o another, knowing that the likelihood was that
murderers lay in wait, and that a few picked bones alone would tell the
tale even if, satiated with horrors to the point of indifference, any
one cared to inquire of it.

When I expressed surprise at the many rows of caves allowed to fall into
utter ruin, and the traces of whole villages now returned to waste
land: "Famine year," he would briefly answer, "dogs ate dogs and men ate
men."

I learned, too, why it was that no merry groups of children wandered
away from the village, even now when no evil-doers lay in wait, upon
some game or exploring adventure. I first discovered the reason of this
through meeting a woman whose face was scarred and mutilated so as to
bear small likeness to the human, and on inquiry I was informed that, as
a little girl, she had strayed away from home and been attacked by a
wolf; men had rushed to her rescue, but her face, which is generally the
part first attacked, was torn beyond recognition. I then learned what a
common thing it is for wild beasts, wolves or leopards, to come down
from the hills, and steal children even as they play around the
courtyard grinding-stone. I could not be surprised at the intense
anxiety of a woman whose son was half an hour late returning from an
errand, when I heard that her eldest child had strayed off one day, and
never been seen again. I was told of yet another woman who, nursing her
baby in the cave, saw a leopard spring on her eldest child in the
courtyard. Frantic, she left the baby to raise the alarm, and when she
returned bearing the little mangled body in her arms, she found that the
wild beast's mate had noted her absence and carried the baby off to its
lair.

I also heard, and found myself compelled to believe, things which I
should have dismissed with an incredulous smile some few months earlier.

It was now that I found myself brought face to face with the strange
phenomenon of demon possession. There is so much to be said on this
interesting topic, that it will require a chapter under its own heading
to note even a portion of what has come under my personal notice. For
the first time I heard, often in the midnight stillness, the
high-pitched voice, intoning the magic incantations whereby some young
woman yielded herself to be the medium of communication between the
spirit and the material, the wild chant sometimes dying away in the
distance, as she led a group of inquirers over wild mountain pa