“Without you,” he said, “or without her, San-fun-ho will find others. She is my chela, and I know the power that is in her. But beware of being false! Better for you never to have been born! Better to die ten thousand deaths than to betray her through self-seeking! Let her alone, my son, unless you can follow all the way! Then, if she should lead you wrong, that will be her affair; in after lives you will have karma of sincerity, and she the fruit of false teaching—if she should teach falsely.—But I know my chela. She will lead upward, as an eagle, and all the enemies of light will spread their nets for her in vain!”
As he ceased speaking the whole western wall of the gigantic pit became suffused in silver, as the moon’s edge crossed the eastern rim. Wan, scrawny crags of limestone yearned like frozen ghosts toward the light. The pit’s awful nakedness lay revealed, its outlines dimmed in shadow, as mysterious, as silent and as measureless as the emotion born of gazing.
Suddenly, as the moon’s disk appeared, there shone a green light in the midst of the pit—a light that swirled as if in moving water, and increased in size, as if it multiplied itself within the substance it had touched. It grew into a pool—a globe—a sphere—an ovoid mass of liquid green light, all in motion, transparent, huge—afloat, it seemed, in black precipitated silence, two, or perhaps three hundred feet away. Slowly, very slowly, it became apparent that the egg-shaped mass was resting on seven upright stones, of the same color as itself, that were set beneath it on a platform of dark rock that rose exactly in the middle of the pit.
As the full moon floated into view the enormous mass of jade so caught the light that it seemed to absorb all of it. And suddenly a figure stood before the livid jade—a girl’s; she was the Gretchen-girl, with whom Ommony had spoken on the night when he first saw San-fun-ho’s companions on the stage. She was draped in white, but the stuff glowed green in the jade’s reflection, and as she peered into the enormous stone she held the end of the loose drapery across the lower portion of her face, like a shield, with her elbow forward. She gazed for about a minute, and then disappeared. Another took her place.
“It is only San-fun-ho who dares to look into the Jade for long,” said the Lama solemnly. “It shows them all the horror of their lower selves. They look by moonlight. They must drape themselves, for they have much to overcome, and there is magic in the Jade. None but my chela—none but San-fun-ho—dares to face it in the full light of the sun.”
One by one the seventeen girls appeared, looked deep into the Jade, and vanished into darkness.
“They are not bad,” said the Lama. “Not bad, my son. There are not so many better women. Do you dare to look?”
But Ommony sat still.
“Better so,” said the Lama. “In curiosity there is no wisdom. He who can not look long enough to see his higher nature shining through the lower, had better have seen nothing.”
There commenced a chant, of women’s voices, rising from the fathomless darkness below the Jade. It began by being low and almost melancholy, but changed suddenly into faster tempo and a rising theme of triumph, ending in a measured march of glory. There was no accompaniment, no drum-beat, but the final phrases pulsed with power, ending on a chord that left imagination soaring into upper realms of splendor. Then, in silence, as sublimely as the moon had sailed across the rim of the dark pit, the girls emerged out of the black night as if they had been projected by a magic lantern. No sound of footfall or of breathing reached across the intervening gap as, with restraint that told of strength in hand and limitless lore of rhythm, they danced their weaving measure seven times around the stone, as lovely to the eye as Grecian figures, cut in cameo on green and conjured into life. It was sheer spiritual magic.