“But what in the world is this gibberish about Egyptian gods?” asked the Englishman.

“Cats,” said Dana Da, with a hiccough, for he had discovered the Englishman’s whisky bottle.  “Cats and cats and cats!  Never was such a Sending.  A hundred of cats.  Now give me ten more rupees and write as I dictate.”

Dana Da’s letter was a curiosity.  It bore the Englishman’s signature, and hinted at cats—­at a Sending of cats.  The mere words on paper were creepy and uncanny to behold.

“What have you done, though?” said the Englishman; “I am as much in the dark as ever.  Do you mean to say that you can actually send this absurd Sending you talk about?”

“Judge for yourself,” said Dana Da.  “What does that letter mean?  In a little time they will all be at my feet and yours, and I, oh, glory! will be drugged or drunk all day long.”

Dana Da knew his people.

When a man who hates cats wakes up in the morning and finds a little squirming kitten on his breast, or puts his hand into his ulster pocket and finds a little half-dead kitten where his gloves should be, or opens his trunk and finds a vile kitten among his dress shirts, or goes for a long ride with his mackintosh strapped on his saddle-bow and shakes a little sprawling kitten from its folds when he opens it, or goes out to dinner and finds a little blind kitten under his chair, or stays at home and finds a writhing kitten under the quilt, or wriggling among his boots, or hanging, head downward, in his tobacco jar, or being mangled by his terrier in the veranda—­when such a man finds one kitten, neither more nor less, once a day in a place where no kitten rightly could or should be, he is naturally upset.  When he dare not murder his daily trove because he believes it to be a manifestation, an emissary, an embodiment, and half a dozen other things all out of the regular course of nature, he is more than upset.  He is actually distressed.  Some of Lone Sahib’s coreligionists thought that he was a highly favored individual; but many said that if he had treated the first kitten with proper respect—­as suited a Toth-Ra Tum-Sennacherib Embodiment—­all his trouble would have been averted.  They compared him to the Ancient Mariner, but none the less they were proud of him and proud of the Englishman who had sent the manifestation.  They did not call it a Sending because Icelandic magic was not in their programme.

After sixteen kittens—­that is to say, after one fortnight, for there were three kittens on the first day to impress the fact of the Sending, the whole camp was uplifted by a letter—­it came flying through a window—­from the Old Man of the Mountains—­the head of all the creed—­explaining the manifestation in the most beautiful language and soaking up all the credit of it for himself.  The Englishman, said the letter, was not there at all.  He was a backslider without power or asceticism, who couldn’t even raise a table by force of volition,