Once, half way of the bridge, a man’s voice rang out commandingly, calling backward, admonishing some one to hurry, crying, “It is the kurban!”

Barlow started; the kurban meant a human sacrifice.  He looked at Bootea—­he could have sworn her head had drooped, and that she shivered.  The girl must have sensed his thoughts, for she turned her eyes up to his, but they held nothing of fear.

Beyond the bridge they passed across a lower level, jungle clad with delicate bamboos and dhak, and sweet-scented shrubs, and clusters of gorgeous oleanders.  The way was thronged with white-clothed figures that seemed like wraiths, ghosts drifting back to the cavern of the Destroyer.

Then they commenced the ascent following the bed of a stream that had cut a chasm through black trap-rock, leaving jagged cliffs.  And the persistent jungle, ever encroaching on space, had out-posts of champac and wild mango, their giant roots, like the arms of an octopus, holding anchorage in clefts of the rock.  And from the limbs above floated down the scolding voices of lungoor, the black-faced grey-whiskered monkeys, who rebuked the intrusion of the earth-dwellers below.  Where the path lay over rocks it was worn smooth and slippery by naked feet, the feet of pilgrims for a thousand years.  On the right the mouth of a deep cave had been walled up by masonry.  Within, so the legend ran, the High Priest of Mandhatta, centuries before, had imprisoned the goddess Kali to stop a pestilence, making vow to offer to Bhairava, her son, a yearly human sacrifice.  Higher up, approaching the plateau where were the ruins of a thousand gorgeous shrines, both sides of the pathway were lined by mendicants who sat cross-legged, in front of them a little mat for the receipt of alms—­cowries, pice, silver; the mendicants muttering incessantly “Jae, Jae, Omkar!” (Victory to Omkar).

In front of the temple within which sat the god, was a conical black stone daubed with red, the Linga, the generative function of Siva, and before it, the symbol of reproduction, women made offering of cocoanuts, and sweets, and garlands of flowers,—­generally marigolds,—­and prayed for the bestowal of a son; even their postures, carried away as they were by desire, showing a complete abandon to the sex idea.  A Brahmin priest sat cross-legged upon a stone platform repeating in a sing-song cadence prayers, and from somewhere beyond a deep-toned bell boomed out an admonishing call.

Holy water from the sacred Narbudda was poured into the two jugs each pilgrim carried and sealed by the Brahmins, who received, without thanks, stoically, as a matter of right, a tribute of silver.

Towering eighty feet above the temple spire was a cliff, and from a ledge near its top a white flag fluttered idly in the lazy wind.  It was the death-leap, the ledge from which the one of the human sacrifice to Omkar leapt, to crash in death beside the Linga.