on a stone platform
repeating in a sing-song cadence prayers, and from somewhere beyond a
deep-toned bell boomed out an admonishing call.

Holy water from the sacred Narbudda was poured into the two jugs each
pilgrim carried and sealed by the Brahmins, who received, without
thanks, stoically, as a matter of right, a tribute of silver.

Towering eighty feet above the temple spire was a cliff, and from a
ledge near its top a white flag fluttered idly in the lazy wind. It
was the death-leap, the ledge from which the one of the human sacrifice
to Omkar leapt, to crash in death beside the Linga.

Almost without words Barlow and the girl had toiled up the ascent,
scarcely noticed of the throng; and now Bootea said: "Sahib, remain
here, I go to speak to the High Priest."

Barlow saw her speak into the open portal of one of the cloister
chambers that surrounded the temple, then disappear within. After a
time she came forth, and approaching him said, "The Priest would speak
with thee, Sahib; for because of many things I have told him who thou
art, though mentioning not the nature of the mission, for that is not
permitted."

Barlow's foreboding of evil was now a certainty as he strode forward.

The priest rose at the Captain's entrance. He was a fine specimen of
the true Brahmin, the intellectual cult, that through successive
generations of mental sway and homage from the millions of untutored
ones had become conscious of its power. Tall, spare of form, with wide
high forehead and full expressive eyes, almost olive skin, Barlow felt
that the Swami was quite unlike the begging yogis and mendicants; a man
who was by the close alliance of his intellect to the essence of
created things a Sannyasi. Larger in his conceptions than the yogis
who misconstrued the Vedas and the Law of Manu as imposing an
association of filth--smeared ashes, and uncombed, uncleansed hair--as
a symbol of piety and abnegation of spirit, a visible assertion that
the body had passed from regard--that it, with its sensualities and
ungodly cravings, had become subservient to the spirit, the soul.

Swami Sarasvati was austere; Barlow felt that he dwelt on a plane where
the trivialities of life were but pestilential insects, to be endured
stoically in a physical way, with the mind freed from their irritation
grasping grander things; life was a wheel that revolved with the
certainty of celestial bodies.

It was so curious, and yet so unfailing, that Bo