"Einem gelang es – er hob den Schleier Goettin zu Sais..."

                                                                                                                                              Novalis

 I

One morning in the autumn of 1934, a messenger brought me a rather strange letter, adding he was waiting for an answer right then and there. The letter was from a lady, Mrs. Zerlendi, whose name I had never heard before, inviting me to visit her that very afternoon.

It was a very correct letter, excessively polite, as it was customary in our parents' time when a lady wrote to a gentleman she had never met. "I heard that you had just returned from the Orient, and I believe you would be interested to research the collections gathered by my husband," she was writing to me, among other things.

I confess I was hardly interested at that time in meeting people who invited me to see them just because I had spent a few years in the Orient. More than once, I had to give up some otherwise promising friendships, because I did not accept to recount platitudes about the "mysteries of Asia" – fakirs, miracles, or jungle adventures – those sensational details my companions expected me to comment. But Mrs. Zerlendi's letter mentioned some Oriental collections, without describing their nature or origin, and this was enough to arouse my curiosity.

Indeed, I was interested in the lives of those Romanians who were overwhelmed by their passion for the East. To be honest, I must confess that, many years before this event, I had discovered a trunk full of books about China with one of the antiquarians on the Dambovita River embankment; those books had all been read, annotated, and sometimes even corrected in pencil for a long time, by a man who had bought them and whose signature I found repeatedly on the title page of many of them: Radu C.

This Radu C. had not been an amateur, though. His books, which are today in my possession, proved he had conducted a serious, systematic study of the Chinese language. He had annotated the six volumes of Memoires historiques by Se-Ma Ts'ien, as translated by Edouard Chavannes, and he corrected all the printing mistakes based on the Chinese texts, he knew the Chinese classics in the Couvreur editions, he had a subscription to the T'oung Pao magazine, and he had bought all the volumes of Varietes sinologiques published in Shanghai until the beginning of the war.

I became interested in that man ever since I was able to rebuild part of his library, although for a long time I was unable to learn his full name. The antiquarian had bought several hundred books by 1920, but, apart from a few postcards, which he had sold immediately, he had not found any buyer for this collection of Sinological texts and studies. I was wondering then: who was that Romanian man, who had set out to learn the Chinese language so seriously and who left nothing behind, not even his full name? What obscure passion attracted him to that distant land, which he did not wish to approach as an amateur, though, but whose language he wished to learn, whose history he labored to penetrate? Did he ever manage to reach China, or did he die early, in some hole of the war front?

To some of those questions I had in my mind, feeling confused and melancholic, as I was browsing his books there, with the antiquarian on the embankment, I got an answer much later. An answer itself intertwined in numberless mysteries. But this is a completely different story, without any connection to the events I am beginning to describe now.

Still, remembering this Radu C. and a few other Orient scholars or enthusiasts of Eastern things who had lived, in total anonymity, here in Romania, I decided to accept the invitation from this unknown lady.

That same afternoon I went straight to the house on S. Street. When I stopped at number 17, I recognized one of those houses which I could never walk by without slowing down and spying on, eager to guess what was going on behind those aging walls, who lived there, and struggling with what destiny. S. Street is right in the center of Bucharest, very close to Victoria Street.

What miracle had managed to keep that aristocratic house untouched, at number 17, with its iron trellis work, pebbles in the yard, locust trees and sweet chestnut trees freely growing, crushing part of the facade with their shadow? The gate opened heavily and, among the rich autumn flower beds, a basin where the water had long since dried up and two dwarfs with discolored heads welcomed you. There was a sense of a different atmosphere in that place. A world that had slowly entered into twilight in the other proud neighborhoods of Bucharest, but which had endured here, courteous, without the agony of decrepitude or misery.

It was an aristocratic house of the old times, but well kept. Only the dampness of the trees had made the facade wither out too early. The main entrance was protected, as it was fashionable forty years ago, by a foggy glass fan. A few stone steps, green with moss, and carrying large flower pots on each side, led to a marquee with colored upper windows. There was no name card near the door bell.

I was expected. An old, limping housekeeper opened the door for me immediately and ushered me to an enormous living room. I had little time to glance at the furniture and the paintings surrounding me, because Mrs. Zerlendi showed up from behind an oak door.

She was a woman past the age of fifty, but a hard one to forget even if you saw her even once. This lady – well, she did not grow old like everybody else. Or, perhaps, she was getting old like women in other centuries: in a mysterious comprehension that through death she would go toward the great illumination of all meanings, rather than toward the end of an earthly life, with the gradual drying up of the flesh and its definitive melting into dust. I have always divided people into two categories: those who see death as the end of life and of the body and those who conceive of it as the beginning of a new spiritual experience. And I never try to judge anybody I meet until I learn their honest belief about death. Otherwise, the most brilliant intelligence or thrilling charm can mislead me.

Mrs. Zerlendi sat in an armchair and pointed a high-back, wooden chair to me, with a gesture in which I did not recognize the usual familiarity of aged women.

"Thank you for coming," she spoke. "My husband would've been delighted to meet you. He loved India, too, perhaps more so than his medical profession would have allowed him to –"

I was getting ready to listen to a long story, happy because, during that time, I would be able to carefully watch the very strange face of Mrs. Zerlendi without offending her. But my hostess stopped for a few seconds, and then, slightly bending her forehead in my direction, she asked:

"Do you know the life and writings of Dr. Johann Honigberger? My husband fell in love with India through the books of this Saxon doctor from Brasov. He probably inherited his interest for history, too, because history was the hobby of his entire family, but he began to get involved with India when he discovered the works of Dr. Honigberger. In fact, he kept collecting materials for years, and he even began to write a monograph of this Saxon doctor. He was a physician himself, and he believed he was capable of writing such a book."

I confess I knew very little about Dr. Johann Honigberger at the time. I remembered that, many years before, I had read his main book, Thirty-Five Years in the East, in an English translation, the only one available to me in Calcutta. That was a time when I was studying the Yoga philosophies and techniques, and I researched Honigberger's book mostly for its details on these occult practices, which the doctor seemed to have been very familiar with. However, since his book was published by the mid-19^th century, I suspected that the author's judgment was not critical enough. But I did not know that Dr. Honigberger, who had been remarkably famous in Orientalism, came from an old family of Brasov. However, now this very detail was the one that interested me.

"My husband exchanged huge numbers of letters with various physicians and scientists who had met Honigberger, because, although Honigberger died in 1869 in Brasov, just back from his last trip to India, there were a lot of people who were still alive and who had met him. One of his children was a magistrate in Iasi; the doctor sired him by his first wife, but my husband never got to meet him, although he went to Iasi very often in search of some papers."

In spite of myself, I began to smile. I was amazed that Mrs. Zerlendi knew the details of Honigberger's biography so accurately. She probably guessed my thought, because she added:

"He was so very much interested in these things, that they got stuck in my mind, too, forever. These things and many others –"

She suddenly stopped, musing. Later, I had the opportunity to see for myself how many accurate things Mrs. Zerlendi knew about Dr. Honigberger. One entire evening she only told me the story of his first stay in India, after having spent about four years in Asia Minor, one year in Egypt, and seven years in Syria. It was easy to surmise that Mrs. Zerlendi had repeatedly researched her husband's books and manuscripts, as if she had once wished to finish up the work he had interrupted.

True, it was very hard to flee the mysterious magic of that Saxon doctor, a doctor because this is what he wanted to be, since officially, he only had a pharmacist's diploma.

Honigberger had spent more than half of his long life in the Orient. At one time, he became the Court physician, pharmacist, head of the Armory, and admiral for Maharajah Ranjit-Singh of Lahore. Many times he gathered considerable fortunes and then lost them. A big-time adventurer, Honigberger had never been a crook, though. He was educated in very many sciences, both profane and occult, and his ethnographic, botanical, stamp, and art collections enriched many illustrious museums. Easy to understand why Dr. Zerlendi, passionately interested as he was in the past of our nation and in the history of medicine, spent so many years of his life reconstructing and deciphering Honigberger's real biography.

"Because very early," Mrs. Zerlendi once confessed to me, "he reached the conclusion that Honigberger's life was hiding a lot of riddles, despite all the books that have been written about him. For example, my husband couldn't explain his last trip to India, in 1858, when he was feeling so ill from a journey to tropical Africa, that he was barely still alive. Why did Honigberger go back to India, crashed as he was, and why did he die as soon as he set foot back in Brasov?, my husband often wondered.

"And again, the so-called botanical research the doctor conducted in Kashmir a long time before seemed questionable to my husband. He had reasons to believe that Honigberger hadn't traveled just to Kashmir, but that he had crossed over to Tibet, or, anyway, he had researched the science of occult pharmacopoeia in one of those hermitages in the Himalayas, and, so, his botanical inquests served only as a pretext. Anyway, you can be a better judge of that," Mrs. Zerlendi added.

I must confess that, after taking a look at the books and documents on Honigberger that Mrs. Zerlendi's husband had collected so carefully, I began to be convinced, too, that the life of the Saxon doctor was veiled in riddles. But everything that happened after my first visit to the house on S. Street was much beyond the mystery of Honigberger.

"Then I thought," Mrs. Zerlendi began to speak again after a long break, "that it would be a pity to waste all this work. I heard about you, I read some of your works, especially those on India and on the Indian philosophy. I can't say I understood them completely, but I got one thing clear: that I can trust you."

I tried to confess I was flattered, etc., but Mrs. Zerlendi continued the same way:

"Virtually nobody has visited this house for very many years. Just a few friends, who don't have the special training my husband had attained. So his desk and library have remained unchanged since 1910. I was out of the country myself for a long time, and since I came back I've avoided mentioning my husband's name too often. His colleagues, the doctors, considered him a maniac at the time. This library I'm going to show you – well, only one person has seen it, I mean of the people who could appreciate it: Bucura Dumbrava.

"I wrote to her the way I wrote to you, that I had a rich Orientalist collection, and she finally came, but after long postponements. I think she was very much interested. She told me she found here books that she had once requested at the BritishMuseum. But she didn't have time to research it methodically. She took some notes and promised to come back after her return from India. As you may know, she was going to a theosophical congress in India. But she never got to set foot on Romanian soil again. She died at Port Said."

I do not know whether Mrs. Zerlendi ascribed some secret meaning to this death of Bucura Dumbrava's, right before her return. She fell silent again, intensely watching me. I felt I had to say something, so I told her that mystery was so active in our life, that it was not even necessary to look for it far away, in places like Adyar or Port Said. Mrs. Zerlendi did not answer me. She stood up from her armchair and invited me to go with her to the library. When we crossed the living room, I asked her if her husband had ever been to India.

"Hard to say," she whispered hesitatingly, still trying to smile.

II

I have seen many libraries belonging to rich people, belonging to great scholars, but none has ever fascinated my heart like this one, on S. Street. When the massive oak door opened, I froze in wonder on the threshold. It was one of those giant rooms that can rarely be found, even in the richest houses of the 19^th century.

