What fragrant bushes of heliotrope, and straggling tufts of tube roses! What wild flowers and fantastic grasses! had apparently struggled over every obstacle to join their more civilized relations in Mrs. Noote’s neglected garden. Beyond it lay the yellow valley, the swelling hills, and, rising out of a faint pearly mist, and clearly defined against a turquoise sky, Juliet recognized her old friends, Trisul (the three peaks) and Nanda-devi (the storm god), who reared his noble white head higher than any mountain in British territory. They seemed to have come nearer to her, but, in reality, it was she who had decreased her distance from them by close on thirty miles. The thin, stimulating hill air, the fresh flowers, the songs of the ever busy minars, and the shouts of the reapers in the corn, combined to assure her that it was a sin to be in the house, and, dressing at once, she set forth to explore her surroundings. Her first discovery was her hostess in the dairy yard, shrieking fluent anathemas at her gwala, or milkman, a sturdy Pahari, wearing a battered old forage cap (whose various vicissitudes would possibly fill a volume) and an expression of silent scorn, that would not have been unbefitting on the countenance of a Roman emperor. Doubtless he was saying to himself, “What a devil of devils is this screaming white pig; the curse of my father be upon her!” 

“Teach her music! Oh well, I cannot get over that!” gasped Eulalie, in a tone of horror.

“No. And you should hear her playing on the sitar, and singing hill songs; and when she passes through the village I declare they salaam to her, as if she was a goddess, and never takes no notice what ever of me—no more nor if I was so much dirt.”

Mrs. Noote’s arraignment was partly correct. Juliet spoke the Pahari tongue fluently; she was in a way a hill girl herself, and when she went down to the village, on an errand to the Bunnia’s shop, or on her own account, every one was glad to see her. First of all, she had made friends with the sturdy brown children, and then with their parents—who were children too-most of them high-caste Brahmins, whose simple dignity and single-mindedness and courtesy afforded a strong contrast to the inmates of Kala Dara. They all adored the Miss Sahib, whom they named among themselves “Sunduria,” that is to say, “the beautiful,” and gladly welcomed her under their flat stone roofs, and offered her dahlias and marigolds. She knew their family histories and ancient feuds, and all about their lawsuits, leases of land, and the condition of their cattle and crops. It was true that Gindia taught her how to play the sitar-an instrument made out of a gourd with strings like a guitar-and Gindia’s old grandmother, Neoli, poured into her ears many legends and tragedies, and tales of self-immolation and desperate pilgrimages to almost inaccessible mountain shrines. She gave her a smooth dark green stone, pierced, to wear as an amulet against the evil eye, and cautioned her to beware of the big blind bull who haunted the Taka valley, or of the Dekkanee woman, who cast spells near the old water mill, and above all of the mad fakir.

She stooped to pick up her sticks with an involuntary shudder. It was a weird and dreadfully lonely spot-funereal, secret, ghostly. Its dark frowning walls, its solemn stillness, seemed to weigh upon her senses; she would tarry no longer. As she raised her eyes, her heart seemed about to jump from her breast. Silently as a shadow, a man had come out of the interior of the temple—a tall, emaciated, loathsome fakir. His hair, plastered with dirt, stood stiffly erect, like horns; his face and chest were daubed with wood ashes and of a bluish-white colour; from his unearthly white face gleamed a pair of devilish eyes that glowed like carbuncles. He was partly clothed in a panther’s skin. In one hand he held the dripping carcass of a headless kid, and in the other the enormous sacrificial knife, common to the Nepaulese and hill tribes; not a mere ghoorka—“cookery,” but a wide, sharp blade, nearly two feet long, with a cruel curve at the end, where it fits the neck of the bullock about to be slain. With one of these awful weapons, a dexterous arm can sweep off the animal’s head at a single stroke; and failure to do this, at the yearly Dussera, entails on the executioner disgrace and derision.