“Remember that my getting there didn’t save that fellow’s life. Also, you can’t quite account by mere telepathy for my feeling of some one calling me. The first day, perhaps, yes. He was probably just about dying then, and maybe his calls for help travelled in some unknown way to me, the nearest human being. “But--when I started off into the desert--the impression disappeared, and did not reappear until I was on the point of turning back. Then it suddenly reappeared stronger than ever, and the man had been dead two days. “I was clearly not meant to save his life, but I do think, queer as it may sound, that I was meant to find his body. “That, combined with the chance of my great-great-uncle finding the country, the chance, if you call it so, of my picking up those old papers at home before I came out, and the chance of my being able to go up to Central Asia and of being there just at that particular moment, to me point to the fact of our being intended to get to that hidden country. “Why I or either of you or all of us are wanted there, and what we are to do when we get there, the Power that starts us off alone knows. But I cannot help the feeling that we are meant to get there, and that we shall get there. Then beyond that all is a blank. But the getting-there part seems to me Sapper’s ‘three times’--simply a moral cert.” “As for me, I don’t believe in anything particularly, and it’s all quite beyond me,” said Forsyth. “But the prospect is pleasing enough without worrying about the why and wherefore. I shall look forward to trying twentieth-century medicine on second-century Greeks.” And on that we went off to bed, after arranging to meet next morning to fix up our journey on to Bombay. But--unlike Wrexham and Forsyth--I do profess a belief--a very definite, concrete one; and, when I said my prayers that night, I prayed that we might have fortune in our undertaking, and if He meant us to go there--which, after Wrexham’s story, I could not but believe--that we might have grace and strength to carry out whatever He wanted of us. Before I went to sleep, I read one of my “bed books,” and happened upon the verse of Psalm 23: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.” A suitable verse for old John Wrexham’s gateway, I thought, and so went to sleep. CHAPTER V THE JUMPING-OFF LINE