Yet it was a gruesome group, in truth, which circled round that solitary and still more gruesome figure in the centre. A figure squatting like the rest (since, when wood is dear, funeral piles must be restricted) in full view, yet mercifully obscured for the most part by the heavy column of smoke which rose straight to a level with the leaping flames, then, tilting sideways before the intermittent breeze of early dawn, drifted westward, to hide those white tents upon the horizon.
"Above or below, fool!" called Ramanund, sharply, as they neared the shore. "I am no Dôm, like thou, to choose my way among dead men's bones."
The allusion to the semi-aboriginal tribe who earn their livelihood by streaking the dead, brought a frown this time to Am-ma's face.
"I am no Dôm, either," he retorted, "and were I one, thou wouldst be glad of my guidance to the fire some day, Pundit-jee!" Roshan Khân listened with the wholehearted contempt of his race and creed. "Be quick, either way," he said, scornfully. "We have bare time, as it is."
Yet he, also, swerved from that gruesome group, which, as the two--dressed as Europeans, save for their turbans--stepped ashore and hurried off in the direction of the camp, stood up in a linked semi-circle to salaam, then squatted again with a clank of leg irons.
Am-ma, his task over, had paused in the deeper water, and was once more sidling sedately. The sun had risen with the inconceivable swiftness with which it rises from a dead-level, treeless plain, and shone reddish-yellow, like a fire, on his wet skin. The shadow of that dense column of smoke sidled sedately on the water also, shifting with the shifting spirals of the reality.
"Had he spilt blood?" asked Am-ma, suddenly, as that something, half-hidden in the smoke, seemed to dissolve, sending a great fountain of sparks, bright even in the sunlight, up into the air.
One in the semicircle clucked denial.
"A jogi--they say of Gorakh-nâth's monastery--had him for disciple. And there was dhatoora in the sweetmeats, for sure. Whether he was strangler, God knows! Perhaps. Yet such travellers deserved poison; who but a fool trusts a strange hand?"
A big man at the end of the semicircle, who had a sinister face despite his good conduct badge, looked round hastily to where, a little distance off, the two jail-warders in charge were dividing a smoke on the sly with swift mysterious bubblings; then lowered his voice.