ough to our brains
with its true significance. For there was an eerie _difference_ about
the scene; it was not a land below us such as any of us had ever seen.
I felt that and yet I could not think clearly about it. We moved along
like zombies, not thinking--just accepting the unusual and the unknown
as casually as if we were travelers who could not be astounded. But
inside, my mind was busily turning the significance and the meaning of
this wall of force. I had heard of such walls before--upon Shasta in
California, and in Tibet, and in ancient times in Ireland, and there
were other instances of a similar wall in the past, and in the present
in other places. But what it could really mean, that was what I did not
know.

After crossing that invisible barrier, things began to happen in a
sequence, of a strangeness and with a rapidity such that I was unable to
analyze or to rationalize. From there on I was like a man on a
tightrope, hounded by invisible tormentors trying to shake me off. I had
not time to wonder whether it was true that spirits existed. What I did
think was that some of these Korean primitives had a Devil Doctor who
surpassed all others in trickiness, and was amusing himself at our
expense. But I did not _think_ it, I _clung_ to the idea to save my
reason from tottering over the brink.

The first thing after the wall that could not exist but did--after we
had passed on over the ridge and half way down the mountain side--was a
gully along the mountain side, up which Barto turned. I assumed he was
still following the pointing of the magnetic statuette, but I was
vaguely conscious that none of us were _really_ conscious--were under a
kind of spell in which our actions and our thoughts were
predetermined--inevitable! I knew it, but I could not shake it off, nor
put my finger on any reason why I should shake it off and call a halt to
the strange, wordless, silent following of Jake and his eerie talisman.

The faint trail led along the bottom of the gully, and after twenty
minutes of downward progress, led into a dark overhang of rock, the sky
hardly visible where the rocks almost met overhead. Down the semi-cavern
we went; still silent, zombie-like; and I felt ever more strongly the
compulsion that made us so move and so unable to do otherwise.

Jake was striding rapidly now, his dark ugly face aflame with weird
eagerness, my own heart pounding with alarm at the strangeness and the
irrationality of the who