I don't know what he perceived, but I saw a tiny elderly mortal whose body glowed and flashed with a surrounding halo of blue radiation. He wore a sealskin loincloth and a kind of tabard of woven eelgrass to which had been sewn thousands of seagull feathers, tiny white ones. His ancient spectacles were tied on with string. Apart from advanced age he was in excellent health, without so much as an infected tooth.
He peered at me suspiciously, cocking his head.
"Yez ain't from Them," he stated.
"No," I admitted. "Who are They?"
"Why, the Ascended Masters," he answered, as though I were crazy to ask. "Them fellows up on Mount Shasta, ye know. The Inheritors of Lemuria."
O-kay. "No, I haven't heard of them, Senor, I'm only from Monterey," I replied cautiously. "My name is Dolores Concepcion Mendoza, and I have come here on holiday to sketch wildflowers."
"O, I don't know about that." He looked me up and down. "Yez got a look about yez of the Deathless Ones."
Whoops. So much for keeping a cover identity around a psychic. I thought fast, which is to say I accessed Smith's History of Mystical Esoteric Cults, Volumes 1-10; blinked, smiled and said: "The White Fraternity does not reveal itself to all men. You are to be commended on your sharp sight, Brother. But I have come here, as I said, for the wild flowers that grow here in these Dunes, to collect them for their rare properties. Look into my heart and you will see that I speak the truth."
He scanned me a moment and nodded. "So, dat's all right. Yez ain't of any Order I ever seen though. What Discipline do yez follow?"
"The Mystical Sisterhood of Orion," I improvised.
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