Page:Karl Gjellerup - The Pilgrim Kamanita - 1911.djvu/66

 without a surprise attack being carried out, or a house broken into. Several times whole villages were plundered. On the fifteenth night of the waning moon, Kali's festival was celebrated with ghastly solemnity. Not only were bulls and countless black goats slaughtered before her image, but several unhappy prisoners as well; the victim being placed before the altar, and having an artery so opened that the blood spouted directly into the mouth of the loathsome figure hung round with its necklaces and pendants of human skulls. Thereafter followed a frantic orgy, in the course of which the robbers swilled intoxicating drink with utter abandon till quite senseless, all the while amusing themselves with the Bajaderes who had been, with unparalleled audacity, carried off for that purpose from a great temple.

Angulimala, who in his cups became magnanimous, wanted to make me also happy with a young and handsome Bajadere. But when I, with my heart full of Vasitthi, spurned the maiden, and she, overwhelmed by the slight put upon her, burst into tears, Angulimala flew into a frightful rage, seized, and would have strangled me then and there, but that the bald, smooth-faced robber came to my help. A few words from him sufficed to make the iron grip of the chief relax, and to send him away growling like a scarcely tamed brute.

This remarkable man, who thus for the second time became my rescuer,—his hands yet bloody from the hideous Kali sacrifice he had conducted,—was the son of a Brahman. But because he had been born under the Robber Constellation he had taken to the trade of the robber. At first he had belonged to the "Thugs," but went over for scientific reasons to the "Senders." From his father's family he had inherited, as he told me, a leaning to religious meditation.