And, seeing him at gaze, the fakir recovered confidence and jeered new ribaldry, until some one suddenly shot out from behind Cunningham, and before he had recovered from his surprise he saw the fakir sprawling on his back, howling for mercy, while Mahommed Gunga beat the blood out of him with a whalebone riding-whip.

The sun went down with Indian suddenness and shut off the scene of upraised lash and squirming, naked, ash-smeared devil, as a magic-lantern picture; disappears.  Only the creature’s screams reverberated through the jungle, like a belated echo to the restless paroquets.

“He will sleep less easily for a week or two!” hazarded Mahommed Gunga, stepping back toward Cunningham.  In the sudden darkness the white breeches showed and the whites of his eyes, but little else; his voice growled like a rumble from the underworld.

“Why did you do it, risaldar?  What did he say?”

“It was enough, bahadur, that he sat on that stone; for that alone he had been beaten!  What he said was but the babbling of priests.  All priests are alike.  They have a common jargon—­a common disrespect for what they dare not openly defy.  These temple rats of fakirs mimic them.  That is all, sahib.  A whipping meets the case.”

“But the stone?  Why shouldn’t he sit on it?”

“Wait one minute, sahib, and then see.”  He formed his hands into a trumpet and bellowed through them in a high-pitched, nasal, ululating order to somebody behind: 

“Oh-h-h—­Battee-lao!”

The black, dark roadside echoed it and a dot of light leapt up as a man came running with what gradually grew into a lamp.

Mahommed Gunga seized the lamp, bent for a few seconds over the still sprawling fakir, whipped him again twice, cursed him and kicked him, until he got up and ran like a spectre for the gloom beyond the trees.  Then, with a rather stately sweep of the lamp, and a tremble in his voice that was probably intentional—­designed to make Cunningham at least aware of the existence of emotion before he looked—­he let the light fall on the slab on which the fakir had been squatting.

“Look, Cunningham-sahib!”

The youngster bent down above the slab and tried, in the fitful light, to make out what the markings were that ran almost from side to side, in curves, across the stone; but it was too dark—­the light was too fitful; the marks themselves were too faint from the constant squatting of roadside wanderers.

Mahommed Gunga set the lamp down on the stone, and he and the attendant took little sticks, sharp-pointed, with which they began to dig hurriedly, scratching and scraping at what presently showed, even in that rising and falling light, as Roman lettering.  Soon Cunningham himself began to lend a hand.  He made out a date first, and he could feel it with his fingers before his eyes deciphered it.  Gradually, letter by letter—­word by word—­he read it off, feeling a strange new thrill run through him, as each line followed, like a voice from the haunted past.