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 experience of Gurus, I have never yet met one who would consciously tell a lie. "From time immemorial," says Mr Sinnett's Guru, "there has been a certain region in Thibet, which to this day is quite unknown to and unapproachable by any but initiated persons, and inaccessible to the ordinary people of the country, as to any others, in which adepts have always congregated. But the country generally was not in Buddha's time, as it has since become, the chosen habitation of the great brotherhood. Much more than they are at present, were the _mahatmas_ in former times distributed throughout the world.