Palos of the Dog Star Pack Read online

alive. The two lived there together for someweeks, and the Hindu taught Croft the rudiments at least of the occultphilosophy of life.

  Then, with little warning, Croft was assigned on a mission toAustralia by his church. He got a letter from "Box B," as he told me,smiling, knowing I would understand. The church of which he was amember has a custom of sending their members about the world asmissionaries of their faith, to spread its doctrines and win convertsto their ranks. Croft went, though even then he had begun to see thesimilarity between his own lifelong creed and the scheme of thingsheld before him by Gatua Kahaun.

  For over two years he did not see the Hindu, though he kept up hisstudies of the occult, to which he seemed inclined by a natural bent.Then, just as he was nearly finished with his "mission," what shouldhappen but that, walking the streets of Melbourne, he bumped intoGatua Kahaun.

  The two men renewed their acquaintance at once. Gatua Kahaun taughtCroft Hindustani and the mysteries of the Sanskrit tongue. WhenCroft's mission was finished he prevailed upon him to visit Indiabefore returning home.

  Croft went. Through Gatua's influence he was admitted to the man's ownbrotherhood. He forgot his former objects and aims in life in the newworld of thought which opened up before his mental eyes. He studiedand thought. He learned the secrets of the magnetic or enveloping bodyof the soul, and after a time he became convinced that by constantapplication to the major purpose the spirit could break the bonds ofthe material body without going through the change which men calldeath. He came to believe that beyond the phenomenon of astralprojection--the sending of the conscious ego about the earthlysphere--projections might be made beyond the planet, with only theuniverse to limit the scope of the flight.

  * * * * *

  At times he lay staring at the starry vault of the heavens with avague longing within him to put the thing to the test. And alwaysthere was one star which seemed to call him, to beckon to him, to drawhis spirit toward it as a magnet may draw a fleck of iron. That wasthe Dog Star, Sirius, known to astronomers as the sun of anotherplanetary system like our own.

  Meantime his studies went on. He learned that matter is the reflex ofspirit; that no blade of grass, no chemical atom exists save as theenvelope of an essence which cannot and does not die. He came to seethat nature is no more than a realm of force, comprising light, heat,magnetism, chemical affinity, aura, essence, and all theimponderables which go to produce the various forms of motion asexpressions of the ocean of force, so that motion comes to be no morethan force refracted through the various forms of existence, from thelowest to the highest, as a ray of light is split into the sevenprimary colors by a prism, each being different in itself, yet eachbut an integral part of the original ray.

  He came to comprehend that all stages of existence are but stages andnothing more, and that mind, spirit, is the highest form of lifeforce--the true essence--manifesting through material means, yetindependent of them in itself. So only, he argued, was life afterdeath a possible thing. And so, he reasoned further, could the mysterybe solved, there was no real reason why the spirit could not be setfree to roam and return to the body at will. If that were true, itseemed to him that the spirit could return from such excursions,bringing with it a conscious recollection of the place where it hadbeen.

  Then once more he was called home by a thing which seems like no morethan a further step in the course of what mortals call fate. Hisfather's brother died. He was a bachelor. He left Croft sufficientwealth to provide for his every need. Croft decided to pursue hisstudies at home. He had gained all India could give him. Indeed, hehad rather startled even Gatua Kahaun by some of the theories he haddeduced.

  He began work at once. He stocked the library where I had found himthe night before, with everything on the subject he could find. Andthe more he studied, the more firmly did he become convinced thatordinary astral projection was but the first step in developing thespirit's power--that it was akin to the first step of an infantlearning to walk, and that, if confidence were forthcoming, if thewill to dare the experiment were sufficiently strong--then he couldaccomplish the thing of which he dreamed.

  He began to experiment, sending his astral consciousness here andthere. He centered on that one phase of his knowledge alone. He roamedthe earth at will. He perfected his ability to bring back from suchexcursions a vivid recollection of all he had seen. So at last he wasready for the great experiment. Yet in the end he made it on impulserather than at any pre-selected time.

