He kept his thoughts behind his lips.
“But why must you restore the Eye, at so much risk?” Grover, put in possession of facts already known to Roger, asked, “Turn it over to those mysterious Tibetans who open safes and enter sealed rooms.”
“That’s the rub,” Clark declared. “Are they genuine priests? Or thieves?”
“The Voice of Doom is a genuine manifestation, apparently,” Doctor Ryder added, “at least, in the mountain temple, I heard something similar to the screaming doom. In some way they produce that noise, on a much greater scale of volume. It is said to be the Voice of Doom, and is supposed to come through the lips of their image of Buddha, as an omen, only when a criminal is being judged by the image, which is to say by the temple priests—or before some calamity such as an earthquake or famine year.”
“But maybe these fellows are using that, and pretending to be priests from the Forbidden Land, to scare us into giving up the gem,” Mr. Clark argued.
Real priests, bent on revenge, he insisted, struck first, spoke afterward, if at all. Or, these might be of some other sect or lamasery, as they called their mountain retreats.
“I can see that,” Ellison agreed.
“It is not from them so much comes the danger to Ryder,” Zendt was also a champion, “More from the hidden menace of the real Doom comes it.”
“If I could get away,” said Ellison, “I’d take back the thing for Ryder.”
“It is my risk. I got into this thing.”