THE FIRE BATHERS
Our little wrinkly-skinned host did the honors as far as the door, and I
thanked him for the demonstration; but the Gray Mahatma seemed
displeased with that and ignoring me as usual, turned on King in the
doorway almost savagely.
"Do you understand that whoever can do what you have just seen can also
accomplish the reverse of it, and transmute gold into baser metal?" he
demanded. "Does it occur to you what that would mean? A new species of
warfare! One combination of ambitious fools making gold--another
unmaking it. Chaos! Now you shall see another science that is no fit
pabulum for fools."
We came to a door on our right. It was opened instantly by a lean,
mean-looking ascetic, whose hooked nose suggested an infernal brand of
contempt for whoever might not agree with him. Just as the others had
done, he met the Gray Mahatma's eyes in silence, and admitted us by
simply turning his back. But this door only opened into another passage,
and we had to follow him for fifty feet and then through another door
into a cavern that was bigger than any. And this time our host was not
alone. We were expected by a dozen lean, bronze men, who squatted in a
row on one mat with expressionless faces. They were not wearing masks,
but they looked as if they might have been.
This last cavern was certainly a blow-hole. Its round roof, blackened
with smoke, was like the underside of a cathedral dome. No effort seemed
to have been made to trim the walls, and the floor, too, had been left
as nature made it, shaped something like a hollow dish by the pressure
of expanding gases millions of years ago when the rock was molten.
The very center of the vast floor was the lowest point of all, and some
work had been done there, for it was shaped into a rectangular trough
thirty feet long by ten wide. That trough--there was no guessing how
deep it might be--was filled almost to the brim with white-hot charcoal,
so that obviously there was a means of forcing a draft into it from
underneath.
"Now," said the Mahatma, turning to King as usual and ignoring me, "your
friend may submit to the test if he wishes. He may walk on that furnace.
He shall walk unscathed. I promise it."
King turned to me.
"What d'you say?" he asked. "I've seen this done before.[2] It can be
done. Shall we try it together?"
[Footnote 2: See the newspaper accounts of fire-walking in the presence
of the Prince of Wales and about a thousand witnesses mostly European.]
I did not hesitate. There are times when even such a slow thinker as I
am can make up his mind in a flash. I said "No" with such emphasis that
King laughed. The Mahatma looked at me rather pityingly, but made no
comment. He invited the two of us to sit down, so we squatted on the
floor as close to the trough as we could go without being scorched.
There were no screens or obstructions of any kind, and the only
appliance in evidence was an iron paddle, which the man who had admitted
us picked up off the floor.
He took that paddle, and without any preliminary fuss or hesitation
walked straight on to the bed of white-hot charcoal, beginning at one
end, and smoothed the whole glowing surface with the paddle, taking his
time about it and working with as little excitement as a gardener using
a rake. When he had finished the end of the paddle was better than
red-hot--a good cherry-red.
The hairs on his legs were unscorched. The cotton cloth of which his
kilt was made showed not the slightest trace of burning.
As soon as he had sat down the other twelve advanced toward the fire.
Unlike him, they were stark naked. One by one they walked into the fire
and traversed it from end to end with no more sign of nervousness than
if they had been utterly unconscious of its existence. Then they turned
around and walked back again.
"Is it the men or the fire?" King demanded.
"Neither," the Mahatma answered. "It is simply knowledge. Any one can do
it, who knows how."
One of the men approached the fire again. He sat down on it, and went
through the motions of bathing himself in the white-hot flame, turning
his head repeatedly to grin at us. Then, lying down full-length, he
rolled from end to end of the furnace, and walked away at last as
casually as if he had come out of a bath. It was perfectly astonishing
stuff to watch.
"If this isn't superstition, or mesmerism, or deception of some kind,
why do you insist on all this mummery of soot and ashes for my friend
and me?" King demanded. "Why do you use a temple full of Hindu idols to
conceal your science, if it is a natural science and not trickery?"
The Gray Mahatma smiled tolerantly.
"Can you suggest a better way of keeping the secret?" he answered. "We
are protected by the superstition. Not even the Government of India
would dare arouse the superstitious wrath of a people by inquiring too
closely into what goes on beneath a temple. If we were to admit that
what we know is science, just as wireless telegraphy is a science, we
would not be safe for an hour; the military, the kings of commerce, the
merely curious, and all the enemies of mankind would invent ten thousand
excuses of investigating us."
"Where did you learn English?" King demanded.
"I am a Ph.D. of Johns Hopkins," the Gray Mahatma answered. "I have
traveled all over the United States seeking for one man who might be
trusted with the rudiments of our science. But I found none."
"Suppose you had found the wrong man--and trusted him?" King suggested.
"My friend," said the Gray Mahatma, "you are better known to us than we
to you. You are a man incapable of treachery. You love India, and all
your life you have striven to act always and in all things like a man.
You have been watched for years. Your character has been studied. If our
purpose had been to conquer the world, or to destroy the world, we would
never have selected you. There is no need to speak to you of what would
happen if you should commit treachery. There is no risk of your
explaining the secret of our science to the wrong individual, for you
are not going to be taught it."
