But it was no lie.  You could not think up a lie to equal the actual things that happened to Rodman.  Take the way he died!....

The thing began in India.  Rodman had gone there to consult with the Marchese Giovanni concerning some molecular theory that was involved in his formulas.  Giovanni was digging up a buried temple on the northern border of the Punjab.  One night, in the explorer’s tent, near the excavations, this inscrutable creature walked in on Rodman.  No one knew how he got into the tent or where he came from.

Giovanni told about it.  The tent-flap simply opened, and the big Oriental appeared.  He had something under his arm rolled up in a prayer-carpet.  He gave no attention to Giovanni, but he salaamed like a coolie to the little American.

“Master,” he said, “you were hard to find.  I have looked over the world for you.”

And he squatted down on the dirty floor by Rodman’s camp stool.

Now, that’s precisely the truth.  I suppose any ordinary person would have started no end of fuss.  But not Rodman, and not, I think, Giovanni.  There’s the attitude that we can’t understand in a genius — did you ever know a man with an inventive mind who doubted a miracle?  A thing like that did not seem unreasonable to Rodman.

The two men spent the remainder of the night looking at the present that the creature brought Rodman in his prayer-carpet.  They wanted to know where the Oriental got it, and that’s how his story came out.

He was something — searcher, seems our nearest English word to it - in the great Shan Monastery on the southeastern plateau of the Gobi.  He was looking for Rodman because he had the light — here was another word that the two men could find no term in any modern language to translate; a little flame, was the literal meaning.

The present was from the treasure-room of the monastery; the very carpet around it, Giovanni said, was worth twenty thousand lire.  There was another thing that came out in the talk that Giovanni afterward recalled.  Rodman was to accept the present and the man who brought it to him.  The Oriental would protect him, in every way, in every direction, from things visible and invisible.  He made quite a speech about it.  But, there was one thing from which he could not protect him.

The Oriental used a lot of his ancient words to explain, and he did not get it very clear.  He seemed to mean that the creative Forces of the spirit would not tolerate a division of worship with the creative forces of the body — the celibate notion in the monastic idea.

Giovanni thought Rodman did not understand it; he thought he himself understood it better.  The monk was pledging Rodman to a high virtue, in the lapse of which something awful was sure to happen.