e
for the first time in her life, had broken purdah, with her senses
strung by days and nights of never-ceasing preparation for her
marriage; during which she had been massaged by skilful, cunning hands;
bathed and perfumed, forced to dance, forced to over-feed; until roused
to a pitch of terrible excitement by drugs and curiosity, and the
religious ecstasy of all around her, she had crept out alone, and into
the temple with the teeming multitude to dance for the glory of her
goddess.

Her little feet made patterns in the dust as she turned slightly, this
child of ten, until her snake-like arms seemed stretched in invitation
to the four pairs of burning eyes fixed upon the virgin beauty of the
little body.

Who noticed in all that crowd when four pairs of hands shot up and
seized her about the knees, lifting her gently down, or who, in the
tumult, heard the cry smothered in the muffling cloth of a white coat
in a distant shadowed corner.

And one dead body more or less in the morning, what does it signify or
matter in a place which reeks of blood?

And just as this happened, and just as a dishevelled pock-marked woman
stole swiftly up the temple steps, every face turned in one direction,
and wave after wave of indescribable excitement swept the multitude.

And yet there was nothing, no sound, no sight to account for it; only
the high priest, tall and terrible, with the face of a Roman emperor or
a Jesuit, came from behind the altar and stood at the open door,
looking first at the throngs and then at a mass of black cloud which,
as is sometimes the way in India, had suddenly spread itself towards
the east, and was slowly climbing the heavens.

CHAPTER XXXIX

"The gods approve
The depth, and not the tumult of the soul."--_Wordsworth_.

"What a frightful row the natives are making in the city," was the
fractious comment of one heat-distracted tourist to another through the
mosquito netting which divided the two beds.

"Disgraceful!" peevishly assented the other as she turned restlessly
upon the thin, hot mattress, and heaved the one thin sheet to the foot
of the hot bed.

A sharper note had topped the heavy murmur which, like the rumble of a
distant sea, had beaten the air without ceasing throughout the night.

A film operator would have said that a crowd had woken up; a London
policeman, that a crowd was turning nasty, as the sharp note went
crescendo right along, until it took the definite tone