the rest of humanity--or rather, so much of humanity as may reach it in
the ordinary course of nature--in the latter part of the fifth round. I
merely mention this to give confidence to my readers, as I am about to
describe a moral cataclysm which subsequently took place in my sixth
sense, which would be of no importance in the case of an ordinary
_chela_, but which was attended with the highest significance as
occurring to a _mahatma_ who had already attained the highest grade in
the mystic brotherhood. It was not to be wondered at that when I arrived
at this advanced condition, Khatmandhu, though a pleasant town, was not
altogether a convenient residence for an occultist of my eminence. In
the first place, the streets were infested with _dugpas_, or red-caps, a
heretical sect, some members of which have _arhat_ pretensions of a very
high order--indeed I am ready to admit that I have met with Shammar
adepts, who, so far as supernatural powers were concerned, were second to
none among ourselves. But this was only the result of that necromancy
which Buddha in his sixth incarnation denounced in the person of Tsong-
kha-pa, the great reformer. They even deny the spiritual supremacy of
the Dalai Lama at Lhassa, and own allegiance to an impostor who lives at
the monastery of Sakia Djong.

The presence of these men, and the presumption of their adepts, who
maintained that through subjective or clairvoyant conditions, which they
asserted were higher than ours, they had attained a more exalted degree
of illumination which revealed a different cosmogony from that which has
been handed down to us through countless generations of adepts, were a
perpetual annoyance to me; but perhaps not greater than the proximity of
the English Resident and the officers attached to him, the impure
exhalations from whose _rupas_, or material bodies, infected as they were
with magnetic elements drawn from Western civilisation, whenever I met
them, used to send me to bed for a week. I therefore strongly felt the