ying there. When
this one returned, the fourth leg went out and it heard a voice in
the sky saying: "The Raja is very cunning, I will send a snake which
shall hide in his shoe and when he puts the shoe on in the morning,
it will bite him and he will die." When this leg came back, each one
told the others what it had seen and done, and the Raja heard them and
lay awake till morning, and at dawn he called his servants and sent
them outside the palace and there they found the tiger and leopard
and bear lying dead, and the four thieves with their legs broken. Then
the Raja believed what the legs had said and he would not get up but
first ordered his servants to make a fire in the courtyard and he
had all his shoes thrown into the fire and then he got up.

After this the Raja ordered that great care was to be taken of the
bedstead and that anyone who sat on it should be put to death; and he
himself used not to sleep in it anymore but he kept it in his bedroom
that it might protect him.

XXXV. The Ghormuhas.

Ghormuhas have heads like horses and bodies and arms like men and
their legs are shaped like men's but they have only one leg each,
and they eat human beings.

One day a young man named Somai was hunting a deer and the deer ran
away to the country of the Ghormuhas and Somai pursued it, and the
Ghormuhas caught him and took him home to eat. First they smoked him
for two or three days so that all the vermin were driven out of his
body and clothes and then they proceeded to fatten him; they fed him
well every day on rice cooked with turmeric.

Somai saw how they dealt with their other victims: they tied them hand
and foot and threw them alive into a pot of boiling oil and when they
were cooked they hung the bodies up in the doorway and would take a
bite as they passed in and out; the liver and heart and brains they
cooked separately. They used to eat their own parents also: for when
a father or mother grew old they would throw them on to the roof of
the house and when they rolled down and were killed they would say to
their friends, "The pumpkin growing on our roof has got ripe and fallen
off and burst, let us come and eat it;" and then they had a feast.

Somai saw all this and was very frightened. The Ghormuhas could run
very fast and they made Somai run a race with them every day and
their plan was that they would eat him when he was strong enough to
beat them in the race. In the course of time he came to bea