The large windows opened to the garden behind the house. The curtains had been pulled a little before we came in, so the clear autumn sunset light added even further to the solemnity of this high-ceiling hall, which was mostly upholstered with books. A wooden gallery surrounded a vast portion of the library. There were perhaps thirty thousand books, nearly all leather-bound, of the most diverse disciplines of culture: medicine, history, religion, traveling, occultism, India scholarship.

Mrs. Zerlendi directed me straight to the exclusive shelves where only the books having to do with India had been gathered. I have seldom encountered such valuable books and so many of them in a private collection. Only later, after spending a whole afternoon in front of those numberless shelves, did I fully realize what treasures were lodged in that place.

There were hundreds of traveling books about India, from Marco Polo and Tavernier to Pierre Loti and Jaccolliot. Obviously, Dr. Zerlendi gathered any and all books about India, because this is the only way I can explain the presence of phony writers, too, like for instance Louis Jaccolliot.

Then, there were the entire collections of the Journal Asiatique and of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of London, not to mention the documents issued by a whole host of academies, hundreds of scholarly memorandums on the languages, literatures, and religious of India. Everything important that had been published in the field of India scholarship in the 19^th century was there, from the grand dictionary of St. Petersburg to the editions of Sanskrit texts published in Calcutta or Benares. The volumes of Sanskrit texts provided my greatest surprise.

"He began to study the Sanskrit language in 1901," Mrs. Zerlendi explained, as she saw me flabbergasted, "and he learned it thoroughly, as much as anyone can learn a language being far from its living centers."

True, I found there not just elementary books or texts that an amateur would buy, but books that only a man who penetrated deeply into the secrets of the Sanskrit language could order. I discovered, for example, difficult commentaries like Siddanta Kaumudi, which proved his interest in the nuances of the Sanskrit grammar; or the enormous treatise by Medhaditi on the Laws of Manu; or those thorny sub-comments to the Vedantic texts, which are printed in the printing shops of Allahabad and Benares; or numerous books about the Indian rituals.

I was especially stupefied by the presence of the Indian medicine books and the treatises of mysticism and asceticism. I know from my limited experience how profound and difficult such texts are and that they cannot be understood without a painstaking comment, and often they are only half-understood if they are not orally explained by a teacher.

I turned my eyes toward Mrs. Zerlendi in astonishment. I had felt a thrill when I walked into the library, expecting to find rich archives about the life and work of Dr. Honigberger, but what I discovered was the library of a scholar on India, which, owing to its immensity and variety, would have made men like Roth, Jacobi, or Sylvain Levi envious.

"He arrived at this point starting out from Honigberger," Mrs. Zerlendi explained to me, understanding my thoughts, and showing me another corner of the library, where I was soon to find the books and documents related to the Saxon doctor.

"But when did he have time to collect so many books and research them all?," I exclaimed, still stunned.

"He inherited a large number of them from his family, especially the history books," she added. "As for the rest, he bought them on his own, especially during the last eight years. He sold a few land estates." She uttered the last words smiling, without the slightest regret.

"All the antiquarians in Leipzig, Paris, and London knew him," she continued. "And he really knew what to buy. Sometimes he bought entire libraries from the families of deceased Orientalists. But, obviously, he didn't have time to read them all, although those last years he stayed awake almost all night; he only slept for two or three hours."

"Maybe that damaged his health," I said.

"No, on the contrary," Mrs. Zerlendi answered. "His capacity for work was gigantic. And he had a special lifestyle: he didn't eat any meat, didn't smoke, didn't drink alcohol, tea, or coffee –"

She seemed ready to add something, but she stopped suddenly and invited me to the other side of the library, where the "Honigberger corner" was located. All the books written by the Saxon doctor were there, along with most of the published works that deal with his exceptional life. In a corner, a reproduction of the Mahlknecht engraving, that famous engraving which shows Honigberger wearing his outfit as Ranjit-Singh's adviser.

In cardboard files, Dr. Zerlendi had gathered numberless letters from Honigberger to the scholars of his time, copies from portraits and engravings of his family and contemporaries, maps on which he had reconstructed the itinerary of all the journeys made by Honigberger to Asia and Africa. I browsed melancholically through all those documents, whose value I was to discover later, amazed how come a man lived in our city only a quarter of a century ago, without anyone ever figuring out what a treasure he had amassed.

"And why didn't he write the book about Dr. Honigberger?," I asked.

"He had begun a draft," Mrs. Zerlendi spoke, after a long hesitation, "but he interrupted it suddenly, without ever telling me the real reason. As I told you, he exchanged lots of letters, looking for unpublished information and documents. By 1906, at the Exhibition, he met a friend of Constantin Honigberger's, the doctor's son by his first wife, who had a few letters and several documents he had gotten somewhat by chance.

"That autumn, my husband went to Iasi and he came back rather troubled. I don't think he got the originals, but he made copies from all those documents. Anyway, since then, he stopped writing the book and got increasingly focused on the Indian philosophy. In time, he forgot all about Honigberger, and, the following years, my husband dedicated himself entirely to the study of the Sanskrit language –"

Smiling, she showed me the library wall where I had first stopped, totally baffled.

"And he never confessed to you the real reason why he gave up the fruit of such passionate work, of all those years?," I asked.

"He rather hinted," Mrs. Zerlendi began, "because, since his return from Iasi, he had become rather silent.

"He told me once that it was mandatory for him to get deep knowledge of the Indian philosophy and occultism in order to be able to understand a certain period in Honigberger's life, a part that had remained obscure, sunk in legend. When he took up Sanskrit, he began to be interested in occultism, too.

"But this is an episode I know rather vaguely, because my husband never talked to me about his latest hobby. I gathered on my own that he was fervently interested in such studies because of the books he kept ordering all the time. As you can see for yourself," Mrs. Zerlendi added, urging me to another section of the library.

It is difficult for me to express how my surprise was even greater in that place. Everything Mrs. Zerlendi had confessed to me since we had entered the library, everything I had seen that far made up so many surprises and fed my perplexities so powerfully, that I inspected the new shelves in silence, overwhelmed with bewilderment and admiration.

It was obvious from the first look that the doctor had debuted very felicitously in building his collection of occult books. Those vulgar popularizing books, mostly spread out on the market by French publishers in the late 19^th century, were absent. The majority of the theosophical books, which are, for the most part, mediocre and equivocal, were equally absent. Just a few of the books written by Leadbeater and Annie Besant, with the complete works of Mrs. Blatavsky, which I later had the opportunity to learn that Dr. Zerlendi had read especially carefully.

In exchange, apart from Fabre d'Olivet and Rudolf Steiner, apart from Stanislas de Guaita and Hartmann, the library was extremely rich in the classics of occultism, Hermetism, and traditional theosophy. Old editions of Swedenborg, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Boehme, Della Riviera, and Pernety stood beside the works attributed to Pythagoras, the hermetic texts, the collections of the famous alchemists, both in the old printings of Salmon and Manget and in the modern edition of Berthelot. Also present were the forgotten books of physiognomy, astrology, and chiromancy.

Later, when I had the opportunity to take my time to research those shelves, I discovered extremely rare works, such as De aquae vitae simplici et composito by Arnaud de Villeneuve, or Christian apocrypha, like for instance that Adam and Eve which Strindberg had so long pursued in his quest.

One could say that a secure thought and a precise target had urged Dr. Zerlendi to collect this rich occult library. As I realized step by step, no important author, no significant book was missing. Undoubtedly, the doctor had not just looked for superficial information, to assimilate the basic issues of the occultist doctrine and terminology, in order to write with a certain degree of competence the biography of Honigberger he was preparing. His books proved to me he wanted to see for himself the truth kept so well hidden in the hermetic tradition. Otherwise, it would have been useless to read Agrippa von Nettesheim and the Bibliotheca Chemica Curiosa.

And it was precisely the doctor's fervent interest in occultism, to which was added his passion for the Indian philosophy and, most of all, for the secret schools of India, that made me extremely curious. Especially because Mrs. Zerlendi had hinted that this new, latest passion of her husband's had broken loose following his visit to Iasi.

"He probably didn't limit himself to occultist readings," I said. "Surely, the doctor must've attempted to put some things into practice."

"I suppose so, too," Mrs. Zerlendi said, after a few seconds of hesitation. "He never confessed anything to me. He spent most of those last years in this room alone, or on one of our estates in Oltenia. As I was telling you, he never looked tired, in spite of that virtually ascetic lifestyle of his. On the contrary, I could even say he felt better than before –"

Still, he died, I thought, listening to Mrs. Zerlendi's so very reticent explanations. It had gotten almost dark in the room, and the hostess crossed it in her soft footsteps to turn on the lights. Two giant chandeliers, from which numberless crystal arrowheads were hanging, flooded the library with an artificial, glaring light. I could not bring myself to leave and I remained standing there, in front of the shelves with occultist books, hesitating. Mrs. Zerlendi came closer to me again, after she shut one of the windows – the one opening to a stone balcony – and drew a golden-green velvet curtain.

"Now that you've seen what collections we are talking about," she began, "I can tell you my whole thought. For years I've been wondering, maybe I'm a little guilty myself about this whole work done by my husband, I mean all those drawers filled with papers and letters he collected when he was preoccupied with Honigberger's biography. I don't know exactly what he was planning to study during the last years, but the research he was doing still came from the same need to understand Honigberger better.

"When I heard about you, that you spent so many years in India studying the philosophies and religions there, I thought maybe you knew what my husband set out to learn and that Honigberger's life wouldn't be such a mystery to you. Your work wouldn't be futile," Mrs. Zerlendi added, slightly raising her arm to point to the "Honigberger corner." "Perhaps you'll find it interesting to write the biography of this Saxon doctor, which my husband was never able to finish. I could die reconciled with myself," she continued, "knowing that my husband's materials have been useful to somebody and that the biography he dreamed of has been published."

I did not know what to answer. I had never before made a commitment for any commissioned work in any discipline unfamiliar to me. I wrote most of my books in a hurry, compelled by life's needs, but I only wrote things of my own choice, whether I began a novel or a philosophical treatise. Still, I felt my hesitation could not be prolonged forever.

"Madam," I began, "I'm flattered by your trust in me and I honestly confess I'm more than happy thinking I could come back to this library without bothering you. But I don't know if I could ever finish what your husband began. First, I'm not a doctor and I don't know the history of the 19^th century medicine. Then, there are a lot of things your husband was familiar with and which are totally alien to me. But I can promise you one thing: that Honigberger's biography will be written and published. I could look for someone to cooperate with me, a specialist in everything that has to do with the medicine and history of the 19^th century."

