the Old Man of the Mountains--the head of all the creed--explaining the
manifestation in the most beautiful language and soaking up all the credit
of it for himself. The Englishman, said the letter, was not there at all.
He was a backslider without power or asceticism, who couldn't even raise a
table by force of volition, much less project an army of kittens through
space. The entire arrangement, said the letter, was strictly orthodox,
worked and sanctioned by the highest authorities within the pale of the
creed. There was great joy at this, for some of the weaker brethren seeing
that an outsider who had been working on independent lines could create
kittens, whereas their own rulers had never gone beyond crockery--and
broken at that--were showing a desire to break line on their own trail. In
fact, there was the promise of a schism. A second round robin was drafted
to the Englishman, beginning: "Oh, Scoffer," and ending with a selection
of curses from the rites of Mizraim and Memphis and the Commination of
Jugana; who was a "fifth rounder," upon whose name an upstart "third
rounder" once traded. A papal excommunication is a _billet-doux_ compared
to the Commination of Jugana. The Englishman had been proved under the
hand and seal of the Old Man of the Mountains to have appropriated virtue
and pretended to have power which, in reality, belonged only to the
supreme head. Naturally the round robin did not spare him.

He handed the letter to Dana Da to translate into decent English. The
effect on Dana Da was curious. At first he was furiously angry, and then
he laughed for five minutes.

"I had thought," he said, "that they would have come to me. In another
week I would have shown that I sent the Sending, and they would have
discrowned the Old Man of the Mountains who has sent this Sending of mine.
Do you do nothing. The time has come for me to act. Write as I dictate,
and I will put them to shame. But give me ten more rupees."