Page:Karl Gjellerup - The Pilgrim Kamanita - 1911.djvu/85

 ments of the gate, but also the coping of the walls to either side, were hideously decorated with impaled human heads.

There was no room for doubt—these were the heads of the executed robbers from Angulimala's band.

For the first time since I had seen Vasitthi's face under the baldachin, another feeling than that of grief possessed me, and I gazed with unspeakable horror upon these heads, of which the vultures had long since left nothing but the bones, with, at the very most, the pigtails, and here and there a beard whose wild tangle had protected the place on which it grew. So all of them would have been unrecognisable had not his savage red beard betrayed one, and his pigtail wound around on the top of his head, after the manner of the ascetic plait-wearers, another. These two, and without doubt many of the others, had often nodded to me in comrade-like fashion from the camp circle at night; and I remembered with ghastly distinctness how that red beard, flaring in the moonlight, had wagged with merriment on the occasion of the lecture upon the "Stupidity of Night-watchmen." Yes, so realistic was it all that I could almost imagine I still heard the droning laughter from that lipless mouth.

But about the middle of the battlements over the gate, and somewhat raised above the rest, a powerful skull shone forth in the rays of the rising sun and imperiously drew all my attention to itself. How should I not recognise those lines again? He it was who that day forced us all to laugh without himself moving a muscle of his Brahman face. Vajaçravas' head dominated here, while, without doubt, Angulimala's had been put up over the eastern gate. And a curious sensation stole over me as I thought of the