A haughty smile, dark-red streaked with white against a brown background, the whole lighted by two eyes of marvelous power, met our gaze.
"Only by soul itself is soul perceived," answered Yamama, somewhat irrelevantly, I thought.
"You're out, my dear," whispered Edgerton, playfully, to his wife.
"May I trouble you, my dear sir," began Van Tromp, pompously--"may I trouble you to explain to a mind darkened by Occidental erudition why it is that the West is so blind to the mighty truths that you teach?"
"That's a touchdown," muttered Edgerton.
Yamama gazed fixedly at the poet for a time. Then he said:
"The West is not blind to the mighty truths of which you speak. You only imagine that you do not see them. Your great thinkers have taught what we teach. Schopenhauer, Lessing, Hegel, Leibnitz, Herder, Fichte the younger, are with us. Your great poets sing the eternal verities. It is nothing new, that which I bring to you from the East."
"Is there--ah--any reason to fear," I dared to ask, "that when we--ah--change around again--I mean--ah--get reincarnated, you see, that we become--ah--frogs or--or snakes--that is, if we don't--ah--so to speak, stay put?"
My voice had been gradually ascending Caroline's scale until it hit the interrogation mark in a sharp falsetto. As Yamama's eyes met mine I thought for an instant that I had been struck by lightning. What his strange glance--cutting through me until I knew that I had no secrets left--meant I had no way of determining. I was like a rabbit fascinated by an anaconda.
"There is salvation for him whose self disappears before truth, whose will is bent upon what he ought to do, whose sole desire is the performance of his duty. The root of all evil is ignorance." Thus spake Yamama, whether in answer to my question I could not decide.