And as Barlow pressed the girl to him, fiercely, crushing her almost, she raised her lips to his, and they both drank the long deep draught of love.

Then the Gulab drew from his arms and her face was radiant, a soft exultation illumined her eyes.

“That is all, Sahib,” she said.  “Bootea passes now, goes out to kailas in a happy dream.  Go, Sahib, and do not remain below for this is so beautiful.  You must ride forth in content.”

She took him by the arm and gently led him to the door.

And from without he could hear a chorus of a thousand voices, its burden being, “The Kurban!”

Barlow turned, one foot in the sunshine and one in the cloister’s gloom, and kissed Bootea; and she could feel his hot tears upon her cheek.

Once more he pleaded, “Renounce this dreadful sacrifice.”

But the girl smiled up into his face, saying, “I die happily, husband. 
Perhaps Indra will permit Bootea to come back in spirit to the Sahib.”

The High Priest strode to the entrance of the cloister, his eyes holding the abstraction of one moving in another world; he seemed oblivious of the Englishman’s presence as he said: 

“Come forth, ye who seek kailas through Omkar.”

As Barlow staggered, almost blind, over the stony path from the cloister, he saw the group of sixteen Brahmins, their foreheads and arms carrying the white bars of Siva.

Then Bootea was led by the priest down to the cold merciless stone Linga, where she, at a word from the priest, knelt in obeisance, a barbaric outburst of music from horn and drum clamouring a salute.

When Bootea arose to her feet the priest tendered her some mhowa spirit in a cocoanut shell, but the girl, disdaining its stimulation, poured it in a libation upon the Linga.

From the amphitheatre of the enclosing hills thirty thousand voices rose in one thundering chorus of “Jae, jae, Omkar!” and, “To Omkar the Kurban!”

Many pressed forward, mad fanaticism in their eyes, and held out at arm’s length toward the girl bracelets and ornaments to be touched by her fingers as a beneficence.

But Swami Sarasvati waved them back, and turning to Bootea tendered her, with bowed head, the pan supari (betel nut in a leaf) as an admonition that the ceremony had ceased, and there was nothing left but the sacrifice.

As the girl with firm step turned to the path that led up through shrub and jungle growth to the ledge where fluttered the white flag, a tumult of approbation went up from the multitude at her brave devotion.  Then a solemn hush enwrapped the bowl of the hills, and the eyes of the thousands were fixed upon the jutting shelf of rock.

A dirge-like cadence, a mighty gasp of, “Ah, Kuda!” sounded as a slim figure, white robed, like a wraith, appeared on the ledge, and from her hand whirled down to the rocks below a cocoanut, cast in sacrifice; next a hand-mirror, its glass shimmering flickers of gold from the sunlight.