flesh seared,
my garments aflame, I reeled into the courtyard of the women's quarters,
and threw myself into the fountain splashing in the middle of the marble
pavement. Then, drawing myself out of the water like a bedraggled rat, I
crawled on hands and knees to the apartment of my wife.

"God! God! It was to find her and our two little children dead--stabbed
to the heart on the sleeping mats where they lay."

A sobbing wail burst from the narrator's lips, and he covered his face
with his hands. After a time he recovered his self-possession, and
resumed, although still in broken tones and with shoulders heaving from
emotion.

"I need not dwell on the pitiable story. Gaining the open country, I
gazed upon the fierce flames now bursting in a dozen places from the
roof of my doomed home, the funeral pyre of the last ones dear to me on
earth.

"As I gazed I rent my garments, and raised my voice in loud
lamentations. Soon all was consumed, and there remained only the dull
glow of red embers. Then I wandered out into the night, stupefied and
broken-hearted by the crowning calamity that had overtaken me, afraid
even to face my neighbours of the village, naked, penniless, and alone.

"Thus did it come about that I, a man of estate, feudatory of a prince,
within the period of a single moon lost wives and children, slaves and
retainers, land and crops and cattle, family jewels, stores of gold and
of silver, and also the blue diamonds of the idol for the retention of
which I had rashly but unknowingly ventured all that I had of happiness
in this world.

"And since that day of final disaster I have journeyed over the face of
the land trying to find, not the blue diamonds, not my stolen hoard, but
that fiend incarnate, the priest of Siva, who slew my wives and
children.

"I go about, now a Moslem fakir with the right of entry to the mosques
where I may worship the only true God and Mohammed his prophet, now
disguised as a Hindu yogi, crying 'Ram, Ram,' so that I may gain access
to the temples of the idolators, there to find the Ganapati with the
jewelled eyes, and by that token discover the man for whom I am ever
seeking. Every year I revisit Ferishtapur, whence the idol was
originally taken by my hand from the wrecked temple, but thither neither
the priest nor the Ganapati has ever returned. At other times I travel
from one city to another, searching for temples, mingling with the
devotees at the recurring festivals, the H