"I thought about this, too," Mrs. Zerlendi said. "But the important thing is not the medical part, for that, I can always find the most learned experts, what's important is the Oriental part of the biography. If I hadn't known how much my husband wanted the life and work of Honigberger to be written by a Romanian, too – because, anyway, there are enough biographies put together by foreigners – I would've contacted a specialist from Britain or Germany, there Honigberger is famous."

She stopped suddenly and, after a few minutes of silence, she raised her eyes and looked straight into mine. "And then I confess there is something else that might sound too personal to you: my wish to see this biography written close to me. There are certain episodes in that man's life which are obscure enough, you'll see, and I keep hoping someone will disclose them to me one day."

III

Mrs. Zerlendi was perfectly right to talk about those obscure episodes in the life of Johann Honigberger, and I realized that only later, when I read carefully the manuscripts the doctor had collected, classified, and annotated. I went back to the house on S. Street a few days later, and since then, I spent at least three afternoons a week in the library.

That autumn was lingering on, inexpressibly beautiful and warm. I usually arrived by four o'clock and stayed until late in the evening. Mrs. Zerlendi sometimes welcomed me right in the living room. But usually we met in the library, where she would come long after I sat down to work, stepping in with that same low-key grace, as she approached my desk and stretched out to me the same unusually pale hand coming out from a black silk sleeve.

Immediately afterwards, the old housekeeper would come in, bringing a tray with confiture and cups of coffee. Mrs. Zerlendi was always there when coffee was served to me. She must have thought her presence would not be inconvenient to me during that break when I interrupted my work for a while, leaving the manuscript file open in front of me.

"How's it going?," she would always ask me. "Do you think you could use my husband's papers?"

But things moved pretty slowly. Maybe it was my fault, too, because I did not just research the Honigberger archive, but, as I made an inventory of it, I tried to penetrate into the numberless shelves with books about India and occultism, an operation I was very passionate about and which took me a long time.

After my fourth visit to the house on S. Street, I succeeded in finding how much of Honigberger's biography the doctor had actually written. The definitive text stopped at the point when Honigberger went back Aleppo, by 1822: there, the Saxon doctor had introduced his new vaccination methods. But there was also a first draft of a few chapters describing the seven years Honigberger had spent in Syria.

All this hardly accounted for a quarter of the actual biography, because Honigberger began to be interesting only after he arrived at the court of Ranjit-Singh. As for other epochs in the life of the adventurous doctor, I only found documentary materials about them, carefully classified in cardboard files, arranged in chronological order. On each file, the dates, localities and number of included testimonies had been written.

Sometimes, a year was followed by question marks or forwarding notes to another dossier of the apocryphal pieces. Because Dr. Zerlendi had reached the conclusion – avowed in a note to the first chapter – that many assertions made by Honigberger, and which were accepted by his contemporary biographers, were based on false data or on documents deliberately forged later on. What had been Honigberger's interest to mystify his already fabulous life, experienced under the sign of mystery and adventure? I had a hard time understanding that.

"You haven't yet reached the riddles my husband was telling me about?," Mrs. Zerlendi once asked me.

It was difficult for me to answer. I suspected what kind of explanations the old lady wanted from me, and I did not know whether I could ever reveal such things to her. The cases of "apparent death," Yogic trance, levitation, incombustibility, or invisibility Honigberger referred to, and which Dr. Zerlendi had studied in-depth, are very hard to explain to someone who does not theoretically understand the possibility of their occurrence.

As for the journeys veiled in mystery that Honigberger took to Kashmir and Tibet, his research in magic pharmacology, his alleged participation in certain initiatory ceremonies of the Vallabhacharya cult – those were unclear to me, too. Dr. Zerlendi, if he had found anything certain about these episodes, had not written anything about them in the files of his biography.

"I find riddles every step of the way," I answered evasively. "I haven't been able to read them yet –"

Mrs. Zerlendi would remain sitting beside me for a few moments, her eyes staring far away, then she would gradually come to herself and leave the library in her melancholic footsteps. When she remained there longer, continuing our conversation, she would ask me about my journeys to India; she was mostly interested in details about the hermitages in the Himalayas that I had gotten to know, things I am not very happy to talk about. She never confessed anything about her own life, or their family. I never learned the name of her friends, whom she sometimes referred to.

Everything I discovered subsequently happened by mere chance. Once, three weeks after my first visit, I came in a little earlier than usual. It was raining that day, a sad, autumn rain, and the old housekeeper opened up for me rather late. Mrs. Zerlendi was not feeling good, she told me. Still, I was allowed to come in; she had even lit the fire in the fireplace.

I went in shyly. The library seemed to have changed in the moldy light of the autumn rain. The fireplace was unable to warm up that giant room. Still, I began to work in a frenzy. I thought Mrs. Zerlendi would feel her suffering soothed if she knew I was working in the adjacent room, and that, maybe one day soon, I would be able to elucidate for her some of the "mysteries" her husband had explored.

Half an hour after my arrival, the library door opened and a young lady, with a cigarette in her hand, came in. She did not look at all surprised to find me there at the desk, with those open files in front of me.

"So you are the one!," she exclaimed, coming closer.

I stood up and told her my name.

"I know, my mother told me," she added in passing. "Let's hope you'll be luckier."

I smiled in confusion, not really knowing what she meant. Then I started to talk about everything I had found in connection with Honigberger. The young lady watched me somewhat ironically.

"We already heard all that some time ago," she interrupted me. "The others managed to arrive at this point, too. Poor Hans, he even reached further, they say –"

I must have stared at her in such amazement, that the young lady burst out laughing. She put out her cigarette in a copper ashtray and came closer to me.

"Or maybe you thought those 'riddles' had been waiting for you, for almost a quarter of the century, to read them?! Error, my dear sir! Others have tried before. My father was a fairly famous man, indeed, and his 'case' was not extinguished all that fast in the memory of a rather large group of people before the war."

"I'm not responsible for this error you caught me in," I answered, trying not to look too troubled. "Mrs. Zerlendi decided to reveal only certain things to me, but she was silent about others. In fact, my mission is rather limited," I added smiling. "I'm here to examine the documentary material in connection with Honigberger's biography."

The young lady looked straight into my eyes, as if it was difficult for her to believe me.

Then I was able to see her better. Tall, thin, almost skinny, her eyes were burning in a smoldering light, her mouth was nervous. She was not wearing any makeup and this added a few years to her thirty plus.

"I suspected my mother wasn't telling you certain things," she began in a less tense voice. "Maybe she would've disappointed you from the very beginning if she had told you that three people have already done the work you're doing today.

"The last one was a German officer, who remained here in Bucharest after the occupation. Poor Hans, we called him, because his fate was really tragic. He died in a hunting accident, on one of our estates. He claimed he was beginning to understand Honigberger's 'mysteries' my father referred to, but that he spoke too little Romanian, so he had to learn more. I don't see what possible connection could exist between Honigberger's 'mysteries' and Hans' progress in the Romanian language. I feel he didn't learn much, either –"

"Nothing you're telling me," I began, "could discourage me. On the contrary, these things bring me even closer to this Honigberger, who, until a few weeks ago, meant just the name of a traveler-adventurer to me."

The young lady smiled again and sat in the armchair near the desk; she continued to watch me very closely.

"My mother is less interested in Honigberger than you think. And she's perfectly right, too. She's interested most of all to know what happened to my father –"

"I realized that," I interrupted her. "And since I never dared ask her, please, explain this to me. Why did your father die and in what circumstances?"

The young lady hesitated a few moments, bowing her head. She seemed to be wondering whether she could tell me the truth, or if maybe it was better for me to learn it elsewhere, on my own. Finally, she stood up slowly from the armchair and spoke:

"My father didn't die. Anyway, we don't know if or when he died. On September 10, 1910, he disappeared from home, and since then, nobody ever saw him again and we never heard from him again."

We both fell silent, looking at each other. I did not know what to say. I did not even know whether she was confessing the whole truth to me, or if she was hiding certain upsetting details. She opened a small amber cigarette case and chose a cigarette.

"No doubt he left for the Orient, he went to India," I said, to break the silence. "To follow Honigberger –"

"That's what we thought, too. I mean this is what our friends thought, because I was in the second grade in elementary school and I didn't quite understand what had happened. I had just come back from school and found them all agitated and terrified. My father had disappeared that morning, or maybe during the night before –"

"He probably wanted to leave unexpectedly," I said. "He knew what difficulties he would've faced if he had confessed his thought to anyone."

"Of course. But it's very hard to accept that he could have left for the Orient without a passport, without money, and without clothes."

I did not understand and she insisted:

"The truth is my father disappeared in the proper meaning of the word. And he disappeared without taking any of his suits, without his hat, leaving all his money in his desk drawer. He didn't take any document, didn't get a passport, didn't write any letter to my mother or to any friend.

"It's very hard to understand how mysterious this disappearance looked to those who knew the circumstances. My father's life had been strange, almost ascetic for a few years. He never saw anyone. He spent his days and nights in this library and in his room, where he only slept for two hours each night, on a wooden bed, without mattress or pillow. He wore very thin clothes, white trousers, sandals, and a flax shirt. That's what he wore at home, both in summer and winter.

"And that's what he was wearing when he disappeared, I mean clothes he wouldn't have worn in the street. We haven't been able to find out whether he disappeared during the night, just leaving the house from this library, or after he withdrew to his bedroom.

"The whole house was asleep when he usually stopped working: at three o'clock in the morning. Two hours later, at five, he woke up, took his shower, and then he remained locked in his room, meditating, for a long time. That's what we thought, anyway, because he wasn't telling my mother anything. He had distanced himself from the world, from the family. When I ran into him, seldom that is, I felt his love hadn't dwindled, but it was a different kind of love –"

"And all that investigation led to no results at all?," I asked. "Nobody found any trace of him, anywhere? It's incredible that a man can just disappear, without leaving any trace behind."

"Yes, but that's exactly what happened. We found no sign indicating any preparations for his departure. Here, in this room and in his bedroom, everything was in perfect order; his books and notebooks were placed on this desk the way he left them every evening, in the bedroom we found his watch, his keys, and his wallet with change on the nightstand. As if he had disappeared in a few seconds only, before he had time to gather his things, before he even wrote a word to explain things or call for forgiveness –"

The young lady suddenly interrupted her confessions and shook hands with me.

"Now that I've told you what you should've known from day one, I'll go. Only, please, don't say anything to my mother about our conversation. She has her own superstitions and I don't want to upset her by not taking them into account –"

IV

She left before I could summon enough courage to stop her and ask her to explain those many obscure episodes in her confession. For instance, how come there had not been more talk at the time about this mysterious disappearance, or what happened to the other men Mrs. Zerlendi had asked to research the library, and who, the young lady told me in passing, had been unlucky.

I sat down at the desk somewhat dizzy from all I had heard. I was unable to focus my thoughts. Now I looked at the files in front of me and at the books surrounding me on all sides, feeling different. My admiration as a bibliophile and as an India scholar had turned into a fuzzy complex feeling, mixing fear, distrust, and fascination. It was difficult to believe everything my visitor had told me, word by word. Still, her confessions shed a new light for me to better understand the old lady's reticence in talking to me openly, her concern never to tell me anything about her husband's death, her barely controlled curiosity.

