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 dynamo