“Yes, rather. I’ve never seen a tiger outside of a cage,” said Forsyth. “What about you, John?”
“Yes, I’ll come along, but I won’t stop long. Directly after Christmas I’ll push on and start getting things together, and you can meet me at Calcutta.”
“Then that’s that, and now for bed. One thing, John. How do you account for finding your man? I don’t mean the shooting part and the sister, but the rest? It’s one of the most extraordinary things I ever heard.”
“I don’t attempt to account for it really. But although, as you know, I don’t profess any particular kind of religion, I do believe that something or some one runs the show with some very clear design. And just as the smallest part in the biggest machine has to be made to work on appointed lines, so, too, each one of us must have some definite part to play, though we may not know what it’s all about while we’re doing it. In this case I hope it doesn’t sound as if I was talking through my hat when I say that I really do believe that for some reason or other we’re meant to get to this country which we think exists.
“Remember that my getting there didn’t save that fellow’s life. Also, you can’t quite account by mere telepathy for my feeling of some one calling me. The first day, perhaps, yes. He was probably just about dying then, and maybe his calls for help travelled in some unknown way to me, the nearest human being.
“But—when I started off into the desert—the impression disappeared, and did not reappear until I was on the point of turning back. Then it suddenly reappeared stronger than ever, and the man had been dead two days.
“I was clearly not meant to save his life, but I do think, queer as it may sound, that I was meant to find his body.
“That, combined with the chance of my great-great-uncle finding the country, the chance, if you call it so, of my picking up those old papers at home before I came out, and the chance of my being able to go up to Central Asia and of being there just at that particular moment, to me point to the fact of our being intended to get to that hidden country.
“Why I or either of you or all of us are wanted there, and what we are to do when we get there, the Power that starts us off alone knows. But I cannot help the feeling that we are meant to get there, and that we shall get there. Then beyond that all is a blank. But the getting-there part seems to me Sapper’s ‘three times’—simply a moral cert.”
“As for me, I don’t believe in anything particularly, and it’s all quite beyond me,” said Forsyth. “But the prospect is pleasing enough without worrying about the why and wherefore. I shall look forward to trying twentieth-century medicine on second-century Greeks.”