p 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.

Giovanni wrote a letter to the State Departme