"At the time I swore him to secrecy, of course, and I honestly believe that up until the time I left Jasor's body for the purpose of making a final trip to earth, he was the only man who knew that the spirit within it was not the same as the one it had held at birth. But"—a smile flicked across his lips—"just as on my first excursion to Palos I made an error and nearly precipitated myself into the fiery heart of Sirius, so I seem to have overlooked the human equation which holds on Palos no less than earth—and I overlooked also the fact that Zud was the high priest.
"Abbu, after the war with Zollaria, had been brought to Zitra and raised to a higher rank, because of his part in first assisting me. Naturally Zud was acquainted with all such facts, and one can hardly blame him for wanting to know more in view of what I can well understand were the tremendous changes I had brought about in Tamarizia's affairs.
"To me motors and firearms were nothing save things of every-day experience, and what I had made on Palos seemed but as crude devices at the best. But to Zud and all others they appeared little short of the miraculous, upsetting all former conceptions of their lives. Take that into consideration and then picture the impression on his mind likely to be made by the fact that by my own admission I was not the same Jasor of Nodhur who, according to the physician attending him in Scira, had there died."
I began to understand what must have happened.
"He pumped Abbu?" I exclaimed.
"Exactly." Croft smiled dryly again. "He absolved him from his oath and learned all the facts with which Abbu was acquainted. You can easily understand the rest. Jasor of Nodhur dies. His body comes back to life. Its lips speak to Abbu, the priest. He hears that a new spirit inhabits Jasor's body. Immediately after strange things—but things aimed wholly for Tamarizia's good—begin to happen.
"Shall the dead live again, save by divine intervention? Shall undreamed of things appear save by Zitu's grace? And if in addition the revivified body shall fall into strange sleeps at times and upon waking seem possessed of a supernatural knowledge, what more natural to the priest—unendowed with a full understanding of what was taking place, unaware that the things that excited his unlimited amazement were but copies of things existing on another planet—than to consider that those things he witnessed were the result of divine ordination and to regard the individual who brought them about as the mouthpiece of his god in the flesh? Oh, frankly, Murray, I don't blame that puzzled old man in the least. As a matter of fact, I blame myself for not having foreseen the effect of all that had happened on his brain."
Croft put out a hand and selected a fresh cigar. He set it alight and got it to going nicely while, as it seemed to me, he marshaled his thoughts. And then—all at once he began speaking again, and this is the story he told.
The Palosian day—or "sun"—is twenty-seven hours long. Dawn was on the verge of breaking when Croft, having severed the astral link with his earthly body, opened Jasor of Nodhur's physical eyes in the room of the Zitran pyramid. And because now he had taken the last step which so nearly as possible must make him a Palosian indeed, and nothing held him longer on any other sphere, he opened his eyes in a flash.