  He sat one evening on his porch. Over the eastern mountains which hemin the valley the full moon was rising in a blaze of mellow glory. Itsrays caught the sleeping surface of a lake which lies near our littlecity, touching each rippling wavelet until they seemed made of moltensilver. The lights of the town itself were like fireflies twinklingamid the trees. The mountains hazed somewhat in a silvery mist,compounded of the moonrays and distance, seemed to him no more thanthe figments of a fairy tale or a dream.

  Everything was quiet. Mrs. Goss, now a widow, had gone to bed, andCroft had simply been enjoying the soft air and a cigar. Suddenly, asthe moon appeared to leap free of the mountains, it suggested athought of a spirit set free and rising above the material shell ofexistence to his mind.

  He sat watching the golden wheel radiant with reflected light, andafter a time he asked himself why he should not try the greatadventure without a longer delay. He was the last of his race. No onedepended upon him. Should he fail, they would merely find his body inthe chair. Should he succeed, he would have won his ambition andplaced himself in a position to learn of things which had heretoforebaffled man.

  He decided to try it there and then. Knocking the ash from his cigar,he took one last, long, possibly farewell whiff, and laid it down onthe broad arm of his chair. Then summoning all the potent power of hiswill, he fixed his whole mind upon his purpose and sank intocataleptic sleep.

  The moon is dead. In so much science is right. It is lifeless, withoutmoisture, without an atmosphere. Croft won his great experiment, orits first step at least. His body sank to sleep, but his ego leapedinto a fuller, wider life.

  There was a sensation of airy lightness, as though his sublimatedconsciousness had dropped material weight. His body sat beneath him inthe chair. He could see it. He could see the city and the lake and themountains and the yellow disk of the moon. He knew he was risingtoward the latter swiftly. Then--space was annihilated in an instant,and he seemed to himself to be standing on the topmost edge of amighty crater in the full, unobstructed glare of a blinding light.

  He sensed that was the sun, which hung like a ball of fire halfway upfrom the horizon, flinging its rays in a dazzling brilliance againstthe dead satellite's surface, unprotected by an atmospheric screen.His first sensation was an amazing realization of his own success.Then he gazed about.

  * * * * *

  To one side was the vast ring of the crater itself, a well ofunutterable darkness and unplumbed depth, as yet not opened up to theburning light of the sun. To the other was the downward sweep of thecrater's flank, dun, dead, wrinkled, seamed and seared by the stabbingrays which bathed it in pitiless light. And beyond the foot of thecrater was a vast irregular plain, lower in the center as though eonspast it might have been the bed of some vanished sea. About the plainwere the crests of barren mountains, crags, pinnacles, misshapen andweird beyond thought.

  Yes, the moon is dead--now. But--there was life upon it once. Croftwilled himself down from the lip of the crater to the plain. He movedabout it. Indeed it had been a sea. There in the airless blaze, stilletched in the lifeless formations, he found an ancient water-line, themark of the fingers of vanished waters--like a mockery of what hadbeen. And skirting the outline of that long-lost sea, he came to theruin of a city which had stood upon the shores a myriad years ago. Itstood there still--a thing of paved streets, and dead walls, safe inthat moistureless world from decay.

  Through those dead streets and houses, some of them thrown down byterrific
earthquakes which he judged had accompanied the final coolingstages and death of the moon, Croft took his way, pausing now and thento examine some ancient inscriptions cut into the blocks of stone fromwhich the buildings had been reared. In a way they impressed him assimilar in many respects to the Asiatic structures of to-day, most ofthem being windowless on the first story, but built about an innercourt, gardens of beauty in the time when the moon supported life.

  So far as he could judge from the buildings themselves and frescoes onthe walls, done in pigments which still prevailed, the lunarians hadbeen a tiny people, probably not above an average of four feet inheight, but extremely intelligent past any doubt, as shown by theremains of their homes. They had possessed rather large heads inproportion to their slender bodies, as the paintings done on theinside walls led Croft to believe.

  From the same source he became convinced that their social life hadbeen highly developed, and that they had been well versed in the artsof