"You'll have to walk me about soon, Pudgie, and bang me with bladders, as they do the opium-patients," he said sleepily.
"Let me take one of the statue now," I said eagerly.
But he put up his hand.
"No, no. That's too much like testing our god. Faith's the food they feed gods on, Pudgie. We'll let the S.P.R. people photograph it when it's all over," he said. "Now get it developed."
I developed the plate. The obliteration now seemed complete.
But Benlian seemed dissatisfied.
"There's something wrong somewhere," he said. "It isn't so perfect as that yet—I can feel within me it isn't. It's merely that your camera isn't strong enough to find me, Pudgie."
"I'll get another in the morning," I cried.
"No," he answered. "I know something better than that. Have a cab here by ten o'clock in the morning, and we'll go somewhere."
By half-past ten the next morning we had driven to a large hospital, and had gone down a lot of steps and along corridors to a basement room. There was a stretcher couch in the middle of the room, and all manner of queer appliances, frames of ground glass, tubes of glass blown into extraordinary shapes, a dynamo, and a lot of other things all about. A couple of doctors were there too, and Benlian was talking to them.