thrown into the waters—while the women wailed and beat their breasts, while white-robed priests chanted long-winded litanies, while the conches brayed from the temples, and while the smoke from many ceremonial fires ascended to the sky in thick, wispy streams and hung in a ruddy, bloodshot cloud above the glare of the funeral pyre that lit up the palace and told to all the world that another one of the divine race of Oneypore had gone to join Brahm, his kinsman.
Brahm, his kinsman!
And Martab Singh had mingled the bones of his dead body with those of the mlechchas, the foreigners, the barbarians, the Christians—on foreign, Christian soil!
Something like a shudder of apprehension passed over Thorneycroft, but he kept sturdily on his way, returning the salutations with which the hook-nosed, saber-rattling, swaggering Rajputs greeted him because of his Brahman garb. He went up a steep ascent that led to the chowk, the outer courtyard of the palace, and the soldiers salaamed and stepped aside:
"Enter, O holy one!"
