a witch her body is liable, says popular
tradition, to be tenanted by a devil (as may be seen
from No. iii.), and to corpses thus possessed have
been attributed by the storytellers the terrible deeds
which Indian tales relate of Rakshasas and other evil
spirits. Thus in the story of Nischayadatta, in the
seventh book of the "Kathasaritsagara," the hero and
the four pilgrims, his companions, have to pass a
night in a deserted temple of Siva. It is haunted by a
_Yakshini_, a female demon, who turns men by spells
into brutes, and then eats them; so they sit watching
and praying beside a fire round which they have traced
a circle of ashes. At midnight the demon-enchantress
arrives, dancing and "blowing on a flute made of a
dead man's bone." Fixing her eyes on one of the
pilgrims, she mutters a spell, accompanied by a wild
dance. Out of the head of the doomed man grows a horn;
he loses all command over himself, leaps up, and
dances into the flames. The _Yakshini_ seizes his
half-burnt corpse and devours it. Then she treats the
second and the third pilgrim in the same way. But just
as she is turning to the fourth, she lays her flute on
the ground. In an instant the hero seizes it, and
begins to blow it and to dance wildly around the
_Yakshini_, fixing his eyes upon her and applying to
her the words of her own spell. Deprived by it of all
power, she submits, and from that time forward renders
the hero good service.[368]]

In one of the skazkas a malignant witch is destroyed by a benignant
female power. It had been predicted that a certain baby princess would
begin flying about the world as soon as she was fifteen. So her
parents shut her up in a building in which she never saw the light of
day, nor the face of a man. For it was illuminated by artificial
means, and none but women had access to it. But one day, when her
nurses and _Mamzeli_ had gone to a feast at the palace, she found a
door unlocked, and made her way into the sunlight. After this her
attendants were obliged to allow her to go where she wished, when her
parents were away. As she went roaming about the palace she came to a
cage "in which a _Zhar-Ptitsa_,[369] lay [as if] dead." This bird, her
guardians told her, slept soundly all day, but at night her papa flew
about on it. Farther on she came to a