“Instead I knocked around the world. And Lord, got knocked around too. Tramp steamers, maritime strike in Frisco, the Bela Kun regime in Hungary—I wound up in North Africa when I was about thirty years old.
“I was broke, as broke as any person could be and stay alive. A Scotswoman picked me up, hired me, taught me mathematics. I plunged into it, algebra, conies, analytics, calculus, relativity. Before I was done, I’d worked out wave-mechanics three years before that Frenchman had even begun to think about it.
“When I showed her the set of differential equations for the carbon molecule, all solved, she damned me for an unnatural monster and threw me out But she’d given me the beginnings of mental discipline, and done it many thousands of times better than they could have in that Persian village. I began to realize what I was.
“It was then that I drifted into the nut cult business. I found out that all you need for capital is a stock of capitalized abstract qualities, like AU-Knowingness, Will-Mind-Urge, Planetude and Exciliation. With that to work on I can make nry living almost anywhere on the globe.
“I met Runi Sarif, who was running an older-established •ect, the Pan-European Astral Confederation of Healers. He was a Hindu from the Punjab plains hi the North of India. Lord, what a mind he had! He worked me over quietly for three months before I realized what was up.
“Then there was a little interview with him. He began with the complicated salute of the Astral Confederation and got down to business. ‘Brother Kazam,’ he said, ‘I wish to show yen an ancient sacred book I have just discovered.’ I laughed, of course. By that time I’d already discovered seven ancient books by myself, all ready-translated into the language of
the country I would be working at the time. The ‘Isba Kazh-lunk’ was the most successful; that’s the one I found preserved in the hide of a mammoth in a Siberian glacier.
“Runi looked sour. ‘Brother Kazam,’ said he, ‘do not scoff. Does the word Kaidar mean anything to you?’ I played dumb and asked whether it was something out of the third chapter of the Lost Lore of Atlantis, but I remembered ever so faintly that I had been called that once.
” ‘A Kaidar,’ said Runi, ‘is an atavism to an older, stronger people who once visited this plane and left their seed. They can be detected by*—he squinted at me sharply—*by a natural aptitude for occult pursuits. They carry in their minds learning undreamable by mortals. Now, Brother Kazam, if we could only find a Kaidar…’
“‘Don’t cany yourself away,’ I said. ‘What good would that be to us?”
“Silently he produced what 111 swear was actually an ancient sacred book. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d just discovered it, moreover. It was the psaltery of a small, very ancient sect of Edomites who had migrated beyond the Euphrates and died out. When I’d got around the rock-Hebrew it was written in I was very greatly impressed. They had some noble religious poems, one simply blistering exorcism and anathema, a lot of tedious genealogy in verse form. And they had a didactic poem on the Kaidar, based on one who had turned up in their tribe.
“They had treated him horribly—chained him to a cave wall and used him for a sort of male Sybil. They found out that the best way to get him to prophesy was to show him a diamond. Then, one sad day, they let him touch it. Blatn! He vanished, taking two of the rabbis with him. The rabbis came back later; appeared in broad daylight raving about visions of Paradise they had seen.
“I quite forgot about the whole affair. At that time I was obsessed with the idea that I would become the Rockefeller of occultism—get disciples, train them carefully and spread my cult. If Mohammed could do it, why not I? To this day I don’t know the answer.
“While I was occupying myself with grandiose daydreams, Runi was busily picking over my mind. To a natural cunning and a fantastic ability to concentrate he added what I unconsciously knew, finally achieving adequate control of many factors.