These years of Mounting the Spiral were, however, very trying to the Occidental Man, who had been used to the Spirit of Chicago and the Push of Illinois. His Oriental education wholly lacked the stimuli of association and competition. For months he would have no other company than his own image in the Sacred Lake by day, and his own reflection in the night time. For weeks together he heard no sounds nor had any news of outside life except the growl of a tiger or the laugh of some hyena in the mountain fastnesses. This was especially depressing to one who had been reared on the Morning and Evening editions and to whom yellow journalism was food and drink. Anything like a “Scoop” is not likely to occur in Mystic Circles in a thousand years. For a long time the life in Gingalee seemed unutterably slow. He found himself where advertising as an art had not opened up. There was nothing to “exploit” and nobody to exploit it. He found that men of his chosen profession were not expected to talk about themselves nor boast of their successes. At first this was so oppressive to the Seer from the States that he almost regretted leaving Kankakee. For, to boast of the length of one’s nails growing through the Palms would be voted exceedingly bad taste; and to exhibit satisfaction in the length of time one could meditate upon the “inspirated breath” would be set down as a weakness unworthy of a Wise Man. Alonzo Leffingwell, therefore, practiced his Western methods and took his Eastern Degrees without announcing it in Headlines. He did not even send out a circular, nor display a poster. By close application, however, he accomplished in five years what would have required fifty years for the native Hindustanee. He was now, physically speaking, quite another man. He was quite another being than was he who had fallen at the feet of Imogene Silesia Sheets that June night in Kankakee. His Physical Vehicle was now but an underlying skeleton with an overlaid sun-baked skin. For days together he sat folded up like a jack-knife, or knotted like a piece of string. He was impervious alike to heat and cold, sunshine and storm, or mosquitoes and antimires. And as for this whole physical world, though still in it, he was not of it. He was now, as far as the appetites and desires of the flesh are concerned, of no possible pleasure to himself nor to anyone else. Physically, or exoterically speaking, Alonzo Leffingwell was no more. All this, however, was but the external, physical, material view. Esoterically, or astrally speaking, our hero had achieved the supreme object of Yog, and in reality the young man had never been so much alive, so joyously youthful, so entirely free, or so recklessly gay. For it was now Alonzo Leffingwell, the astral man, who at will walked in and out of the crumpled up physical shell and levitated gaily through tangled jungle and dreary desert.