"Five camel days," he muttered. "Romney, they don’t give you a chance to choose or to fight. You’ve either got to go on or lay down—and you can’t lay down...." He turned a look back to the East as the camel knelt for him, and sent forth the best he had of love and courage to the woman. So much surged from him that moment that an answer seemed to come back—nothing he could be sure of, nothing that had to do with actual words, perhaps illusion altogether, but his face wore a thin smile, and there was a humming about his heart. For another whole day at Rhadassim, Romney talked, and the next day Rajananda offered his observations. All the time the stern and stolid Tsing Hsia listened, and at the end announced that one more Father should be called to the matter—Chi Yuan of Kuderfoi, a three days’ journey westward by camel.... Romney felt in this accession that his last debt was paid to life.... It was Chi Yuan, on the second day after the arrival at Kuderfoi, who asked by what means the new Chinese party planned to make Japan sue for an early peace in case of struggle with China. Romney asked permission to withdraw for an hour. It was granted and he read the sealed letter from Nifton Bend. ... For a long time he sat in silence. Ten minutes was all that the reading required. He rejoined the three Holy Men, no longer impassioned for the cause of the Big Three, but merely to state the case without bias, as Nifton Bend had asked.... Romney always remembered the three bowed heads, as he entered the little tiled court where the yellow lilies grew. This was the end of his out-journey. He knew it now and was very calm. That for which he had been sent would be answered this day. The rest was but the return of the message—then Anna Erivan, if grace were still in the world for him. Romney felt aged like the three. A little spray moved a pool of water before them. The lilies were lotus-sweet to the white man’s nostrils after an eternity of desert-sand. The green cooled his brain like a dear hand. He stood with bowed head, a little at the side, and waited for them to turn from their meditation. "Speak," said Chi Yuan. "The new party of China is prepared to fight Japan with pestilence. Their plan is complete. Their chemists have been working for several years. I have the data here to outline to you how the servants of the Empire expect to meet the landing forces of Japan, as well as literally to impregnate the Island Empire with the germs of incurable disease—" "The outer world of men is truly crushed in the coils of matter," said the gentle Chi Yuan.