“If that be so, why, indeed, seek me at all?  Why not confide in those swarthy attendants, who doubtless are slaves to your orders?”

“Confide in slaves, when the first task enjoined to them would be to discover, and refrain from purloining gold!  Seven such unscrupulous knaves, or even one such, and I, thus defenseless and feeble!  Such is not the work that wise masters confide to fierce slaves.  But that is the least of the reasons which exclude them from my choice, and fix my choice of assistant on you.  Do you forget what I told you of the danger which the Dervish declared no bribe I could offer could tempt him a second time to brave?”

“I remember now; those words had passed away from my mind.”

“And because they had passed away from your mind, I chose you for my comrade.  I need a man by whom danger is scorned.”

“But in the process of which you tell me I see no possible danger unless the ingredients you mix in your caldron have poisonous fumes.”

“It is not that.  The ingredients I use are not poisons.”

“What other danger, except you dread your own Eastern slaves?  But, if so, why lead them to these solitudes; and, if so, why not bid me be armed?”

“The Eastern slaves, fulfilling my commands, wait for my summons, where their eyes cannot see what we do.  The danger is of a kind in which the boldest son of the East would be more craven, perhaps, that the daintiest Sybarite of Europe, who would shrink from a panther and laugh at a ghost.  In the creed of the Dervish, and of all who adventure into that realm of Nature which is closed to philosophy and open to magic, there are races in the magnitude of space unseen as animalcules in the world of a drop.  For the tribes of the drop science has its microscope.  Of the host of yon azure Infinite magic gains sight, and through them gains command over fluid conductors that link all the parts of creation.  Of these races, some are wholly indifferent to man, some benign to him, and some deadly hostile.  In all the regular and prescribed conditions of mortal being, this magic realm seems as blank and tenantless as yon vacant air.  But when a seeker of powers beyond the rude functions by which man plies the clockwork that measures his hours, and stops when its chain reaches the end of its coil, strives to pass over those boundaries at which philosophy says, ’Knowledge ends’—­then, he is like all other travelers in regions unknown; he must propitiate or brave the tribes that are hostile—­must depend for his life on the tribes that are friendly.  Though your science discredits the alchemist’s dogmas, your learning informs you that all alchemists were not ignorant impostors; yet those whose discoveries prove them to have been the nearest allies to your practical knowledge, ever hint in their mystical works at the reality of that realm which is open to magic—­ever hint that some means less familiar than furnace and