I thought the disappearance of Dr. Zerlendi appeared so incredible because the man had probably prepared it for a long time, to the tiniest details, ardently longing to reach India and for ever break all the bridges that linked him to his previous life. But it was precisely this very clever departure, the secret way he had prepared it, his utter passion for the secrets of India that captivated me.

I had never heard before of any such attempt to leave suddenly, without saying good-bye, without farewell letters, without leaving any trace behind. Compared to everything I had just heard, the Honigberger file, still open on the desk, seemed of little importance now. I went to the shelves with books about India, where I knew I would also find the doctor's drawers with manuscripts and charts, the evidence of his study of so many years. I opened the first drawer and I began to make a very careful inventory, searching each individual book.

There, I found his notebooks with Sanskrit grammar drills, and I felt a touch of melancholy when I found the homework and declensions I had struggled with myself, a long time before: nrpah, nrpam, nrpena, nrpaya, nrpat, nrpasya, nrpe, nrpa, etc. The doctor's clumsiness in writing the Sanskrit characters was obvious. But his patience had undoubtedly been enormous, because dozens of full notebook pages were filled with the declension of the same word, in unrelenting reiteration, like a college pensum.

In another book, there were entire sentences already, most of them from Hitopadesha and Panchatantra, with both the literal and the free translations attached. I rummaged through dozens of such notebooks, filled up to the last page with drills, conjugations, and declensions, or translations. In a thick book, with an alphabetical index, the doctor wrote the new words he came across in his drills.

Some books had certain dates on their title page: in all likelihood, the time when he worked on the materials included there. Time and again, I found proof of the doctor's irrefutable labor in learning the Sanskrit language; a 300-page book had been filled up with drills in less than two weeks.

That rainy autumn afternoon, I only found in the manuscript drawer proof of his unrelenting passion for the study of Sanskrit, and nothing else. Just a simple note on the first page of a language drill notebook drew my attention for a moment. There were just a few words there, but thrilling words to me. Shambala = Agarttha = the unseen realm. All the other pages were filled up with the same schoolboy drills.

The next day I went back there earlier than usual. I had never entered into the library in such a state of restlessness and curiosity. I had stayed awake almost all night thinking about everything Mrs. Zerlendi's daughter had unveiled to me, and wondering what force from beyond drove the doctor to such a brutal gesture, such a cruel separation from his family, his friends, and his country.

As soon as I reached the library, I went straight back to the drawers I had researched the day before, I took a whole stack of books, files, and notebooks and I sat down at the desk. This time I worked in a state of extremely high alertness. The notebooks were written in increasingly secure Sanskrit characters, which in time became cursive. Half an hour later, Mrs. Zerlendi came in. She was pale, weak, although she had only been ill for two days.

"I'm happy to see you working with such great interest," she began, as she noticed the heap of notebooks. "Those papers have never been researched by anyone, yet," she added, slightly blushing. "It doesn't matter what my daughter told you yesterday. Smaranda has a fantastic bent, and in her imagination she sees connections between things that have nothing to do with each other. She was a child back then. And because Hans, her fiance, died recklessly while hunting, after he, too, began to research these notebooks, Smaranda made up a whole theory of her own.

"She thinks everything connected to Honigberger is under a curse, and horrible things happen to those who research his archives, beginning with my husband; something similar to what is alleged to have happened to those who searched the tomb of Tutankhamun. But these are her fantasies, and she began to believe in them after she read some books about Tutankhamun."

As I listened to her, I felt increasingly troubled. Because now I did not know what to believe and which side the truth was on. Mrs. Zerlendi was somewhat embarrassed when she talked about her daughter. But how did she know what the young lady had told me, I was wondering. Could she have eavesdropped?

"Smaranda never recovered after Hans' death in 1921," Mrs. Zerlendi began to speak again. "Perhaps because of this great pain, now she sometimes loses sight of reality."

"But the young lady –," I tried to defend her.

"You don't have to tell me anything more," Mrs. Zerlendi interrupted me. "I know what she believes and what kind of hints she makes, especially to the people she finds in this library."

At that time, Mrs. Zerlendi's explanations seemed rather incoherent to me. Still, she had not mentioned her husband at all. She never said he was dead, but she never spoke about his disappearance, either. She had just tried to defend herself against Smaranda's accusation that she had invited others, too, before me, to read, in one form or another, Honigberger's "riddles," which could also have been her husband's riddles.

"That's what I wanted to tell you," she whispered in a tired voice. "Now, please excuse me, I need to go back to my room. I am not completely recovered yet."

When I was alone again, I began to smile. I thought Smaranda was due to come to the library any minute now, asking me not to believe what Mrs. Zerlendi had confessed. But my curiosity was too strong, so, after a little while, I went back to researching the notebooks.

Almost until evening, I kept turning pages and all I found was translations, homework, transcribed texts, interpretations, and grammar comments. One book with notes on the Vedanta philosophy and Yoga appeared more interesting, so I set it aside. Then I picked a black cardboard notebook, bearing a title and a number like all the others, which it looked no different from.

The first page was covered with the transcription of a few passages from the Upanishads. Undoubtedly, I would have believed that the following pages basically contained the same kind of texts, if my eyes had not caught the first line on page two: Adau vada asit, sa cha vada ishvarabhimukha asit, sa cha vada ishvara asit! For one split second I did not get the meaning of those words, and I almost turned the page, when a lightning struck my mind, the translation of the sentence I had just read.

It was the beginning of the Gospel According to John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." I was amazed that the doctor had transcribed this quotation in the Sanskrit translation, so I started to read further, to see why.

But, next instant, my emotion pushed all my blood up to my cheeks. The words I was reading, wrapped in those foreign Sanskrit characters, were Romanian: "I am beginning this diary on January 10, 1908. The precaution I am taking to disguise my writing will be comprehended by he who succeeds in reading it to the end. I do not wish that my thought should fall under the eyes of no matter who –"

Now I realized why the doctor had transcribed the quotation from the Gospel According to John on top of page two: to alert the reader that the following were not Indian texts. He had taken all precautions, so that no lay researcher would as much as get one distant clue about the contents of this book; the same kind of a notebook, like all the others, the same number, the same Sanskrit writing –

I became so emotional, that I did not dare read any further. It was rather late now, and I should have left a few minutes before. If I had called Mrs. Zerlendi and read to her the contents of this book, I might have done so against the will of its author. I had to decipher it myself first, before communicating it to other people. But I would not have enough time to finish it that evening, I thought in despair.

Then the door opened and the housekeeper came into the living room. She seemed to be frowning worse than usual, her eyes looked even more severe. When I saw her coming near me, I bowed onto the book, which I opened at random. What I was reading there made me literally suffer because I could not stay there for a few hours on end, to find out everything that had happened.

"Tomorrow and day after tomorrow we're cleaning the house," the housekeeper spoke. "That's why I came in, to tell you this. Don't come over here for nothing. Because if I start cleaning, I will only finish two days later."

I nodded, thanking her. But the housekeeper probably felt like talking. She came closer to the desk and pointed to the books:

"All those devilish things ruin your head," she spoke, meaning a lot. "Better tell Madam you can't manage and get on with your youth, it's too bad to waste it."

I raised my eyes from the book and scrutinized her.

"That's why the doctor passed away," she continued.

"Did he die?," I asked quickly.

"He journeyed out to the wide world and passed away," she repeated in the same manner.

"But did you see him dead?," I persisted.

"Nobody's seen him dead, but he perished out there, somewhere, without a candle. And he left the house empty. Don't follow Madam," she added, keeping her voice down. "Poor lady, she's not all that sane anymore, either. Because two years later, her brother, the prefect, passed away too, after he came here with a Frenchman, a French scientist –"

"Hans," I said.

"No, master Hans came later. He wasn't even French. He came afterwards, after the war. He died young, too –"

I did not know what to say. I remained silent, staring at her. That moment I, too, felt the attraction of a weird charm I had never felt before. The housekeeper wiped the desk edge with her palm.

"That's why I came in," she spoke much later, "to tell you we're cleaning the house for a couple o' days."

Then she went away, limping, and got out through the same door that opened to the living room. I took another look at the notebook. It was terrible for me to leave it now, when I had just found it, and only come back three days later. Almost without realizing what I was doing, I took it and hid it under my coat, shaking all over my joints. Then I stayed on for a few more minutes, to catch my short breath, I put back the rest of the notebooks, and I tiptoed my way out, careful not to run into anybody who could guess my thoughts and my fault.

V

That evening I stayed at home, locking myself up, with my shades down, because I was afraid that the light from my lamp might encourage some friend to trouble my solitude. And, as I furthered on into the night, it seemed that my time and place got dispersed into a fuzzy mist, this is how deeply overwhelmed my whole being was, as I deciphered the notes of Dr. Zerlendi, page by page.

That reading was not exactly easy. At first, the doctor strove to write everything extremely carefully, because it is hard to transpose all the Romanian sounds into the Sanskrit writing. But a few pages later, the transcription became increasingly approximate, and you had to guess the word, rather than read it. Either because of the excitement he felt when he described his apprehensive experiences in this book, or because he hurried, Dr. Zerlendi's writing did not read fluently.

In time, his sentences became shorter, his words increasingly technical, like a conventional, encrypted language. On the threshold of his last experiences, the doctor had taken care to keep his secret, exclusively using Yogic terminology, which is inaccessible to those who have not studied in-depth, like him, this science so rich in arcanes.

"Honigberger's letter to J.E. was the most precise confirmation I had," the doctor wrote at the beginning of his personal diary, without explaining who J.E. was, or the content of that letter, which Mrs. Zerlendi had mentioned to me rather vaguely in one of our conversations. "As early as in the spring of 1907, I began to believe that everything Honigberger had written in his Indian memoirs was not only authentic in the precise meaning of the word, but that it accounted for only an infinitesimal part of what he had seen and managed to achieve."

Several forwarding notes to Honigberger's work follow; cases of fakirs, levitation, apparent death, men buried alive, etc., facts he felt he had the right to consider as purely authentic.

"I began my first experiences on July 1, 1907. Weeks before, I had examined my conscience very severely and I had given up tobacco, alcohol, meat, coffee, tea, and everything else. I am not trying to retrace here the history of that clumsy preliminary stage, which lasted six months. I needed an iron will, because several times I got ready to quit and go back to having fun with historiography. Fortunately, Honigberger's letter proved to me these things were possible to achieve, and that thought kept giving me courage.

"I had never imagined, though, that one can go so far and with such little relative effort. Because only after you acquire the first powers and the veils that cover your eyes fall suddenly, do you comprehend the extent of people's ignorance and the painful illusion that deceives them every day, to the threshold of their death. The will and energy man consumes to satisfy his social ambition or scientific vanity are perhaps even stronger than what is required in order to achieve this extraordinary thing: your own salvation from pettiness, ignorance, and pain."

