sm
which feared nothing, not even death; for when death overtook them, as
it sometimes did, in the performance of their rites, they merely looked
upon it as a means of drawing nearer to their goddess.

The origin of this extraordinary religion seems to be hidden in the
mists of the past, though European travellers claim to have met with it
in India in the seventeenth century. We may note that during the
Mahometan invasion all sorts of crimes were committed in the name of
religion, and possibly the murders in honour of Kali were a survival
from this time. As years went by the sect increased rapidly, and many
of the most peaceable Hindus were attracted by it, and joined it in the
capacity of grave-concealers, spies, or merely as passive adherents who
contributed large sums of money. In Sleeman's time about two thousand
Thugs were arrested and put to death every year, but nevertheless their
numbers, towards the end of the nineteenth century, were steadily
increasing. (Of recent years, however, a considerable diminution has
been shown.) In 1895 only three are recorded to have been condemned to
death for murder; in 1896, ten; and in 1897, twenty-five; while
travellers in Rajputana and the Hyderabad district speak of much higher
figures. The Thugs always bear in mind the maxim that "dead men tell
no tales," and their practice of killing all the companions of the
chosen victim, as well as himself, renders the detection of their
crimes extremely difficult; while their mastery of the art of getting
rid of corpses frequently baffles the authorities. Further, the
terrified families of the victims, dreading reprisals, often fail to
report the deaths, so that the sect has thus been enabled to continue
its murderous rites in spite of all measures taken to stamp it out.

They avoid killing women, except in the case of women accompanying a
man who has been doomed to death, when they must be sacrificed in order
to prevent their reporting the crime. Stranger still, they admit that
murder is not always a virtuous action, but that there are criminal
murders which deserve punishment.

"When a Thug is killed," said one of them to the celebrated Sleeman,
"or when one does not belong to the sect, and kills without conforming
to the rites, it is a crime, and should be punished."

They seem to experience a strange and voluptuous pleasure when
performing their rites of strangulation--a pleasure increased, no
doubt, by the knowledge th