“Not convert-ible. I see. Still the same old Tip, far though you are, as you say, from Grover’s dark-room. But they seem to look up to this man who brought us. He’s sort of bossy, too, and they mind.”
They were made as comfortable as the rude conditions of the cold, harsh life the lamas led would allow.
Roger was glad that Tip was not separated from him. They were both given one cell, a gloomy, but not prison-like cell that looked out through its narrow window over a vast, tumbled, fissure-creased series of crags and ravines, cliffs and snow-covered peaks.
It was as though the Creator of the world had flung this wild mass of rock helter-skelter, in a long backbone, to hold the world together.
Simple, not too palatable food was ungrudgingly served, and their conductor visited them several times to see that they needed nothing he could offer.
The radio-telephone, answered by Doctor Ryder, reassured them. The bandits had been sent away by abrupt orders from another lama. Not a can of food or a bit of apparatus had been disturbed or taken.
The communicating sets worked well, and things were not so bad.
The gaunt, silent, stern-faced lamas served them without comment or objection; and Tip and Roger were allowed to roam at will through most of the corridors, rooms, cells and even were permitted to attend the chanting devotions of the men in a huge chapel-like place. But that, they were certain, was not the “temple” because there was no Buddha of the stature they expected, or with a spare Eye either missing or replaced by an imitation.
But nothing advanced. Nothing happened. Days dragged by.
The explanation came when their captor, or host, brought them into a sort of general community room, where he presented them before a very sedate and reserved and cold-visaged old man. Roger, however, did not feel any fear, because the man’s eyes seemed to hold some deep, broad-minded tolerance. He looked kindly.