But Brown appeared indifferent to the danger that he ran. To the
fakir's unconcealed discomfort, he proceeded to examine him minutely,
going over him with the aid of the lantern inch by inch, from the
toe-nails upward.

"Well," he commented aloud, "if the army's got an opposite, here's
it! I'd give a month's pay for the privilege of washing this brute,
just as a beginning!"

The man's toe-nails--for he really was a man!--were at least two inches
long. They were twisted spirally, and some of them were curled back
on themselves into disgusting-looking knots. What walking he had
ever done had been on his heels. His feet were bent upward, and fixed
upward, by a deliberately cultivated cramp.

His legs, twisted one above the other in a squatting attitude, were
lean and hairy, and covered with open sores which were kept open by
the swarm of insects that infested him. His loin-cloth was rotting
from him. His emaciated body--powdered and smeared with ashes and
dust and worse--was perched bolt-up-right on a flat earth dais that
had once on a time been the throne of a crossroads idol. One arm,
his right one, hung by his side in an almost normal attitude, and
his right fingers moved incessantly like a man's who is kneading
clay. But his other arm was rigid--straight up in the air above
his head; set, fixed, cramped, paralyzed in that position, with
the fist clenched. And through the back of the closed fist the fakir's
nails were growing.

But, worse than the horror of the arm was the creature's face, with
the evidence of torture on it, and fiendish delight in torture for