"Well, what of my friend Ramsden?" King asked him.
"Your friend Mr. Ramsden, I think, will never again see the United
States."
"Why?"
"He has seen too much for his own good. He lacks your mentality. He has
bravery of a kind, and honesty of a kind; but he is--not--the
right--man--for--our--purpose. He made a mistake when he came with you."
King looked straight into the eyes of the Gray Mahatma.
"You think you know me?" he asked.
"I know you better than you know yourself!"
"That's possible," said King. "Do you suppose I would tell you the
truth?"
"I know it. I am sure of it. You have too much integrity to deal in
lies."
"Very well," King answered quietly, "it's both of us or neither. Either
we both go free, or you do your worst to us both. This man is my
friend."
The Gray Mahatma smiled, and thought, and smiled, and looked at King,
and then away again.
"It would be a pity to destroy yourself," he said at last.
"Nevertheless, you are the only chance your friend has. I have no enmity
against him; he is merely unsuitable; he will be the victim of his own
shortcomings, unless you can rescue him. But if you make the attempt and
fail, I am afraid, my friend, that that will be the end of both of you."
It was rather like listening to your own autopsy! I confess that I began
again to feel horribly afraid, although not so much so that I cared to
force King into danger on my account, and once more I made my mind up
swiftly. I reached out to seize the Gray Mahatma by the throat. But King
struck my hand up.
"We're two to their many," he said sternly. "Keep your hair on!"
The Mahatma smiled and nodded.
"A second time you have done well," he exclaimed. "If you can keep the
buffalo from blundering--but we waste time. Come."
King put his hands on my shoulders, and we lock-stepped out of the
cavern behind the Mahatma, looking, I don't doubt, supremely ridiculous,
and I for one feeling furiously helpless.
We entered another cave, whose dome looked like an absolutely perfect
hemisphere, but the whole place was so full of noise that your brain
reeled in confusion. There were ten men in there, naked to the waist as
all the rest had been, and every single one of them had the intelligent
look of an alert bird with its head to one side. They were sitting on
mats on the floor in no apparent order, and each man had a row of tuning
forks in front of him, pretty much like any other tuning forks, except
that there were eight of them to each note and its subdivisions.
Every few minutes one of them would select a fork, strike it, and
listen; then he would get up, dragging his mat after him with all the
forks arranged on it, and sit down somewhere else. But the tuning forks
were not the cause of the din. It was the roar of a great city that was
echoing under the dome--clatter of traffic and men's voices, whistling
of the wind through overhead wires, dogs' barking, an occasional bell,
at intervals the whistle of a locomotive and the rumble and bump of a
railroad train, whirring of dynamoes, the clash and thump of trolley
cars, street-hawkers' cries, and the sound of sea-waves breaking on the
shore.
"You hear Bombay," said the Mahatma. Then we all sat down in line.
It was actual physical torture until you were used to it, and I doubt
whether you could get used to it without somebody to educate you--some
scientist to show you how to defend your nerves against that outrageous
racket. For the sounds were all out of adjustment and proportion.
Nothing was in key. It was as if the laws of acoustics had been lifted,
and sound had gone crazy.
At one moment, apropos of nothing and disconnected from all other
sounds, you could hear a man or a woman speaking as distinctly as if the
individual were up there under the dome; then a chaos of off-key notes
would swallow the voice, and the next might be a dog's bark or a
locomotive whistle. The only continuously recognizable sounds were a
power station and the thunder of waves along the harbor front, and it
sounded much more thunderous than it should have done at that season of
the year.
The tuning of an orchestra does not nearly approximate the confusion;
for the members of the orchestra are all trying to find one pitch and
are gradually hitting it, whereas every sound within that cavern seemed
to be pitched and keyed differently.
"This is our latest," said the Mahatma. "It is only for two or three
hundred years that we have been studying this phenomenon. It may
possibly take us two or three hundred years more before we can control
it."
I wanted to ask questions, but could not because the cursed inharmony
made my senses reel. Nevertheless, you could hear other sounds
perfectly. When I struck my hand on the rock floor I could hear the slap
at least as distinctly as normal; possibly a little more so. And when
the Gray Mahatma spoke, each word was separate and sharp.
"Now you shall hear another city," he said. "Observe that the voices of
cities are as various as men's. No two are alike. Sound and color are
one and the same thing differently expressed, and the graduations of
both are infinite."
He caught the eye of one of the men.
"Calcutta!" he said, in a voice not exactly of command, yet certainly
not of deference.
Without acknowledging the order in any other way, the man got on his
knees and picked up an enormous tuning fork, whose prongs were about
three feet long, and he made some adjustment in the fork of it that took
about five minutes. He might have been turning the screw of a
micrometer; I could not see. Then, raising the fork above his shoulder,
he struck the floor with it, and a master-note as clear as the peal of a
bell went ringing up into the dome.
