"Let him sleep, Mem-sahib," warned Ahmed from across the fire. "He has been fighting the old guru."
"What?" Kathlyn whispered back. "Where?"
Ahmed smiled grimly and pointed toward his forehead.
"Is there really such evil, Ahmed?"
"Evil begets evil, heaven born, just as good begets good. The Colonel Sahib did wrong. And who shall deny some of these gurus a supernatural power? I have seen; I know."
"But once you said that we should eventually escape, all of us."
"And I still say it, Mem-sahib. What is written is written," phlegmatically.
Wearily she turned toward her tent, but paused to touch the head of her sleeping father as she passed. Her occidental mind would not and could not accept as possibilities these mysterious attributes of the oriental mind. That a will could reach out and prearrange a man's misfortunes was to her mind incredible, for there were no precedents. She never had witnessed a genuine case of hypnotism; those examples she had seen were miserable buffooneries, travesties, hoodwinking not even the newsboys in the upper gallery. True, she had sometimes read of such things, but from the same angle with which she had read the Arabian Nights—fairy stories.
Yet, here was her father, thoroughly convinced of the efficacy of the guru's curse; and here was Ahmed, complacently watching the effects, and not doubting in the least that his guru would in the end prove the stronger of the two.
One of the elephants clanked his chains restlessly. He may have heard the prowling of a cat. Far beyond the fire, beyond the sentinel, she thought she saw a naked form flash out and back of a tree. She stared intently at the tree for a time; but as she saw nothing more, she was convinced that her eyes had deceived her. Besides her body seemed dead and her mind too heavy for thought.