All this, however, was but the external, physical, material view. Esoterically, or astrally speaking, our hero had achieved the supreme object of Yog, and in reality the young man had never been so much alive, so joyously youthful, so entirely free, or so recklessly gay.
For it was now Alonzo Leffingwell, the astral man, who at will walked in and out of the crumpled up physical shell and levitated gaily through tangled jungle and dreary desert.
It was not the body but the spirit, the ethereal man, which clove the atmosphere and hied itself away through space, quite independent of all our clumsy means of locomotion, of our ships and railways, and our foolish bikes and autos. In this superior state he became a very active member of the great body politic. He was continually on the go. He went everywhere and saw everything.
Questions of salary and transportation were done. He had no baggage to check. He had no hotel bills, no tips to pay. He could no longer be snowbound nor floodtied. He traveled on schedule time.
He was now equipped for any old state of matter. He was impervious to dust, dirt, noise, odors and confusion. He was now equal to Chicago.
Liberated, self-supporting and self-propelling, this gay Gnani betook himself from the gloomy glades of Gingalee. He hied himself joyously over jungle and desert. He blithely skimmed the sea. He poised himself above the breakers on his native shore. His eyes were on the setting sun, his heart in Kankakee.
Nothing asked he now of any man. The exactions of custom houses and the extortions of cabmen were no more. He had forever escaped the abbreviated bunk of the Pullman sleeper, and the elongated solicitude of the Pullman porter.
The annual pass, once so prized by the Kankakee journalist, was now as nothing. For He-Who-Knows is a perpetual deadhead. He has solved the annoyances of travel. Steamships and steam cars have no value to him. Transfers and trolleys trouble him no more.
HE-WHO-KNOWS has indeed solved the question of income and transportation. He has unlimited credit. He is rapid transit itself.