"Sahib—the curse."
"There is no curse," he said, with the same gentleness.
He waded through the water to the place they indicated and pushed aside the tangled bashes. The hidden path lay before him, leading steeply upwards. He went on. He was climbing from gloom and shadow into light. He knew now neither doubt nor fear. A great serenity possessed him. There could be no curse. Strange flowers clustered at the roots of the stark, straight-standing trees—but they were not evil. There was sound—a rustling and crackling among the branches-a frightened scurrying of some wild creature startled from its lair—familiar loved sounds of living things. A warm, consoling radiance sank down between the stems of the trees as light pours down through a cathedral window upon the stately pillars.
Up—steadily upwards, up into a higher, purer air, with a strange heart-beating of foreknowledge. And then at last the end—a wide clearing on the mountain-summit, and on a high altar, not Siva, but a golden Lakshmi, her face, beatific in its serene sweetness, turned towards the rising sun.
Vahana squatted in her shadow, his half-naked body bowed over something so still, so huddled that Tristram faltered for an instant. Then he went forward and Vahana, seeing him unrecognizingly, pointed down with a shaking finger of derision.
It was Barclay. His piteous face, lifted to the peace of the clear sky, was swollen and bloated almost out of recognition. But he bore no trace of violence.
Vahana shook with a senile laughter. A fangless adder unwound itself from about his wrist, and he held it to the dead man's staring eyes, gibing at him.
"There are no snakes—there are no snakes."
But Tristram had gone on.
He had seen her. Like a pale lotus-flower cast up by the waters, she lay stretched in the short grass which grew about the foot of the altar, her fair, dishevelled head pillowed on her arm in an attitude of happy weariness. He knelt down beside her. The moment's dread was gone. He saw the faint colour in her cheeks. Her breath came gently, smoothly as a child's.