The doctor describes his first experiences in enough detail – that day, January 10, 1908, and the following days. From what I could gather, he already knew the Yogic literature, especially Patanjali's treatise and its comments, he was familiar with the Indian ascetic philosophy and mysticism, but he had not yet tried to put them into practice. He seemed to have gone straight to that difficult experience of achieving breath control, namely pranayama, but without obtaining encouraging results for a long time.

"On July 25, I fell asleep during an exercise of this kind," he wrote, after noting that, a few days before, he had choked in an unusually violent cough. "For a long time I did those exercises after midnight, then at dawn. The only results were a terrible chest pressure and episodes of dry coughing. I understood, after weeks of efforts, that I was unable to accomplish anything, because, forcing myself to control my breath, the way Patanjali's text says, I kept forgetting to concentrate my mind on a single object.

"The resistance I met with was due precisely to this mental vacuum, which I was not aware of at the time. I tried again Honigberger's advice. I stuffed my ears with wax and I did not begin my pranayama until after a few minutes of prayer.

"I reached a state of exceptional mental peace. I still remember the first sensations: I felt as though I was in the midst of an angry sea quickly calming down, until there was nothing left but boundless water, without any wave, without a single tremble. Then a feeling of plenitude, which I cannot compare to anything else, except for the feeling that sometimes overwhelms you after listening to a lot of Mozart.

"For a few days on end, I reiterated the same experience, but without being able to go any further. I woke up a quarter of an hour later, in a vague reverie, although I knew that this feeling should not have been the result of the exercise. Somewhere on my way I had lost control; I had allowed myself to be rapt in the magic my own mind spread around me. I reiterated the exercise, but, after some time, the result was the same: reverie, drowsiness, or peerless mental placidity."

Those confessions touched me so deeply! A long time before, I had also tried some of the experiences the doctor clung to so obstinately, and I encountered the same difficulties. But he had been luckier and, certainly, his will was stronger.

In the first days of September 1907, almost without realizing it, he took a great step forward in these exercises to control his breath, namely to perfectly match inhaling with exhaling. "I began, as usual, by holding my breath for twelve seconds." This means he had managed to breathe in during twelve seconds, hold the air for another twelve seconds, and breathe it out during yet another twelve.

That day, fire was his object of meditation. Of course, he "concentrated" his mind on a recipient full of embers, trying to penetrate the essence of "fire," to find this fire in the entire cosmos, assimilating its "principle" at the same time, identifying it in all the processes of his own body, reducing the infinity of blazes that together make up the universe and each individual creature to the same incandescent element he had in front of his eyes.

"I do not know very well how it happened, but, after some time, I woke up sleeping, or, more accurately, I woke up in sleep without sleeping in the true meaning of the word. My body, with all its senses, was sinking into an increasingly deep sleep, without my mind interrupting its activity for one second. Everything in me had fallen asleep, except for my lucidity. I continued to meditate on fire, realizing at the same time, in a fuzzy manner, that the world around me was changing completely and that, if I had interrupted my concentration for one moment, I would have been naturally integrated into this world, which was the world of sleep –"

As he later realized himself, Dr. Zerlendi succeeded that day in the first and perhaps most difficult step on the road he had decided to take. He succeeded in what is called, in technical terms, the continuity of consciousness, namely to pass from the waking consciousness to the consciousness of sleep, without any hiatus. The consciousness of the normal man is brutally slashed by sleep; no man maintains the continuity of his mental stream when he falls asleep, no man knows he is asleep (at the most, he sometimes realizes he is dreaming), and no man lucidly continues his thinking in sleep. From the world of sleep he only remembers a few dreams and a certain indefinite fear.

"What frightened me the most in this discovery of mine – that I found myself awake in my sleep – was the feeling that the world around me was changing completely and it did not look like the world of the diurnal consciousness at all anymore. It is very difficult for me to spell out the way I felt this change, because I had projected my entire mind, like one single ray, on fire, and my senses were put to sleep. Still, it was like I was in another space, where it was not necessary to look in order to see, and I could see the room I was in, the objects, the shapes, the colors gradually changing.

"Everything that happened then is beyond all description; but I will try to describe it the best I can, because, as far as I know, nobody has ever dared reveal such an experience in writing. I kept watching the fire, not as a pretext for a hypnotic trance, because I have studied enough hypnotism to know its technique and effects. While I was watching, my thought was on fire, I assimilated it, using my mind to penetrate my own body, identifying all flames in it. So, it was not a frozen thought, only a thought that was one, namely it was not fragmented in several directions, it was not called upon by various objects, it was not distracted by any external stimulus or by any recollection projected like an eclat out of the subconscious.

"This thought, one, had fire only as its pillar; but with it, I penetrated everywhere I had to identify fire. So hypnosis was totally out of the question; especially because I was conscious all the time; I knew who I was, why I found myself in that posture, why I was controlling my breath, and the purpose of my meditating on fire. However, I realized at the same time that I was in another space, in another world. I could not feel my body anymore; just a vague warmth of the head, which, in time, disappeared, too. The objects looked as if they were forever flowing, without their contour being altered too much, though.

"In the beginning, you could have said you saw everything as through water in a perpetual state of movement, but the comparison is far from precise. Actually, the objects were flowing; some more slowly, others very fast, but it was impossible to tell where they were flowing and by what miraculous process their substance never ran dry from such an overflow above their natural boundaries; although, to try and explain my vision more accurately, it was not an overflow above the boundaries of the object, it seemed rather that those very boundaries were permanently flowing. Even stranger, all these objects were moving to-and-fro, against their will.

"Although I was not watching them, I knew they were there: a bed, two chairs, a carpet, a painting, a nightstand, etc., and I felt they would all gather in one spot if I just stopped to take a look at one of them. This impression was not a deception, a delusion; it was comparable to the precise feeling a man has in water, the feeling that he can move forward or get out of the water. It was something I knew, without being able to tell whether I had ever experienced it before or not.

"I also had the impression I could look much further than the walls of my room allowed me to. I cannot say the objects had become transparent. On the contrary, apart from their continuous flow and their weird mobility, seeming to respond to my possible desire to look at them, the objects had stayed as before. However, I could look beyond them, though, I repeat, I had not tried to look. Not through them anyway, but beyond them.

"They were there, in front of me, and still I knew I could see further, with them staying where they were. That feeling is somewhat similar to the vision a man can have looking at his entire house from the corner of one room; he cannot see through the walls, but he can still see all the things, because he knows they exist in the next room or in the whole house, without having the feeling that his eyes have penetrated the walls –"

VI

Undoubtedly, the doctor wrote all this after having reiterated the experience of the continuity of consciousness in sleep countless times. Judging from the clarity of his writing in this fragment, it seems that he had carefully drafted the above description and then he transcribed it into Sanskrit characters – which he did not do again later, when he just wrote down in the book directly.

"After a while, I felt an urge to penetrate deeper into the world of sleep, to explore that unknown space around me. But I did not dare take my eyes off the embers. A strange disquiet, even bordering on fright, I could say, was threatening me. I do not know what made me suddenly close my eyes: it was not fatigue, no, because I repeat, I felt I was sleeping and my mind was more awake than ever.

"I was stunned to find, with my eye-lids closed, the same vision I had had before, when my eyes were open. Only the embers seemed to have changed: they were flowing, too, like all the other objects around them, and their brilliance was more powerful, although I could say it was less alive.

"After a few moments of hesitation, I opened my eyes again. I realized it was useless to look, to turn my pupils toward one particular corner of the room; I could see anywhere I wanted, I could see wherever I directed my thought, whether my eyes were open or not. I thought about the garden behind the house and I saw it that very instant, as if I had been there.

"What an astonishing view! It was like an ocean of vegetal sap in restive turmoil. The trees almost embraced each other, the grass seemed to be shaking like a sheaf of sea weeds, only the fruits were quieter, as if driven by a protracted rocking movement.

"Next instant, the mirage of this vegetal storm suddenly disappeared. I thought about Sofia and I was able to see her on the huge bed in our bedroom, sleeping. Around her head there was a dark violet aura, floating; her body seemed to be constantly sloughing, with all those waves flooding out of her, disappearing as soon as they were detached from her limbs. I spent a long time watching her, trying to understand what was going on.

"Then I caught a glimpse of a timid flame, flickering, now by her heart, then lower, by her belly. Suddenly, I realized Sofia was near me. It was a horrible moment, because I could see her perfectly well in bed, sleeping, and I could also see her near me, at the same time, looking into my eyes, amazed, as if she wanted to ask me something. Her face showed extreme bewilderment; perhaps I looked different from the way she expected me to look, perhaps I did not look like the people she had encountered before in her dream. Because, only later, after I reiterated the experience several times, did I begin to understand that the faces I saw around me were the projection of the consciousness coming from various people in their sleep."

(I confess I do not understand what Dr. Zerlendi meant. But I left this fragment on, because the occultists may be interested. A sadhu I kept company with in 1930 or so at Konarak explained to me – but I cannot tell whether he spoke the truth – that it was disturbing to encounter, during certain Yogic meditations, the spirits of people who are asleep and which wander, like shadows, through the dimension of sleep. You could say they watch you in apprehension, not being able to understand how come it is possible for them to run into you there, while you are conscious, awake.)

"A few moments later, the space around me abruptly changed. My dread had brought me back to the waking state. I remained for a while in the same posture I had assumed at the beginning of my experience, and I counted the seconds again: my respiratory rhythm had remained the same: twelve seconds –"

His return from the dream consciousness to the consciousness of wakefulness was brutal; the continuity had been broken by his fear. Only after many experiences, reiterated the next day in the deepest secrecy, was Dr. Zerlendi able to return to his diurnal consciousness without any hiatus, by his sheer will. This is how he articulated his act of will: "Now I'm going back." At the same time, he reduced his respiratory rhythm from twelve to eight seconds, slowly withdrawing from the state of sleep.

As far as his ensuing experiences are concerned, the notes are briefer, either because the doctor did not want to say more, or because he could not, he was unable to find an adequate description. True, he confesses somewhere: "The unification of the consciousness is accomplished by a continuous passage, namely without any hiatus, from the waking state to the state of sleep with dreams, then the state of sleep without dreams, and, finally, to the cataleptic state." The unification of these four states, which implies (paradoxical as it may appear) the unification of the conscious with the subconscious and the unconscious, the gradual enlightening of the obscure and impenetrable zones of one's psycho-mental life, is, in fact, the purpose of the preliminary Yogic techniques.

(All Indian ascetics I met and who agreed to give me some explanations considered this stage, of unifying the states of consciousness, as the most important one. The man who did not succeed in this experience could not achieve any spiritual stature from his Yogic practices).

