several words in Sanskrit to the Gray Mahatma, before turning his back on us and leading the way in.
