“Which is, I take it, the job of the older ones?”
“Yes. The High Lama, for instance, spends almost his entire life in clairvoyant meditation.”
Conway pondered a moment and then said: “By the way, when do you suppose I shall see him again?”
“Doubtless at the end of the first five years, my dear sir.”
But in that confident prophecy Chang was wrong, for less than a month after his arrival at Shangri-La Conway received a second summons to that torrid upper room. Chang had told him that the High Lama never left his apartments, and that their heated atmosphere was necessary for his bodily existence; and Conway, being thus prepared, found the change less disconcerting than before. Indeed, he breathed easily as soon as he had made his bow and been granted the faintest answering liveliness of the sunken eyes. He felt kinship with the mind beyond them, and though he knew that this second interview following so soon upon the first was an unprecedented honor, he was not in the least nervous or weighed down with solemnity. Age was to him no more an obsessing factor than rank or color; he had never felt debarred from liking people because they were too young or too old. He held the High Lama in most cordial respect, but he did not see why their social relations should be anything less than urbane.
They exchanged the usual courtesies, and Conway answered many polite questions. He said he was finding the life very agreeable and had already made friendships.
“And you have kept our secrets from your three companions?”
“Yes, up to now. It has proved awkward for me at times, but probably less so than if I had told them.”
“Just as I surmised; you have acted as you thought best. And the awkwardness, after all, is only temporary. Chang tells me he thinks that two of them will give little trouble.”
“I daresay that is so.”
“And the third?”
Conway replied: “Mallinson is an excitable youth – he’s pretty keen to get back.”
“You like him?”
“Yes, I like him very much.”
At this point the tea-bowls were brought in, and talk became less serious between sips of the scented liquid. It was an apt convention, enabling the verbal flow to acquire a touch of that almost frivolous fragrance, and Conway was responsive. When the High Lama asked him whether Shangri-La was not unique in his experience, and if the Western world could offer anything in the least like it, he answered with a smile: “Well, yes – to be quite frank, it reminds me very slightly of Oxford, where I used to lecture. The scenery there is not so good, but the subjects of study are often just as impractical, and though even the oldest of the dons is not quite so old, they appear to age in a somewhat similar way.”
“You have a sense of humor, my dear Conway,” replied the High Lama, “for which we shall all be grateful during the years to come.”