About the passage from the state of sleep with dreams to that of deep sleep without dreams, I only find few details: "I have succeeded in stretching even further the span of time between inhaling and exhaling: fifteen seconds each, even reaching twenty seconds." That means he only breathed once a minute, because he held his breath for twenty seconds, he took twenty seconds to inhale, and twenty seconds to exhale.

"I had the feeling I was going back to a spectral world, where all I encountered was colors, almost without being contoured into shapes. Colored spots, rather. In exchange, the universe of sounds dominated the world of forms. Each light spot was a source of sounds." As far as I can understand, the doctor tried to account – in a few, scanty lines – for that cosmos of sounds which begins to be accessible to the initiated only after repeated meditations on sounds, on those "mystical syllables" mentioned in the Mantra-Yoga treatises. Indeed, it seems that, from a certain level of the consciousness up, one only encounters sounds and colors – since shapes disappear as if by magic. But Dr. Zerlendi's indications are too vague for us to be able to reconstruct his experience.

The more amazing the results of his Yogic techniques get, the more reticent the confession becomes. About his penetration into the state of catalepsy, only this account: "With my latest experience, I began to learn the thoughts of any human being I concentrated my attention on. I checked this on Sofia, who was just finishing a letter to the estate administrator. I could have easily read the letter directly, but I did not; I was there, beside her, and I knew all her thoughts – not only those she put down in her letter – I learned them naturally, as if I had been listening to her speak."

Astonishing as these experiences may be, Dr. Zerlendi did not think they were all that important. "You can reach the same result even without stern asceticism, but only by a maximum mental focus. Although I am perfectly aware of the fact that modern men are no longer capable of such a mental effort. They are dissipated or in a continuous state of evanescence.

"Asceticism is useful not to acquire these powers, but to keep you from falling prey to them. The exploration of the unknown states of consciousness can tempt you so much, that you run the risk of wasting your life without reaching the end. It is a new world, but it is still a world. If you are content just to explore it, without seeking to transcend it – the way you have tried to transcend the states of wakefulness – it is as though you learned a new language and you took up reading all the books written in that language, but, because of that, you gave up learning other languages."

I cannot tell exactly what technical attainment stage the doctor had reached when he began his diary. Almost twenty pages were written on January 10, 12, and 13, 1908; they include some sort of a brief recap, for the possible reader, of the preliminary stages, but the diary does not say how long those preliminaries took. Several times he mentions the initials J.E.

"I believe that was J.E.'s fatal mistake," Dr. Zerlendi writes somewhere. "He did not acknowledge the unreality of the phenomena he had discovered in the spectral world. He thought that was the last frontier the human spirit could reach. He ascribed an absolute value to his experience, when, in fact, he still had to do with phenomena. I think this explains his paralysis. Honigberger was probably able to reactivate some of his centers, but nothing more. He could not cure his amnesia."

This is an obscure section; in all likelihood, this J.E. was unable to completely control his consciousness and fell prey to his own discoveries in the supra-normal world. I remember that all Indian occult treatises say the new cosmic levels the ascetic penetrates through the Yoga technique are as "illusory" as the cosmos that can be accessed by any mortal in his normal condition. On the other hand, I cannot tell whether the "centers" he refers to are the nervous centers or the occult plexuses which Yoga and the other traditions are familiar with.

Anyway, it seems that this J.E. had attempted, under Honigberger's direct influence, a Yoga-type initiation, and he failed horribly, either due to the cause Dr. Zerlendi surmised, or because his build was not favorable to the techniques he had tried.

"I succeeded in this," – notes the doctor further, referring to a complicated and obscure experience of projecting one's consciousness outside one's body, achieved in the cataleptic state – "because I was an exception, I had an Asian sensory structure (?). I do not believe a European can succeed. He cannot feel his body lower than the diaphragm, and even that is a rare thing, too. Usually, he only feels his head; I only realize this now, when I can see them the way they have never seen themselves, and none of them can hide anything from me."

This passage is cryptic enough. I figure "an Asian sensory structure" could mean the fuzzy experience people have of their own body, and which is different from race to race. I know for instance that an Eastern man feels his body in a way that is different from us, Europeans. If you touch the leg or shoulder of an Eastern man, he has the same sensation of rape that we have if anyone touches our eyes or lips with the back of their hands. As for feeling one's body "lower than the diaphragm," this expression may refer to the Western man's inability to have a total experience of his body. True, very few of us can boast they feel their bodies like a whole. Most people actually feel only certain portions of it – the forehead, the heart – and only in certain circumstances. Try for instance to feel your legs – in a position of total rest, for example lying comfortably in bed – and you will see how difficult that is.

"I unified easily enough the two currents (?), down to my heel," the doctor writes again in connection with the same experience. "That moment, I had the precise sensation that I was spherical, that I had become an impenetrable, perfectly impermeable bubble. Plenary feeling of autonomy, of invulnerability. The myths that refer to primitive man seen as a sphere derive from this experience of unifying the currents."

I do not dare assert this is about the negative-positive currents of the European occult therapy. More likely, the doctor referred to the two fluids, whose nature is so hard to define, of the occult Indian tradition, the "currents" that run through the human body and which the Yogic and Tantric doctrines homologize with the moon and the sun. But, I repeat, I do not dare affirm anything with any degree of certitude, because I only know fragments of the stages making up the initiation he underwent.

VII

Dr. Zerlendi's notes are increasingly rare in February, March, and April 1908. The few pages written during that time are in fact cryptic, and, for the most part, they refer to previous experiences. The doctor's interest in his diary dropped steeply. Compared with the beginning, when the doctor strove to describe his experience as flawlessly as possible, soon afterwards his interest in this type of confessions wears out.

Perhaps he realized how inaccessible such things would be to a lay reader who might happen to find them. Or, perhaps, he was so detached from our world now, that he was no longer interested, in any form whatsoever, to communicate his experiences. Anyway, he almost never wrote down – during that time – the experiences and thoughts discovered the same day. He keeps coming back to the events of the previous days or weeks.

I am prepared to believe that his discoveries were far too interesting to him to put them down in writing everyday. Especially when he began a new experience, he was so deeply preoccupied with it, that he only wrote about it much later and usually very briefly.

"Uncertain results with the muktasana practiced at dawn," he wrote by April. I would need a few pages to explain this encrypted sentence, which refers to a certain posture of the body. This is why I am not even trying to explain it, because, in Dr. Zerlendi's notes, there are plenty such technical indications on body postures during the Yogic meditation, on respiratory exercises, or on the ascetic physiology. Actually, I have offered certain explanations about these practices in my book about Yoga, and I shall not return to them in this story.

In late April 1908, he seemed interested in his diary again. After the brief, technical notes written down before, a long confession follows: "Among other things of utmost importance that Honigberger disclosed to J.E., there is the existence of Shambala, that miraculous country, which, according to traditions, lies somewhere in northern India, a place only the initiated can enter into. J.E., before his madness, believed this unseen realm could still be accessible to the not gifted, and, on one of his pages I found in Iasi, he had written down the names of two Jesuits, Stephen Cacella and John Cabral, who, he claimed, had allegedly reached Shambala.

"I acquired the works of these two Jesuit missionaries with enough difficulty, but I realized that J.E.'s assertions had been groundless. Cacella and Cabral were, indeed, the first Europeans to have heard about Shambala and the first ones to mention it. When they were in Bhutan, looking for the way to Cathay, they heard about the existence of this miraculous realm, which, according to the locals, lay somewhere to the north. And they even set out to look for it in 1627; but they only reached Tibet.

"As for this miraculous country, Shambala, they never found it. Unlike J.E., as soon as I learned about Honigberger's confessions, I believed that this country could not be identified with just another land, geographically placed in central Asia. Perhaps I was also influenced in this belief of mine by the Indian legends about Agarttha and the other 'white islands' of the Buddhist and Brahmanic mythologies. Indeed, I had never found an Indian text to say one can reach these miraculous realms in any other way than by supra-natural powers. All testimonies speak about the 'flight' of the Buddha or of other initiated men to these realms that are hidden from lay eyes.

"And it is a proven fact that, in the symbolic and secret language, 'flight' means the capacity of man to transcend the world of the senses and, therefore, to have access to unseen worlds.

"All I knew about Honigberger made me believe that he had penetrated into Shambala owing to his Yogic technique, which he had mastered as early as before 1858, but, in all likelihood, he was unable to carry out the mission he was entrusted with. This is the only way I can explain why he came back from India so fast and why he died so soon after his return, leaving that crucial document in the hands of an unqualified young man like J.E. –"

My heart jolted so strongly when I read the pages above! So many memories overwhelmed me all of a sudden in the dead of night, when I found these two names, Shambala and Agarttha! Because I, too, had once set out in quest of that unseen realm, determined not to return to this world before I got to know it. An old wound, which I had long thought healed, began to bleed again when I remembered those months I had spent in the Himalayas very close to the Tibetan border on the holy road of Badrinath, asking each and every hermit whether they had heard about Shambala, if they knew anybody who knew its mystery.

And, who knows, perhaps finally, there, in my hut on the left bank of the Ganges River, that jungle-wrapped kutiar, which I had only been thinking of as a lost paradise for such a long time, who knows, perhaps it was there that my deliverance might have come from, and maybe I would have succeeded in finding the way to the unseen realm after years of endeavors and preparations. However, it was ordained for me never to penetrate it, but, rather, to hold it in my melancholies until my death –

The reprimand is much more terrible for someone who has turned back, only to learn later, from another man, that the road he had taken was the good one.

The confessions of Dr. Zerlendi strengthened me in all my beliefs, because everything that followed happened exactly the way I imagined it had to happen to the man in a thirsty quest for Shambala.

"I always had in my mind the living image of the unseen realm that Honigberger had penetrated. Actually, I knew that realm was unseen only to the layman's eyes. More accurately, it is a geographically inaccessible country, which cannot be known, except following a previous, harsh spiritual preparation.

"I imagined this Shambala hidden from the other people not by some extreme natural obstacles, lofty mountains or deep waters, but by the space it partakes of, a space that is qualitatively different from the profane space. My first Yogic experiences confirmed this belief of mine, because I realized how different the space of the profane experience is from the space of the other types of human knowledge. I had even begun, here in this book, a detailed description of those experiences, but very soon I found they were impossible to describe.

"The man who knows them will know I am right. I still go on writing these things down, because, from time to time, it is necessary to have a confirmation of this ancient truth that nobody believes in anymore today. Honigberger himself, I believe, had been allowed to return from Shambala to try to reactivate in the West a few initiation centers that had been dormant since the Middle Ages. His sudden death confirms my belief: undoubtedly, he did not know how to carry out his mission or he marred it from the beginning, this is why he died so mysteriously. As far as I am concerned, although I have not yet reached the definitive results, I think I feel an unseen influence over me, someone who is leading and helping me, and this strengthens my belief that I will finally succeed."

