Page:Malabari, Behramji M. - Gujarat and the Gujaratis (1882).djvu/221

Rh of their one night's adventures which are likely to last them their whole life.

We now come to the Aghori mendicant. The Aghori, as his name implies, is an atrocity. It is a human being who, by a series of exercises, has achieved the highest pitch of his ambition—the feelings, habits, the very nature of a beast. The Aghori is insensible to all bodily discomforts; in fact, he courts them. He is a very rare animal, but by no means altogether extinct. One has only to see him to realise the loathsome object. Dark, muddy, hirsute, with eyes on fire, the nostrils wide distended, the nails grown to the length of an inch, diseased in various parts of the body, which is actually being worm-eaten, with vermin in the hair of his head, vermin on his body, and generally stark-naked. Such is the Aghori. His look is that of a mad idiot. There are the insane leer, the protruding tongue, the filthy teeth. The Aghori never washes, never dresses. He takes only carrion or putrid food, and drinks foul water. In one hand he carries a human skull, in another some hideous instrument of torture and death. These are his