will only be prompted by the most devoted attachment, on the part of the spiritual traveller, to the idea of duty in its purest abstraction.  The second great risk is that of allowing the sense of duty to predominate over the temptation to stay—­a temptation, be it remembered, that is not weakened by the motive that any conceivable penalty can attach to it.  Even then it is always doubtful whether the traveller will be able to return.”

All this is exactly as Mr Sinnett has described it.  I shall never forget the struggle that I had with my ego when, ignoring “the idea of duty in its purest abstraction,” it refused to abandon the bliss of nirvana for the troubles of this mundane life; or the anxiety both of my manas, or human soul, and my buddhi, or spiritual soul, lest, after by our combined efforts we had overcome our ego, we should not be able to do our duty by our rupa, or natural body, and get back into it.

Of course, my migrations to the mahatma region of Thibet were accompanied by no such difficulty as this—­as, to go with your linga sharira, or astral body, to another country, is a very different and much more simple process than it is to go with your manas, or human soul, into nirvana.  Still it was a decided relief to find myself comfortably installed with my material body, or rupa, in the house of a Thibetan brother on that sacred soil which has for so many centuries remained unpolluted by a profane foot.

Here I passed a tranquil and contemplative existence for some years, broken only by such incidents as my passage into nirvana, and disturbed only by a certain subjective sensation of aching or void, by which I was occasionally attacked, and which I was finally compelled to attribute, much to my mortification, to the absence of women.  In the whole of this sacred region, the name of which I am compelled to withhold, there was not a single female.  Everybody in it was given up to contemplation and ascetic absorption; and it is well known that profound contemplation, for any length of time, and the presence of the fair sex, are incompatible.  I was much troubled by this vacuous sensation, which I felt to be in the highest degree derogatory to my fifth principle, and the secret of which I discovered, during a trance-condition which lasted for several months, to arise from a subtle magnetism, to which, owing to my peculiar organic condition, I was especially sensitive, and which penetrated the mahatma region from a tract of country almost immediately contiguous to it in the Karakorum Mountains, which was as jealously guarded from foreign intrusion as our own, and which was occupied by the “Thibetan Sisters,” a body of female occultists of whom the Brothers never spoke except in terms of loathing and contempt.  It is not, therefore, to be wondered at that no mention is made either of them, or the lovely highland district they occupy,