human bodies; foxes, jackals, and hyenas were disputing over their
prey; whilst bears were chewing the livers of children. The space
within was peopled by a multitude of fiends. There were the subtle
bodies of men that had escaped their grosser frames prowling
about the charnel ground, where their corpses had been reduced to
ashes, or hovering in the air, waiting till the new bodies which they
were to animate were made ready for their reception. The spirits of
those that had been foully slain wandered about with gashed limbs;
and skeletons, whose mouldy bones were held together by bits of
blackened sinew, followed them as the murderer does his victim.
Malignant witches with shriveled skins, horrid eyes and distorted
forms, crawled and crouched over the earth; whilst spectres and
goblins now stood motionless, and tall as lofty palm trees; then, as
if in fits, leaped, danced, and tumbled before their evocator. The
air was filled with shrill and strident cries, with the fitful moaning
of the storm-wind, with the hooting of the owl, with the jackal's
long wild cry, and with the hoarse gurgling of the swollen river,
from whose banks the earth-slip thundered in its fall.

In the midst of all, close to the fire which lit up his evil
countenance, sat Shanta-Shil, the jogi, with the banner that denoted
his calling and his magic staff planted in the ground behind him.
He was clad in the ochre-coloured loin-wrap of his class; from his
head streamed long tangled locks of hair like horsehair; his black
body was striped with lines of chalk, and a girdle of thighbones
encircled his waist. His face was smeared with ashes from a
funeral pyre, and his eyes, fixed as those of a statue, gleamed from
this mask with an infernal light of hate. His cheeks were shaven,
and he had not forgotten to draw the horizontal sectarian mark. But
this was of blood; and Vikram, as he drew near saw that he was