Rising, the old man moved toward an arched opening at one side of the stone chamber. Tip, fierce-eyed, loyal, beside Roger, realized as he tugged at his empty holster that in some clever way he had been disarmed. A glance behind him showed the mocking lama, holding his own weapon. Tip gauged the chances of a leap, shrugged. It was useless. Monastery attendants were at all the open doorways.
“Buck up!” he whispered.
“It may not be so bad,” Roger tried to reassure them both.
They followed, as follow they must, down a long, echoing, empty corridor. Far away, low, weird, they could hear male voices, deep, rather disturbing in tone, chanting some uncouth succession of notes.
Their slow walk behind the aged conductor brought them constantly nearer to the chant, for the voices grew louder.
At a doorway, heavily shrouded in lustrous woven velvet or other drapery, the guide swung, and an attendant, bowing, moved the cloth to one side. The chanting swelled suddenly.
Resistance was futile. As the guide moved aside, motioning, Roger, and Tip after him, passed under the great stone door-lintel, into a large square chamber full of the chanting lamas.
And at the end, in a niche, on a sort of raised dais, sat the huge carved wooden image or statue of the Meditating Buddha or prophet of their religion, and in its forehead glowed, in the flickering torchlight, the great, green duplicate—it appeared—of the Eye of Om.
At first it flashed through Roger’s mind that this was strange; but at once he realized that, of course, they would have replaced the gem with a substitute or an imitation, and would not tell many of the loss.
Thrust forward by the lama who had brought them there, Roger and Potts were ushered down the aisle between rows of kneeling, low-and-mocking-voiced monks or lamas, to the space below the great figure.