“She will go with you, thinking I come later. You may tell her in Tilgaun, and she will understand. She will be brave then. She will not forget she was my chela.”
There was only the sound of humming after that until the crags around the rim of the great pit grew faintly luminous before the coming of the dawn, and the stars grew paler. Then the hum swelled into song, whose music sounded like the mystic evolution of new worlds; they were all girls’ voices, thrilling with courage and exultation. Ommony strained his ears to catch the words, but the distance was too great. Somehow, although he could not penetrate the darkness, he felt as if a veil were lifting.
The song ceased, and in the hush that followed Tsiang Samdup rose to his feet.
“I go,” he said quietly. “I am old, my son. I can not bear to say good-by to my beloved chela. May the gods, who guard your manhood, give you strength and honesty to serve her. She will ask for me. You may say to her: ‘The first duty of a chela is obedience.’ ”
He turned into the tunnel, walking swiftly, and was gone. A silver bell rang, over in the distance, opposite, seven times, slow and distinct; then a pause, in which the overtones spread off into infinity; then seven times again. And as the last note faded into silence, dawn touched the crags with silver and the chela’s voice rose young and glorious, intoning the oldest invocation in the world:
“O my Divinity, blend Thou with me . . . that out of darkness I may go forth in Light.”
Daylight spread swiftly down the crags until it touched a ledge on which the chela stood, and all beneath that was darkness, like a pool of ink. Her right hand was raised. The other girls, beneath her, were invisible. Dawn glistened on her face.
Her lips moved and her breast swelled as she drew breath to intone the Word. And then, in chorus from the mist and darkness that enwrapped her feet, and from her own lips, came the magic, long-drawn syllable that has been sacred since before Atlantis sank under the ocean and new races explored new continents—the Word that signifies immeasurable, absolute, unthinkable, all-compassing, for ever infinite and unattainable, sublime and holy Essence—the Beginning and the End.
“O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-om-m-m-m-m—”
It rose, and rose, and died away among the crags, until the last reverberation echoed faintly from the upper levels and there came an answer to it, sonorous and strong, in a man’s voice, from a crag beside a cave-mouth three hundred feet above the ledge where Ommony stood, nearly midway between him and the chela.