The effect was almost ridiculous. It made you want to laugh. Everybody
in the cavern smiled, and I daresay if the truth were known we had
discovered the mother-lode of comedy. That one note chased all the
others out of the dome as a dog might chase sheep--as the wind blows
clouds away--as a cop drives small boys off the grass. They actually
scampered out of hearing, and you couldn't imagine them hiding close by,
either; they were gone for good, and that one, clear master-note--the
middle F--went vibrating around and around, as if scouring out the very
smell of what had been there.
"That is the key-note of all nature," said the Mahatma. "All sounds, all
colors, all thoughts, all vibrations center in that note. It is the key
that can unlock them all."
The silence that followed when the last ringing overtone had gone off
galloping in its stride toward infinity was the most absolute and awful
silence I have ever had to listen to. The very possibility of sound
seemed to have ceased to exist. You could not believe that there could
be sound, nor remember what sound was like. A whole sense and its
functions had been taken from you, and the resultant void was dead--so
dead that no sense could live in it, unless fear is a sense. You could
feel horribly afraid, and I'll tell you what the fear amounted to:
There was a feeling that these men were fooling with the force that runs
the universe, and that the next stroke might be a mistake that would
result like the touching of two high-tension wires, multiplied to the
_nth_. You could not resist the suggestion that the world might burst in
fragments at any minute.
Meanwhile the fellow with the tuning fork fiddled again with some
adjustment on the thick portion of its stem, and presently whirling it
around his head as the old-time warriors used two-handed swords, he
brought it down on one of a circle of small anvils that were arranged
around him like the figures on a clock-face.
You could almost see Calcutta instantly! The miracle was the reverse of
the preceding one. The ringing, subdivided, sharp, discordant note he
struck was swallowed instantly in a sea of noise that seemed not only to
have color but even smell to it; you could smell Calcutta! But that, of
course, was mere suggestion--a trick of the senses of the sort that
makes your mouth water when you see another fellow suck a lemon.
You could even hear the crows that sit on the trees in the park and caw
at passers-by. You could hear the organ in a Christian church, and the
snarl of a pious Moslem reading from the Koran. There was the click of
ponies' hoofs, the whirring and honk of motor-cars, the sucking of
Hoogli River, booming of a steamer-whistle, roars of trains, and the
peculiar clamor of Calcutta's swarms that I can never hear without
thinking of a cobra with its hood just ready to raise.
In the sea of noises in the dome one instantly stood out--the voice of a
man speaking English with a slightly babu accent. For exactly as long as
the reverberations of those two tuning forks lasted, you could hear him
declaiming, and then his voice faded away into the ocean of noise like a
rock that has shown for a moment above the surface of a maelstrom.
"That is a member of the legislature, where ignorant men in all-night
session make laws for fools to break," said the Gray Mahatma.
Signing to King and me to remain seated, he himself crossed the floor to
where the master-tuner sat, and squatting down beside him began picking
up tuning forks and striking one against the other. Each time he did
that some city sound or other distinguished itself for a moment, exactly
as the theme appears in music; only some of the vibrations seemed to jar
against others instead of blending with them, and when that happened the
effect was intensely disagreeable.
At last he struck a combination that made me jump as effectually as
sudden tooth-ache. Some of the other sounds had affected King more, but
that particular one passed him by and tortured me. Watching with his
head a little to one side the Gray Mahatma instantly began striking
those two forks as rapidly as if he were clapping hands, increasing the
vehemence with each stroke.
If I had stayed there I would have been stark mad or dead within five
minutes. I felt as if I were being vibrated asunder--as if my whole body
were resolving into its component parts. I lay on the floor with my head
in both hands, and I daresay yelled with agony, but I don't know about
that.
At any rate King understood and acted instantly. He seized me under the
arms and dragged me face-downward to the door, where he had to drop me
in order to find how to open the thing. Having accomplished that, he
dragged me through into the passage, where the agony ceased as instantly
as the ache does when a dentist pulls an abscessed tooth. No one sound
reached us through the open door. However immature that particular
branch of their science might be, they had learned the way of absolutely
localizing noise.
The Gray Mahatma came out smiling, and ignoring me as if I was not
there.
He opened another door, not requiring to knock this time, and led the
way along another passage that wound through solid rock for what can
hardly have been less than a quarter of a mile.
King had dragged me out of that dome of dins in the nick of time, and my
head was recovering rapidly. By the time we reached a door at the end of
that long passage I could think clearly, and although too weak to stand
upright without holding on to something, was sufficiently recovered to
know that the remainder would be only a matter of minutes. And we spent
three or four of the minutes waiting for the door to open, which it did
at last suddenly.
A man appeared in the opening, whose absolutely white hair reached below
his shoulder-blades, and whose equally white beard descended to his
middle. He wore the usual loin-cloth, but was usual in nothing else. He
looked older than Methuselah, yet strong, for his muscles stood out like
knotted whip-cords; and active, for he stood on the balls of his feet
with the immobility that only comes of ableness. The most unusual thing
of all was that he spoke. He said several words in Sanskrit to the Gray
Mahatma, before turning his back on us and leading the way in.