“Why’s the Tardis showing us a young Indian boy, Doctor? I never knew the Tardis was into photography.” Jo was referring to the picture of a boy standing on top of a rope (or was it a pole) that had flashed onto the scanner screen.
“I’m wondering that myself,” confessed the Doctor. “All I know is that this photograph was taken by the late Lieutenant F W Holmes.”
Before Jo could ask who the Lieutenant was the Doctor had pressed a button on the control console, which brought up a picture of a different boy on the screen. This one was climbing up a rope. The Doctor pressed the button again and the picture was replaced by text.
“IT IS ONLY HYNOTISM”.
“That looks like a headline,” observed Jo.
“It is,” confirmed the Doctor consulting the Tardis’s databank. “You’re looking at the headline and sketches of a newspaper article that appeared in the pages of the Chicago Tribune. It is an eyewitness account of an eastern fakir and the article went on to convince people it was possible to hypnotise an entire crowd.”
Jo read the copy scrolling rapidly up the screen in response to the Doctor’s excited button pressing. She read how two travellers, George Lessing and Fred S Ellmore, had witnessed a feat of oriental jugglery in Gaya, India.
“But what’s a newspaper article got to do with …” Jo never finished her sentence. Instead she was thrown violently across the console room as the floor of the time machine lurched beneath them. Gripping a panel on the six-sided console, the Time Lord watched helplessly as Jo was sucked towards the doors. Sucked! The Doctor blinked. Unable to believe his eyes. The Tardis doors were open! Buffeted by a sudden inrush of wind, the Doctor let go off the console and slipped into unconsciousness.

The Doctor came to with a groan. The ship was in near-darkness. The Time Rotar inactive. The interior doors closed. Something was missing. After a few seconds the Doctor realised what it was. The hum of the console room was absent.
He got to his feet and realised with horror the only other occupant of the time craft was not Jo. The Doctor scowled at the intruder in the blue turban who had dared to invade his ship. The Doctor recognised the man as the Illusionist from the Wimbledon Theatre. “You! What the devil are you doing here? What have you done with my companion, Jo? If anything’s happened to her ...” The intruder indicated the screen. Upon the scanner a length of twine was uncoiling: rising upwards into the void. Something was crawling up the twine. Something far too tiny to make out. The scanner zoomed in on the minuscule figure - as endlessly twisting rope swallowed up the screen. The Doctor realised with a shock the climber was Jo!

Jo hurried up the rope, climbing hand over hand, pursued by the demons of Abandonment and Fear. Eventually. After what seemed like an eternity of climbing, the exhausted girl reached the safety of the summit to be rewarded by the sight of familiar blue doors. The rope terminated in the open doorway of the Tardis. 'The Tardis has thrown me a rope' thought Jo.
Jo was about to clamber up into the ship when a horrified look crossed over her face. A cackling, turbaned figure had just emerged from the Tardis. And there was a viscous-looking knife in his hands. He proceeded to cut the rope.

The monitor passed over Jo’s rapid descent and panned inwards through the doors. Zooming through the open doorway to reveal the lonely, white, emptiness of the void. The Tardis exterior was revealed to be a mock-up especially created to taunt poor Jo.
Suddenly the familiar sounds of dematerialisation rent the air as Jo, the fakir, along with the rope and Police Box doors disappeared.
The Doctor had witnessed the whole illusion. There was no mad fakir. No knife. The only real thing seemed to be his companion Jo.

Jo recognised the two white-clad entities from her glimpse of their likenesses inside the Shrine. She had only seen their portraits then. Back when she and the Doctor had been in Madam Blavatsky’s Occult Room. They had looked like holy men then. Appropriate company for Lord Buddha. The beings read her thoughts and shook their heads to correct her. “We are not FORM. FORM is MAYA. MAYA is ILLUSION. We are the Masters of illusion. We appear to you now in the guise of the familiar. But do not let our appearances fool you.”

“But I don’t understand," said Jo. Feeling too much in awe to be afraid of the beings “Where’s the Doctor. Where’s the Tardis? And what do you want with me?”
“Come with us, Miss Josephine Grant. And we will show you magic!”

“You may have won the first battle, Time Lord, but you will never win the war.”
“By battle, I take it, you’re referring to the destruction of the Shrine.”
“The Hole in the Nineteenth Century may have closed, Doctor. But the even bigger hole in the Twentieth Century is growing larger exponentially. That's how I can be here in your ship. Thanks to the anomaly."
“Don't expect to stay here long. Your space-time anomaly was drawing its energy from the first, much smaller, hole. Now I’ve cut off its power supply, it will be forced to consume its own energy and implode.”
The Doctor's answer angered the Fakir. The ruby on his turban blazed with power. A brilliant ray of light shot out of the ruby and blasted the Doctor. Immobilising him in it's beam. “Foolish meddler! You are forgetting the power of the human psyche. Belief is the only power source the anomaly requires.”

Fourteenth Century China.

A conjurer takes a wooden ball and shows it to the watching crowd. They see the many elongated thongs dangling through holes in the wood. Laying hold of one of these thongs, the conjurer throws the ball straight up into the air. Jo watches the ball rise higher and higher until it passes out of her sight.
Soon the only evidence of the ball’s existence lies in the extremity of the one single thong being clasped in the conjurer’s hand. The conjurer offers the thong to his assistant boy. The boy lays hold of the now attenuated thong and mounts it.
The conjurer calls to the unseen boy. Once. Twice. Three times. No answer. In a rage the conjurer snatches up a knife and follows the boy climbing out of sight. Soon hands, feet, head, trunk come tumbling out of the sky. Jo almost faints in terror. But her terror is short lived as the whole trick ends with the conjurer returning to the ground with the unharmed boy. The boy is miraculously whole again.

“Was that magic?” enquired Jo.
“It would be if it had happened as you remember it”
“But we were there. Weren’t we?”
“We are the Masters of Illusion. It would be well for you to remember that.”
“I will. But why are you showing me these things?”

Seventeenth Century India

A troupe of seven Begali jugglers has assembled in an attempt to impress the Emperor Johangir. Feeling a sense of Deja Vu, Jo tracks the ascent of a 50-cubit chain as it is cast into the sky. A dog is set upon the lower end of the chain. The dog runs up the chain, reaches the upper end and vanishes. A hog likewise ascends the chain and it too vanishes. A panther, a lion, and a tiger follow suite. Finally the chain is taken down and folded in its bag. The animals seemingly gone forever. Perhaps meeting up in heaven or magically transformed into stars.
Jo struggled to hide the effect of the scene on her. “Well, I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of mystifying me, any longer. You want me to ask you whether that lot really happened. Well, I’m not going to ask you. So there!”
“This is no time for sulking, Miss Grant. The Doctor’s life is in danger!”
“Then we must rescue him,” Jo demanded.
“If you want to see The Doctor and his Tardis again, you must finish what you have been brought here to do. You must help us solve the Greatest Mystery of the East: The Indian Rope Trick!”

The ruby was now a bright flaming clot of blood. A mental beam struck the Doctor. Blasting him off his feet. Sending him crashing into a roundel. He stuck fast to the wall unable to move.
“I will swot you like a fly!” the Illusionist snarled.
The Doctor screamed. His entire being convulsed in agony. As wave after wave of yogic power bombarded the pain centres of his brain.