Dr. Zerlendi does not confess anything more about this unseen influence. But it appears often enough in the occult tradition, especially in the East, and everything that followed made me believe the doctor did not allow himself to be deceived by an illusion when he mentioned it. Because his Yogic proficiency was achieved fast enough, almost vertiginously.

He spent the summer of 1908 alone, on one of his estates, and, later, back in Bucharest, he summed up a few of his experiences. Some of them can be reconstructed with a fair degree of accuracy. For instance, he writes at one point about the strange vision he had after certain meditations; he felt he saw all things turned upside down, or, more accurately, exactly opposite from the way they really were. For example, solid objects seemed inconsistent, and the other way around; the "void" appeared to him as "full," and dense things looked empty.

But there was also something else that Dr. Zerlendi does not offer any precise details about: the entire world, in its totality, he saw it, let me quote his manuscript, "wholly other than the way it appears to a man who is awake," without explaining what he meant by "wholly other." True, we find here a phrase that closely resembles the stern formulas of the mystics or of ritual books, because, everywhere in such texts, that different world, or the world known in ecstasy, is described as "wholly other" than the one we see with our bodily eyes.

There is yet another confession made by Dr. Zerlendi, which is equally peculiar, in connection with his "return" to the visible world, after a long contemplation. "In the beginning, I felt I was whisking, that I would fall when I took the first step. I no longer felt my normal certainty; as if it was necessary for me to readapt to the three-dimensional space. This is why, for a long time, I did not even dare move. I stayed there petrified, waiting for a miracle to happen and for me to regain the certainty I used to have before my trance. Now I understand why, after ecstasy, saints stay for hours or even days on end without moving, creating an impression that their spirit is still enraptured in the Divine."

Under September 11, he wrote: "I have tried the cataleptic trance several times. The first time, for twelve hours; the second and third times, for thirty-six hours. I told the forest guard I planned to go to the mansion and I locked myself alone in my room, knowing I would not be disturbed.

"For the first time, I was able to personally check egression out of time. Because, although my spirit remained active, my body no longer participated in the flow of time. Before I provoked my trance I shaved, and, thirty-six hours later, my cheek was as smooth as the moment I fell into my trance. It was a natural thing to happen. Because man experiences time through his respiratory rhythm. With any man, several seconds are spent between inhaling and exhaling; life coincides in man with time.

"At my first attempt, I was able to go into a cataleptic trance at ten o'clock in the morning and I woke up at ten in the evening; during all this time, my body lay in what some people call apparent death, without the slightest breath. The inhaling at ten in the morning was continued by the exhaling at ten in the evening. During all that interval, my body was out of time.

"As far as my body was concerned, those twelve hours were reduced to a few seconds – the long inhaling in the morning and the slow exhaling that preceded my awakening. That day I lived, in the human way, only half a day; my body grew only twelve hours older in twenty-four hours; life was suspended, but this did not injure my system."

This experience that Dr. Zerlendi undertook is actually popular enough, but until this day, it has not been studied in depth. "Apparent death," which was such big news in Honigberger's time, really seems to be an egression out of time. This is the only possible way to explain why, after a trance lasting ten or a hundred days, the body preserves its weight and the freshly shaven cheek stays equally clean. But these are states that absolutely transcend the human condition and which we can have no representation of.

Not even the fanciest imagination can have any adequate intuition of such an "egression out of time." The hints we find in the confessions of some saints or in the Eastern occult writings are incomprehensible to all of us. I have gathered a valuable collection of such testimonies myself, most of them expressed allegorically, but, to me, they have remained mysteries sealed with seven seals. Death alone will shed, for some of us, a new light on this matter.

"To me, the only amazing thing is that people learn nothing from such experiences. The most notable scholars have been content to merely dismiss the authenticity of such events – which had in fact been watched by hundreds of witnesses – and they preferred to preserve their old positions. As if it was enough to cross waters swimming, this way giving up the possibility to cross a sea, only because you do not believe it is possible for water to be crossed in a boat, too."

VIII

The diary stops in September 1908 for four months. The first notes that follow were written in early January 1909. They cannot be transcribed here because of their technical character. Rather, they are just statements of metaphysical principles and practical Yogic prescriptions. Some of them appear meaningless.

"January 26. The experience of darkness. Each letter taken up again from the beginning." Of course, he referred to other previous exercises, probably meditations on sounds and letters – the so-called Mantra-Yoga – but I found no indication of that. Still, what could "the experience of darkness" mean?!

Further: "February 5. Lately, samyama on my body. It is incredible, but it is true." This note could only carry a meaning if the doctor referred to a certain text by Patanjali, which says that, by samyama on his own body, the yogi becomes invisible to other people's eyes.

Patanjali uses the term samyama to name the last three stages of Yogic attainment, which are difficult to deal with in detail here. But I find it hard to believe that the doctor had accomplished this miracle as early as on February 5, 1909. Then how can I explain his surprise later on? How can I explain the eighteen months that followed, and during which, even if very little is told, we still know that he kept striving to acquire this very power to make himself invisible?

In fact, the difficulties of the text keep growing. Some notes even seem contradictory. "March. I resumed a few Upanishads. Amazing progress in understanding the original." How can I interpret this confession? After everything he had attained, reading the Upanishads in the original could no longer be of much interest. And then, what was the point of studying Sanskrit now, for a man who had assimilated something more than a dead science?

Unless he turned back or was stopped on the road to his Yogic attainment under some "influence" he says nothing about. Or perhaps, this study itself, he did not do it anymore in the scholarly manner, reading and thinking about the text, but, as they say in India, he managed to acquire a mysterious science just by accurately pronouncing the sacred words, which are considered there as a revelation of the Logos.

True, somewhere else, he mentions certain exercises, which are actually extremely obscure, consisting in the "inner uttering" of a sacred Indian text. And, at the beginning of that summer, he speaks about the homologation of the "mystic letters" with certain states of rarefied consciousness (I would be closer to the truth if I wrote "super-consciousness").

Still at the same time, he confessed about the "occult vision" he acquired by "reactivating the eye between the eyebrows," an eye that many Asian mythologies and types of mysticism refer to, and which allegedly bestows on the man who possesses it the capacity to see at immense distances. But concerning this "eye of Shiva," as the Indians call it, the references are contradictory, or, anyway, extremely obscure to the layman.

Some say the "eye of Shiva" directs man in space, so it could be a sixth sense; others, the majority, maintain that the new vision acquired by the initiated through this "eye" has nothing to do with the world of forms and illusions, it refers exclusively to the spiritual world. Using the "eye of Shiva," man can directly contemplate the spiritual world, namely he has access to supra-sensitive levels. But Dr. Zerlendi does not say anything about this mystery. He could not, or maybe he was not allowed to? –

Then follows another long silence, whose limits I am unable to identify, because the notes coming immediately afterwards are not dated. In fact, those notes are almost impossible to decipher.

I think they refer to what Dr. Zerlendi called "impersonal consciousness." Because I found this section: "The most difficult thing, better put, the impossible thing to achieve now in the West is an impersonal consciousness. These past centuries, only a few mystics have achieved such a consciousness. All the difficulties that modern man faces post-mortem, all the infernos and purgatories where we are told the spirits of the dead are tormented are caused precisely by this incapacity to achieve an impersonal consciousness while still alive. The drama of the soul after death and the atrocious purifications it goes through are nothing but the stages of the painful passage from the personal to the impersonal consciousness –"

The page following the confession above was torn out of the book. Then I find a confession dated January 7, 1910: "Perhaps I have been punished for my impatience. But I believed it was allowed to create your own destiny. I am not so very young anymore. I am not afraid of death; I know well enough the life I must still live. But I thought it was my duty to hurry, because I am no longer of any help to anybody here, where I am, and I still have many things to learn there."

A few days later: "Now I know the way to Shambala. I know how to get there. I can still say one more thing: three men from our continent have just arrived there. True, two of them are Russians. Each of these men has left alone and has reached Shambala by his own means. The Dutchman even traveled without keeping his name secret as far as Colombo. I know all this from my prolonged trances, when I see Shambala in all its greatness, I see that green marvel surrounded by snow-covered mountains, those odd houses, those ageless men, who talk to each other so little, although they understand each other's thoughts so well.

"If they were not there to pray and think for all the others, this entire continent would be shaken by all those demoniac forces that the modern world has unleashed since the Renaissance. I wonder whether the fate of our Europe is sealed. Is there nothing to be done anymore to help this world, a prey to obscure spiritual forces, which are leading it, without its knowledge, to cataclysm?

"I greatly fear Europe will share the lot of Atlantis and vanish soon enough, sinking into water. If only people knew that it is owing to the spiritual forces emanating from Shambala alone that this tragic change in the Earth axis is postponed over and over again, this change geology knows all too well and which will hurl our world into waters, bringing up who knows what new continent! –"

This fear of a tragic end for our continent also appears in other pages of his diary. I feel the doctor began to see increasingly clearly the series of cataclysms that would strike Europe.

This coincides, in fact, with a whole array of more or less apocalyptic prophecies about the kaliyuga, the "dark age," whose end we are approaching very fast – we are told.

All over Asia travels the legend about the imminent end of this world, in forms that are very different from one another. But Dr. Zerlendi starts out from a possible "change in the Earth axis," which could be the immediate cause of the disaster. As far as I can understand, in his view, such a change of the axis would trigger a formidable seismic catastrophe, in which certain continents would sink or change their existing contours – and new continents would rise out of waters.

The fact that he mentions Atlantis several times makes me believe he thought this continent had really existed and he made a connection between its disappearance and some spiritual decay of its inhabitants. To me, the thing worthy of emphasis about all these tragic portents is that they were made a few years before World War I, when the world was still listening to the illusory lullaby of infinite progress.

Then, suddenly, on May 11, 1910, he comes back to the Yoga exercises by which the invisibility of the body can be attained. It is easy to understand why I am not transcribing those astounding confessions here. I was overwhelmed with a strange feeling of panic when I read Dr. Zerlendi's lines. Before that, I had come across many more or less authentic documents about this Yogic miracle, but never before had things been told so clearly and in so many details.

When I began to write this story, I was still hesitating, not knowing whether I would have to transcribe this very frightening page. Now that I am here, after so many weeks of indecision and restiveness, I realize that such a thing cannot be revealed. I find consolation in the thought that those who understand what "samyama on one's own body" means will know where to look for explanations.

IX

But it seems that the invisibility experience was not without dangers. The effort to make his body invisible to the sight of other people, to withdraw it from light, provokes such a commotion all over man's system, that the doctor once remained in stupor for several hours after an experience of this kind. "Likely, I will not use this method to go to Shambala," he wrote in June 1910. "The time of my definitive departure is approaching and I do not know whether I will have enough powers to leave as an invisible man to the others."

