He beckoned me to come closer, and I rose and stood beside him. He went on as with a lecture:
“The reason given by the natives why this image is not found in Southern Asia is that it cannot be cast anywhere but in the Tibetan monasteries. A certain ritual at the time of casting is necessary to produce a perfect figure. This ritual is a secret of the Khan monasteries. Castings of this form of image made without the ritual are always defective; so I was told in India.”
He moved the glass box a little closer to the edge of the mantelpiece.
“Naturally,” he went on, “I considered this story, to be a mere piece of religious pretension. It amused me to make some experiments, and to my surprise the castings were always defective. I brought the image to England.”
He shrugged his shoulders as with a careless gesture.
“In my idle time here I tried it again. And incredibly the result was always the same; some portion of the figure showed a flaw. My interest in the thing was permanently aroused. I continued to experiment.”
He laughed in a queer high cackle.
“And presently I found myself desperately astride a hobby. I got all the Babbitt metal that I could buy up in England and put in the days and not a few of the nights in trying to cast a perfect figure of this confounded Buddha. But I have never been able to do it.”
He opened a drawer of the gun-case and brought over to the fire half a dozen castings of the Buddha in various sizes.
Not one among the number was perfect. Some portion of the figure was in every case wanting. A hand would be missing, a portion of a shoulder, a bit of the squat body or there would be a flaw where the running metal had not filled the mold.