We had now entered a square corridor the wall of which was built with many cubicles, all small and furnished with bier-like couches of marble upon which lay forms in varying degrees of inertia. Some were already still and pale as the marble all round them, so that you would have said life was extinct, but in others we saw the trance-production--for such it was--in actual process. As the subject lay down on the couch he fixed his eyes on a curious bright blue spark in the low ceiling, produced I don't know how, but apparently by some cut gem illuminated from behind. I looked at one of these things for some minutes, and most strange the appearance of it was: although the light in its immediate neighbourhood was brilliant, in some mysterious way this did not radiate, so that the rest of the niche was no whit the brighter for it. The state of trance appeared to be secured very easily, and very profoundly. In one case we halted outside a recess while its occupant was in the act of lying down. He took no notice whatever of us, but at once concentrated his gaze on the blue spark in the ceiling and barely half a minute later was rigid, of a dead-pallor, deep in the self-induced sleep. They were all ages, these trance-subjects, from fresh youth to grey hair; yet on all their features I noticed the one stamp of profound spirituality. Some of them moved their lips in sleep, muttering, and we came to one recess where an attendant had seated himself beside the trance-subject and was listening closely to his words--but not writing anything down. The next chamber inward was the hub of the whole building. It measured about twenty yards square, and contained absolutely nothing beyond a pedestal of solid marble surmounted by a big globe of some glassy substance which radiated that curious rose-tinted light I had noticed everywhere throughout the building. The sight of this lamp was ordinary enough, but when I came to reflect what it meant, I could have fallen down in my astonishment. In the corridor of recesses we had just left, we had seen a brilliant blue light that didn't radiate. Here was a soft rosy light which had been visible to us for the last half-hour, _through endless walls of solid marble_. I had this explained to me afterwards, but I must in common honesty confess the explanation was beyond my scant scientific understanding, and the mystery of how this people contrived to enhance or stifle the radiation of light at will--to reverse, in fact, what we regard as the eternal laws of physics--remains a mystery to me still.