rous precision.

And between the three fires, not spitted and not bound but absolutely
motionless, there sat a human being, so dried out that not even that
fierce heat could wring a drop of sweat from him, yet living, for you
could see him breathe and the firelight shone on his living, yet
unwinking eyes. Every draft of air that he drew into his lungs must have
scorched him. Every single hair had disappeared from his body. And while
we watched they came and fed him.

But he was only one of many, all undergoing torture in its most hideous
and useless forms, and all as free as he was to deliver themselves if
they saw fit. The least offensive was a man within six feet of me who
sat on a conical stone no bigger than a cocoanut; that small stone was
resting on top of a cone of rock about a yard high, in such fashion that
it rocked at the slightest change of balance; the man's legs were
crossed, however, exactly as if he were squatting on the floor--although
they actually rested on nothing; and his arms had been crossed behind
his back for so long, and held so steadily, that the fingernails of the
right hand had grown through the left arm biceps, and vice versa. He,
too, was fed with drops of water and about a dozen grains of rice--every
second day, as the Mahatma told us afterward.

Space was at a premium in that gruesome madhouse. Close beside the
fellow on the rocking stone there hung two ropes from rings in the roof.
There were iron hooks on their lower ends, and these were passed through
the back muscles of another naked man, who kept himself swinging by
touching the floor with one toe. The muscles were so drawn by his weight
that they formed loops several inches long and had turned to dry
gristle; the strain had had some effect on one of his legs, for it was
curled up under him and apparently useless, but the other, with which he
toed the floor to swing himself, was apparently all right. His hands
were folded over his breast, and his beard and hair hung like seaweed.

Near him again there was an arrangement like a medieval rack, only that
instead of having a wheel or a lever the cords were drawn by heavy
weights. A man lay on it with arms and legs stretched out toward its
corners so tightly that his body did not touch the underlying strut; and
he had been so long in that position that his hands and feet were dead
from the pressure of the cords, and his limbs were stretched several
inches beyond their normal length. I