ng 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
necessity of withdrawal to that isolated and guarded region where the
most advanced adepts can pursue their contemplative existence without
fear of interruption, and prepare their _karma_, or, in other words, the
molecules of their fifth principle, for the ineffable bliss of
appropriate development in _devachan_--a place, or rather "state,"
somewhat resembling Purgatory with a dash of heaven in it; or even for
the still more exquisite sensation which arises from having no sensations
at all, and which characterises _nirvana_, or a sublime condition of
conscious rest in Omniscience.

That I am not drawing upon my imagination in alluding to this mysterious
region, or imposing upon the credulity of my readers, I will support my
assertion by the high authority of Mr Sinnett, or rather of his Guru; and
here I may remark incidentally, that after a long exper