And later, that same month: "Sometimes I myself rather fear the very forces I have concentrated within me. My will does not hesitate, but it is hard enough to control all these powers, which have so far helped me penetrate into unseen worlds.

"This morning, when I was in contemplation, locked in my room, I suddenly felt the atmosphere getting thinner and my body amazingly getting lighter. Without meaning to, I was rising, and, although I tried to grab objects to hold on to, soon I felt I was touching the ceiling with the crown of my head. The frightening thing in this event is the fact that the levitation occurred against my will, due to the forces unleashed by my contemplation. I almost lost control, and one moment without focus would have thrown me motionless on the floor."

I had heard of such strange events before, when the man who attempts to gain control of his occult powers does not manage at a given time to preserve the wholeness of his lucidity and will, and then he runs the risk of falling prey to the magic forces unleashed by his very meditation. I was told in Hardwar that the most horrible dangers await the yogi not at the beginning, but at the end of his progress, when he gets to master lethal forces.

Actually, in the world of myths, we find that those who have "fallen" to the lowest depths are the ones who had managed to come closest to the Divine. The vanity of Lucifer, too, is a form of the obscure forces you unleash through your own progress, and which finally succeed in crushing you.

Later, on August 16: "Appalling detachment from the entire world. One thought still gives me the thrills: Shambala. I do not wish to make any preparations before my departure. I wrote my will the year Smaranda was born. Any other note made now, just before my departure, would look suspicious."

Then, perhaps the same day, a little later, a few lines written hastily: "I think maybe this book could fall into the hands of someone who might destroy it, not having the slightest idea as to its contents. Then, my efforts to confess to certain exceptional things will have been futile. But I am not sorry –"

Then follows a whole crossed line, but I was still able to decipher parts of it: "If the man who reads and understands this – tries – to use – serious – will not be believed." Of course, just before leaving, the doctor wished to offer some advice to the possible reader, reminding him at the same time of the risks he would encounter in case of a reckless disclosure. I cannot tell what made him give up these pieces of advice and cross the sentence he had begun. Still, I respected his wish, and have never revealed his most significant experience.

August 19: "I found myself invisible again and my horror was even more terrible because I had done nothing to achieve this status. I walked in the yard for hours on end, but I only realized I was invisible by chance. The servants passed by me without seeing me; at first, I thought they did not see me because they did not pay attention, but, looking around, I could not see my shadow.

"I followed one of the servants on his way to the stables. He seemed to have felt something fiendish behind him, because he kept turning his head, his eyes in distress, and finally he hurried up, crossing himself.

"Despite all my attempts, I was completely unable to make myself visible before midnight, when I found myself exhausted on my bed. I think this absolute fatigue that followed was due most of all to my efforts to re-become visible. Because I had achieved invisibility by chance, without meaning to and even without realizing it –"

This is the last long entry in the doctor's diary. However, what follows is no less thrilling. "September 12. Since two nights ago I have not been able to come back. I took this book and my pencil and I am writing on the attic staircase. Then I will hide it among my study notebooks. But I am filled with dread thinking that I might still lose my way to Shambala."

This is dated two days after his disappearance. If anyone had been able to decipher the manuscript at that time, and if he had read this freshly written page, he would have understood that the doctor was still in the house, very close to his family.

X

The third day, having decided to return the notebook and to read it all to Mrs. Zerlendi, I went to S. Street. The old housekeeper came to the door. Mrs. Zerlendi was sick, she told me, and the young lady had left for Paris.

"How come, so suddenly?," I wondered.

"That's how she makes up her mind," she answered, almost without looking at me.

It was obvious she did not feel like divulging things. I left her my card, telling her I would be back in a few days to inquire about Mrs. Zerlendi's health. But I could only go back there a week later. The entrance gate was closed, and only after I shook it several times and buzzed the rusty door bell in vain, did the housekeeper come to the gate. She had great difficulty in crossing the garden, where the last flowers seemed to have withered almost overnight, and she came close to the gate mumbling:

"Madam went to the country-side," she said and she turned to go away. But she stopped again and added: "She didn't tell me when she'd be back –"

I went back there several times that fall and winter, to the gate, which was always locked, on S. Street. At best, I got this answer:

"There is nobody in –"

But sometimes the housekeeper did not even come out to answer my bell ring. Then I sent several letters to Mrs. Zerlendi, but without ever receiving any answer or confirmation that she had opened my letters. It was totally impossible for me to understand what was happening.

Mrs. Zerlendi had absolutely no way of knowing that I had found and taken her husband's diary. I was sure nobody had seen me when I hid it under my coat. Even if I had been spied on through the keyhole, I still could not have been discovered; because I had stealthily taken the notebook, hiding near the bookshelves, surrounded by the doctor's other drill books.

In late February 1935, as I was passing by the house on S. Street, I caught a glimpse of the open gate and I went in. I confess I felt an intense thrill when my finger buzzed the bell of the marquee door. I expected the same old morose woman to come to the door, but, much to my amazement, a young housekeeper opened the door.

I asked whether anybody was in.

"Everybody is in," she answered me. I gave her my card and I went to the living room. A few minutes later, the bedroom door opened and Smaranda appeared right in front of me. She was almost impossible to recognize; she looked ten years younger, she was wearing attractive makeup, her hair color was different. She took another look at my card, amazed, before she shook hands with me. She was doing an excellent job pretending she did not know me. She told me her name, as if I had been a stranger.

"To what do I owe this visit?!," she asked me.

I told her I worked for a while in Dr. Zerlendi's library, that Mrs. Zerlendi knew me fairly well – she had invited me herself to research her husband's archive – and I added I knew her, Smaranda, too.

"I believe this is a mistake," she told me smiling. "I'm sure you've never been introduced to me. In fact, I know very few people in Bucharest and I surely would've remembered your name or your face –"

"Still, Mrs. Zerlendi knows me very well. I spent entire weeks working here, in the library," I insisted, pointing to the massive oak door.

Smaranda watched my gesture, then she looked at me flabbergasted, not believing her own eyes.

"What you're telling me is rather weird," she added, "because my father's library was once in this room, this is true. But that was many years ago, very many years ago. Under the occupation, the library, which was exceptionally rich, was dispersed –"

I started to laugh, not knowing what to answer.

"I find it very hard to believe what you're saying," I answered after a long pause, during which I looked straight into her eyes, to make it clear to her that I could see right through her little game. "Only some two months ago I worked in this library. I know it shelf by shelf and I can describe by heart everything in it."

I would have liked to go on, but Smaranda rushed to the bedroom door and cried:

"Mama, please come here for a second! –"

Mrs. Zerlendi showed up, holding the hand of a little boy. I bowed deeply, but I saw in her eyes that she did not wish to recognize me.

"This gentleman claims he worked about two months ago in the 'library,'" Smaranda said, pointing to the massive oak door.

Mrs. Zerlendi looked at me in offended amazement, then she caressed the child's head and whispered:

"Hans, go play –"

"Didn't you write to me yourself asking me to come, and didn't you take me to the library yourself?," I began exasperated. "You even asked me to continue the biography of Dr. Honigberger, which your husband had begun," I added.

Mrs. Zerlendi turned her eyes in bewilderment from me to Smaranda. I admit it, she was perfect in pretending, and I felt my blood climbing to my cheeks.

"It's true, my first husband, Dr. Zerlendi, studied the life of a Saxon doctor, but I confess, sir, I don't remember his name very well. My first husband died twenty-five years ago and the library doesn't exist anymore, not since the war –"

And, because I had frozen there, my eyes staring at the door I had opened so many times only two months before, Mrs. Zerlendi added:

"Smaranda, show the room to the gentleman –"

I followed her in complete confusion and I stood on the doorstep, dizzy, staring at the library as it now looked. Only the chandelier and the curtains were still there. The desk, the book shelves, the huge carpet, everything had disappeared.

That enormous room was now a living room, with two little tea tables, several coaches, a bridge table, a few furs in front of the fireplace. On the site where the book shelves used to be, now they had a rather worn-out wallpaper, partly covered with paintings and old arms. The wooden galleries, which surrounded three walls, had disappeared. I closed the door, baffled.

"You're right," I said, "the library has been dispersed. But if I at least knew who bought it!," I added. "I would've liked to study Honigberger more closely –"

"But my dear sir," Mrs. Zerlendi spoke, "the library was dispersed almost twenty years ago –"

"Still, the most significant thing is that you don't recognize me," I smiled.

I thought Mrs. Zerlendi's hand trembled a little, but I cannot tell if that was really the case.

"We're even more surprised, sir," Smaranda began. "It's odd – to say the least – for someone to recognize the room where there was a library twenty years ago, a room very few strangers have been in lately, as far as I know –"

I was getting ready to leave. I realized that, for reasons I could not fathom, none of them wanted to recognize me. Could they have acted on an unseen influence, from beyond?

"I wonder if at least the old limping housekeeper I talked to several times a few weeks ago will recognize me," I added.

Mrs. Zerlendi suddenly turned toward Smaranda.

"He means Arnica," she whispered, frightened.

"But Arnica's been dead for fifteen years!," Smaranda exclaimed. "How could he have seen her a few weeks ago? –"

I felt my mind dissipating and my eyesight growing dimmer. If I had stayed a few more minutes, I would have collapsed right there, at their feet, unconscious. I mumbled a few excuses and I left almost without daring look up anymore.

Only later, after I wandered for a long time in the streets, when I came to myself, did I feel that I understood the meaning of this astonishing situation. But I did not dare disclose it to anyone and neither shall I disclose it here, in this story. My life has already been troubled more than enough because of the mysteries Mrs. Zerlendi prompted me to search without the doctor's permission.

A few months after the events I described above, I walked to S. Street again. The houses at number 17 were being demolished. The trellis works had been partly pulled out, the basin was loaded with scrap iron and slabs. I stood there for a long time, watching, hoping to catch sight of any of the two women and maybe find out something about their incomprehensible behavior. But there were only workers and a foreman urging them.

Late, I walked toward the end of the street, almost in pain because of this secret, which I could in no way penetrate to the end. I thought I noticed in front of me the boy Mrs. Zerlendi had come to the living room with. I cried out to him.

"Hans," I told him, "I'm happy to see you, Hans!"

The child looked at me in pretended, total amazement.

"My name's not Hans," he answered me politely enough. "My name is Stefan –"

And he went away, without turning his head, slowly, like a bored kid who cannot find any playmate.

Religious historian Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) was born in Bucharest. Initially, he studied philosophy at the University of Bucharest, but, after graduating, he went to India for graduate studies of Sanskrit and Indian thought, which he pursued for a number of years at the University of Calcutta. Back in Romania, he received his Ph.D. in 1933 with a thesis entitled Yoga: Essay on the Origins of Indian Mysticism. He began to teach the history of religions and Indian philosophy at the Bucharest University.

In 1945 he went to Paris for an academic career at Sorbonne. In 1956 he became a professor at the University of Chicago, teaching the history of religions.