The years of dreary dogmatics, homiletics, and biblical languages did little to dampen the fires of Enos Harker's zeal, and upon graduation and ordination he lost no time in choosing his mission field. In truth, it was not really his choice, the location being divulged to him, as he assumed, by the Holy Ghost during a dream. His destination would be a little-known recess of darkest Asia, a place of which he had never heard, a high and airless plateau called Leng.
Dr. Harker did not pause to explain how he managed to gain the cooperation of a missionary agency to journey to such a remote outpost without demonstrating any competence in the local languages. I gather, however, that with the mountain-moving (some would say "fanatical”) faith of the Pentecostalist, he simply dared to believe that the "gift of tongues" would suffice him, that when the moment came to speak the words of the gospel message, the Holy Ghost would quite literally supply the words.
He knew it would be no easy thing even to gain access to his goal. He knew how the first Christian missionaries to China and Tibet were cruelly tortured and martyred, but should this be his eventual fate, he would not shrink from it, welcoming the martyr's crown for the glory of his Lord. He had then imagined, you see, that such might be the ultimate sacrifice in the service of God. He was later to discover horrors far worse.
As the night grew deeper at the old man's bedside and I found myself, ironically, taking the role of father confessor, I was no longer so certain I cared to plumb the mystery further, but I knew it was too late to withdraw, I had the curious feeling that something more ominous awaited me than even the severest shock a mere story, even a true one, might deliver.
Enos Harker's reading while in theological school had been wider than the narrowly prescribed list of standard works drawn up by his professors. Before his abrupt conversion it had of course been wider still. He knew that other Westerners had managed to penetrate into the secret heart of Asia without molestation. Showing the proper respect for a culture in which they were visitors, and which they plainly admired, pilgrims like Madame Alexandra David-Neel and the artist Nicholas Roerich had actually been welcomed and given generous freedom in the usually off-limits regions north of the Himalayas. But they had come to learn the esoteric wisdom of the East, and he had come for quite a different purpose: to teach and to preach the glad tidings of the Holy Ghost. Still, if he came as a holy man seeking out holy men, he was sure he could make himself understood, and that he might even find a ready hearing. Such was his faith.
Dr. Harker, whose wasted constitution forbade him to enlarge upon any point not absolutely needful to relate, passed over the no doubt colorful details of the long sea voyages and difficult treks over land by the most primitive conveyances. He never expected divine inspiration to make it any easier to arrange for transportation or knowledgeable guides without him knowing the tongue-twisting languages of the many tribes and clans along his path. His earlier, purely secular travels had given him a facility for making connections, and somehow he made his way to the shunned Plateau of Leng.
Then a man of hardy physique and robust health, he had found the climb up to the frigid tableland a bracing challenge. He had picked up a smattering of Tibetan and Nepalese phrases necessary to make certain rudiments understood, but his grasp of these languages utterly failed him to understand the sudden reluctance of his guides and bearers to complete the journey up and across the plateau itself. Apparently the man who had hired them for the missionary had withheld the fact of their ultimate destination in order to get them to agree to go even this far. So all fled him. This, too, thinking of the missionary travails of Saint Paul, he took in stride.
On he pressed, finding that the way to his object was after all clearly marked, at least at night, when, from a distant structure, vague against the mist-shrouded horizon, there emerged periodically a beam of light like a beacon, he assumed, to welcome distant pilgrims to a place of holy retreat. As soon as he saw it he thought of Moses and of how God had guided the children of Israel through the wilderness as a pillar of fire by night. The redoubtable Dr. Harker took it as a good omen.
It rook several days to cross the plateau, the total flatness of the place robbing him of any sense of distance. He trudged on for hours, but the squat complex of buildings never seemed to get any closer, until all at once it loomed on the horizon. Structures began to dot the blasted landscape as he approached. Most were the broken teeth of once-proud pillars and obelisks which bore wind-eroded carvings. Upon examining one of these in the light of his lamp. Dr. Harker found long vertical columns of letters remotely resembling Tibetan, of which he had seen quite a bit during his recent journeys. But this was not precisely Tibetan. Subsequent research would disclose that what he had seen was a linguistic ancestor of the Naacal language of fabled Mu. Alternating with these mute stelae were queer carvings of unrecognizable marine creatures, some of which suggested nothing so much as the submarine behemoths of the Permian Age. But surely these glyphs had represented no actual models, but only recounted heathen myths native to the region. Still, it was singularly improbable for marine motifs to occur in the religion of a plateau in the mountainous heart of Asia.
A stiff wind suddenly blew up from out of nowhere and pommeled the intrepid missionary as if Aeolus himself would prevent him from nearing the grim pile of brooding buildings. Harker, however, had an inner drive of his own and would nor be kept from his destiny. He pressed on indefatigably. He had nearly reached the nearest of the buildings, a low, unadorned structure made of huge stone blocks that had so settled together and been smoothed by the howling winds of countless generations that they seemed almost the natural mass of a megalith. Then, without warning, a pair of stocky humanoid shapes loomed up through the ubiquitous gloom that seemed to hold daylight forever at bay. The men, for such they must have been, were completely swathed in great fur cloaks and cowls against the ripping talons of the plateau wind. They accosted the weary traveler, whether in hostility or in rescue, he could not yet surmise, and half-guided, half-carried him the rest of the way into their compound. Though the windy torrent whipped away their words like autumn leaves in a hurricane, Harker believed he caught the word "Leng."
He remembered little else until he awoke inside a dimly lit cell whose only illumination came from a small butter lamp on the floor in a corner. Of comfort there was none, save for a threadbare yak hide beneath him, which hardly softened the naked stone floor. For a moment he feared he had been consigned to some already-forgotten dungeon reserved for any so foolish as to violate the chaste isolation of the place. Then he realized the inhabitants must be a monastic fellowship of ascetics, and that they had no doubt assigned him quarters no more Spartan than their own. He resolved to try to communicate his gratitude for their rough-hewn hospitality—provided he ever saw another of his hosts.
SEVERAL days might have passed. The absolute silence, together with the lack of any hint of sunlight, made it impossible for him to gauge the passing of time. Sometimes when he would awaken from a longer or shorter period of sleep there would be a meager portion of food awaiting him, which he gratefully consumed.
Then one day, he guessed some two or three months later, he awoke to find himself not in his accustomed cell, but in the center of a circle of silent, seated forms in a large meeting hall. Butter lamps provided the only light here, too. None of the shapes could he see distinctly. It was disorienting to behold a robed figure seeming to sit or recline, then to begin to move laterally without rising. Movements were few, and bodily outlines were mostly obscured by generous folds of draping cloth, but something in the perspective suggested that occasional arm or hand motions presupposed the wrong anatomical angles.