"The coward has fled," said Zohrab.
"She is beautiful as the one he lost, and whom he mourned so much that it required the whole seraglio to console him."
"Poor fellow!" sneered Zohrab.
"I will buy her of you for two hundred tomauns, paid down," said the Khond. "Money is useful to those who are fugitives."
"Buy her—for a wife?" asked Zubberdust, changing colour. The Khond laughed; and his laugh was as the growl of some strange animal, as he replied—
"No: a Khond marries a Khond."
"For what, then?"
"The purposes of that religion we have been discussing just now," replied the other, deliberately and in a low voice.
Mabel heard this suggestion without exactly comprehending what it meant at the time; but she could see that a crimson flush of shame and passion came over the dark face of Zohrab; his eyes literally sparkled and flashed with the fury of deep and sudden passion, as he sprang to his feet, snatched up his sabre and half drew it, choking with intensity of utterance, ere he could speak; for the Khonds are a race of cruel and barbarous idolaters, who live in the more inaccessible mountain ranges of India, and were quite unknown till the beginning of her present Majesty's reign, when, by the military operations undertaken in Goomsoor and on the Chilka Lake—a long and narrow inlet from the sea—and when our troops from thence ascended the range of Ghauts, we made the acquaintance of this most ancient but hitherto unknown race of aborigines, whose religion, a distinct Theism, with a subordinate demonology, requires (as Captain Macpherson first discovered) a human sacrifice periodically to the godhead, the fetish or spirit whom they style Boora Penna, or the Source of Good, who created all things by casting five handfuls of earth around him; but, like more enlightened folks, the Khonds have their schismatics and sceptics, who dispute bitterly, and hate each other as cordially as Christians can do,—but about the origin of mountains, meteors, and whirlwinds, where the rivers come from, where they go to, and so forth.
It is to Tari, the wife of this Boora Penna, that the propitiatory human sacrifices are periodically offered (in groves which are dark, gloomy, and deemed holy as those of our Druids were in Europe), amid the most horrible rites, roasting over a slow fire, for one, about the time when the ground is cropped, so that each family may procure and bury a little of the victim's flesh in the soil, to ensure prosperity, and avert the malignity of the goddess, who otherwise might blast their rice, maize, or vines; and the immolation takes place amid wild jollity, deep drunkenness, and debauchery.