It was not often that such troubling thoughts followed him to his medicine lodge. This was his private place, his alone place. Here, in this tenement basement, he had gathered the trinkets and fetishes and ritual materials of the ways of magic. Here, in this dark little room, he had survived the ordeal that had given him his first true taste of the deeper truths of metamagic. The problems of the outside world, the mundane world, seemed strange and alien in this place, as if they did not belong.