There was a stress of sharp cold that year about the 20th of August.  Then the weather turned warm again, and held fine till the beginning of October, within a week of the time when Jackson was to sail.  It had not been so hard to make him consent when he knew where the doctor wished him to go, and he had willingly profited by Westover’s suggestions about getting to Egypt.  His interest in the matter, which he tried to hide at first under a mask of decorous indifference, mounted with the fire of Whitwell’s enthusiasm, and they held nightly councils together, studying his course on the map, and consulting planchette upon the points at variance that rose between them, while Jombateeste sat with his chair tilted against the wall, and pulled steadily at his pipe, which mixed its strong fumes with the smell of the kerosene-lamp and the perennial odor of potatoes in the cellar under the low room where the companions forgathered.

Toward the end of September Westover spent the night before he went back to town with them.  After a season with planchette, their host pushed himself back with his knees from the table till his chair reared upon its hind legs, and shoved his hat up from his forehead in token of philosophical mood.

“I tell you, Jackson,” he said, “you’d ought to get hold o’ some them occult devils out there, and squeeze their science out of ’em.  Any Buddhists in Egypt, Mr. Westover?”

“I don’t think there are,” said Westover.  “Unless Jackson should come across some wandering Hindu.  Or he might push on, and come home by the way of India.”

“Do it, Jackson!” his friend conjured him.  “May cost you something more, but it ’ll be worth the money.  If it’s true, what some them Blavetsky fellers claim, you can visit us here in your astral body—­git in with ’em the right way.  I should like to have you try it.  What’s the reason India wouldn’t be as good for him as Egypt, anyway?” Whitwell demanded of Westover.

“I suppose the climate’s rather too moist; the heat would be rather trying to him there.”

“That so?”

“And he’s taken his ticket for Alexandria,” Westover pursued.

“Well, I guess that’s so.”  Whitwell tilted his backward sloping hat to one side, so as to scratch the northeast corner of his bead thoughtfully.

“But as far as that is concerned,” said Westover, “and the doctrine of immortality generally is concerned, Jackson will have his hands full if he studies the Egyptian monuments.”

“What they got to do with it?”

“Everything.  Egypt is the home of the belief in a future life; it was carried from Egypt to Greece.  He might come home by way of Athens.”

“Why, man!” cried Whitwell.  “Do you mean to say that them old Hebrew saints, Joseph’s brethren, that went down into Egypt after corn, didn’t know about immortality, and them Egyptian devils did?”

“There’s very little proof in the Old Testament that the Israelites knew of it.”