The Thing That Walked In The Rain Read Free Page B

chair.
    “Now,” he said, “we can go on with the diary.” Anita sat down at the desk, reached for the diary, looked surprised, then alarmed, and searched fearfully, frantically through the books and papers on the desk. Then she sank back with a look of despair.
    “I'm afraid we can’t,” she said, weakly. “The diary is gone!”

CHAPTER III The Thing That Walked in the Rain
    AFTER our evening meal, Professor Mabrey and I sat on the porch smoking our pipes and listening to the patter of the rain and to the almost incessant rumbling of thunder that had commenced with the advent of darkness. Anita was inside, looking through her father’s papers. The cook-fire of Pedro and the two Misskitos had sputtered and gone out, and I guessed that they were, by now, comfortably installed in the mosquito-bar draped hammocks they had swung in the hut.
    “This chap Bahna sure slipped one over on us,” I remarked, thinking of the episode of the afternoon, “Seems to me there must have been something important in that diary—something he was afraid to have us see.”
    “Undoubtedly,” replied the professor. “It was careless of me not to watch. These natives are deucedly tricky.”
    “Speaking of natives,” I said, “I’ve been wondering if Bahna really is a native. He certainly doesn’t look like the other Indians here. And he’s educated.”
    “I’ve been wondering the same thing, myself,” replied Mabrey. “Bahna is not a native name. I doubt if it is a proper name at all. Sounds more like a title. And his features were more Aryan than Mongoloid. With a turban instead of a feather crown he’d pass for a Hindu.”
    "Hasn’t it been determined that there is some connection between the religions and traditions of the Far East and those of the early American civilizations?” 1 asked. “Seems to me I’ve heard or read something of the sort.”
    “It is a subject,” he replied, “on which ethnologists have never agreed. It’s pretty generally conceded, I believe, that all American Indians are members of the Mongolian race—blood brothers of the Chinese, Japanese, Tibetians, Tartars, and other related peoples of the Old World. Students of symbology have found evidence which seems to link all the great civilizations of antiquity. And Colonel James Churchward has correlated them all as evidence that the first civilization developed in a huge continent called Mu, situated in the Pacific Ocean, and, like the fabulous continent of Atlantis, sinking beneath the waves after its mystic teachings, had prevailed in the Americas, the then still flourishing Atlantis, Greece, Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, India and other coexistent civilizations.
    “The royal race of Incas, it is said, more nearly resembled Aryans than Mongols, while many of the Aztecs had a strongly Semitic cast of countenance. It’s a pity that the destructive fanaticism of the conquering Spaniards made it impossible for us to learn more than a very small part of the religions and traditions of these peoples. According to our recent tricky visitor, as well as our own observations, there must have existed here at one time a cult worshipping Nayana, or Nayana Idra, a many-headed serpent.”
    “Which brings us,” I replied, “to the consideration of what we saw in the lake during the shower this afternoon. I’m positive that I saw several green, snake-like things of immense size, waving above the water. You saw it, too, as did Anita.”
    “The whole thing,” said the professor, “smacks of the magic of India. Standing in the midst of a crowd, a Hindu fakir throws a rope up in the air. To every member of that crowd it appears to stand stiffly erect while he climbs to its top. But to the eye of a camera, it is lying stretched out on the ground while the fakir creeps its length on all fours. Mass hypnotism. The same thing is true of the trick of growing a rose from a seed in a few minutes, while playing a hautboy. The rose simply does not exist, except in