Srikanta
sands and waiting in silence. Overhead, in the dark heavens, were countless stars, also wide awake in anxious silence. No wind or breeze, and no sound. Except for the beating of my heart there was no stir or response from any living thing as far as my eyes could see. The night-bird that had cried 'Bap!' had not opened its mouth again. I advanced slowly towards the west, the direction in which the cremation-grounds lay. A few days before I had noticed some silk-cotton trees that stood like grim gate-keepers of the place, and when I had advanced a little further I saw their dark branches. As I passed under them I heard a faint stir of life, which became more pronounced as I advanced. It was like the sobbing of a tired child whose cries have failed to rouse its mother from sleep and who has become weak and feeble through excessive sobbing. It came from one corner of the cremation-grounds. He who does not know what this cry means, and who hears it for the first time in the dead of night, will refuse to advance another step. I will bet anything on that. If he does not know that the sobbing thing is not a human child but a young vulture, he will have no means of guessing it. Advancing still further, I saw a flock of vultures sitting on the branches of the silk-cotton trees; the disconsolate crying must have come from a naughty child among them.
It went on crying as before. I passed the tree and stood in a corner of the cremation-grounds. I saw that the statement that one could count a lakh[1] of human skulls there was not so much of an exaggeration as I had thought. Nearly the whole of the locality was strewn with human skeletons. The skulls with which the ghostly presences were to play were there in plenty though the
- ↑ lakh, 10O,000.
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