the actors were simply victims of St.
Vitus's dance. One of them, a tall old man, a mere skeleton with a long
white beard, left the ring and begun whirling vertiginously, with his
arms spread like wings, and loudly grinding his long, wolf-like teeth.
He was painful and disgusting to look at. He soon fell down, and was
carelessly, almost mechanically, pushed aside by the feet of the others
still engaged in their demoniac performance.

All this was frightful enough, but many more horrors were in store for
us.

Waiting for the appearance of the prima donna of this forest opera
company, we sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree, ready to ask
innumerable questions of our condescending host. But I was hardly
seated, when a feeling of indescribable astonishment and horror made me
shrink back.

I beheld the skull of a monstrous animal, the like of which I could not
find in my zoological reminiscences. This head was much larger than the
head of an elephant skeleton. And still it could not be anything but an
elephant, judging by the skillfully restored trunk, which wound down
to my feet like a gigantic black leech. But an elephant has no horns,
whereas this one had four of them! The front pair stuck from the flat
forehead slightly bending forward and then spreading out; and the
others had a wide base, like the root of a deer's horn, that gradually
decreased almost up to the middle, and bore long branches enough to
decorate a dozen ordinary elks. Pieces of the transparent amber-yellow
rhinoceros skin were strained over the empty eye-holes of the skull, and
small lamps burning behind them only added to the horror, the devilish
appearance of this head.

"What can this be?" was our unanimous question. None of us had ever met
anything like it, and even the colonel looked aghast.

"It is a Sivatherium," said Narayan. "Is it possible you never came
across these fossils in European museums? Their remains are common
enough in the Himalayas, though, of course, in fragments. They were
called after Shiva."

"If the collector of this district ever hears that this antediluvian
relic adorns the den of your--ahem!--witch," remarked the Babu, "it
won't adorn it many days longer."

All round the skull, and on the floor of the portico there were heaps
of white flowers, which, though not quite antediluvian, were totally
unknown to us. They were as large as a big rose; and their white petals
were covered with a red powder, the inevitable con