Here I passed a tranquil and contemplative existence for some years,
broken only by such incidents as my passage into _nirvana_, and disturbed
only by a certain subjective sensation of aching or void, by which I was
occasionally attacked, and which I was finally compelled to attribute,
much to my mortification, to the absence of women. In the whole of this
sacred region, the name of which I am compelled to withhold, there was
not a single female. Everybody in it was given up to contemplation and
ascetic absorption; and it is well known that profound contemplation, for
any length of time, and the presence of the fair sex, are incompatible. I
was much troubled by this vacuous sensation, which I felt to be in the
highest degree derogatory to my fifth principle, and the secret of which
I discovered, during a trance-condition which lasted for several months,
to arise from a subtle magnetism, to which, owing to my peculiar organic
condition, I was especially sensitive, and which penetrated the _mahatma_
region from a tract of country almost immediately contiguous to it in the
Karakorum Mountains, which was as jealously guarded from foreign
intrusion as our own, and which was occupied by the "Thibetan Sisters," a
body of female occultists of whom the Brothers never spoke except in
terms of loathing and contempt. It is not, therefore, to be wondered at
that no mention is made either of them, or the lovely highland district
they occupy, in Mr Sinnett's book. The attraction of this feminine
sphere became at last so overpowering, that I determined to visit it in
my astral body; and now occurred the first of many most remarkable
experiences which were to follow. It is well known to the initiated,
though difficult to explain to those who are not, that in a sense space
ceases to exist for the astral body. When you get out of your _rupa_,
you are out of space as ordinary persons understand it, though it
continues to have a certain subjective existence.

I was in this condition, and travelling rapidly in the desired direction,