the ground.

"Hush, hush!" whispered Sham Rao, his whole body trembling. "She is
going to prophesy!.... " "She?" incredulously inquired Mr. Y----. "This
a woman's voice? I don't believe it for a moment. Someone's uncle must
be stowed away somewhere about the place. Not the fabulous uncle she
inherited from, but a real live one!..."

Sham Rao winced under the irony of this supposition, and cast an
imploring look at the speaker.

"Woe to you! woe to you!" echoed the voice. "Woe to you, children of
the impure Jaya and Vijaya! of the mocking, unbelieving lingerers round
great Shiva's door! Ye, who are cursed by eighty thousand sages! Woe to
you who believe not in the goddess Kali, and you who deny us, her Seven
divine Sisters! Flesh-eating, yellow-legged vultures! friends of the
oppressors of our land! dogs who are not ashamed to eat from the same
trough with the Bellati!" (foreigners).

"It seems to me that your prophetess only foretells the past," said Mr.
Y----, philosophically putting his hands in his pockets. "I should say
that she is hinting at you, my dear Sham Rao."

"Yes! and at us also," murmured the colonel, who was evidently beginning
to feel uneasy.

As to the unlucky Sham Rao, he broke out in a cold sweat, and tried to
assure us that we were mistaken, that we did not fully understand her
language.

"It is not about you, it is not about you! It is of me she speaks,
because I am in Government service. Oh, she is inexorable!"

"Rakshasas! Asuras!" thundered the voice. "How dare you appear before
us? how dare you to stand on this holy ground in boots made of a cow's
sacred skin? Be cursed for etern----"

But her curse was not destined to be finished. In an instant the
Hercules-like Narayan had fallen on the Sivatherium, and upset the whole
pile, the skull, the horns and the demoniac Pythia included. A second
more, and we thought we saw the witch flying in the air towards the
portico. A confused vision of a stout, shaven Brahman, suddenly emerging
from under the Sivatherium and instantly disappearing in the hollow
beneath it, flashed before my dilated eyes.

But, alas! after the third second had passed, we all came to the
embarrassing conclusion that, judging from the loud clang of the door
of the cave, the representative of the Seven Sisters had ignominiously
fled. The moment she had disappeared from our inquisitive eyes to her
subterranean domain, we all realized that the unearthly hollow voice we
ha