A priest with an unscabbarded sword in his hand guarded the opening into the great hall, but the Chief Priest stood just inside it, holding the curtains that hung there slightly apart, peering out at the waiting, exultant people—he liked them well, as he saw them—and scanning the path that came down from the castle.
There are several halls not unlike this back of the Himalayas; there is none in the Punjab.
Great columns of wood, rudely carved with distorted animal and human figures, supported the high roof. The walls too were of wood—it was rarer and costlier in Rukh than stone—carved as rudely and grotesquely, and they were pierced, higher by several feet than a tallest man’s head, by a rough clerestory—a series of oblong slits through which the deep blue sky, just changing to sunset’s splendid motley, showed like a velvet drop-cloth of some magnificent theatric spectacle. Roofs and walls and pillars were a dead, dull, dark brown—somber, foreboding—but here and there the interstices between the repellent carvings were washed a dull red. At one side of the hall a high curtained doorway, the curtain a terrible tapestry of human slaughter and gods’ amours, led into the awful disrobing room, where priests put on their costliest vestments, and victims their garlands of sacrifice. An opposite door was heavily barred, but an oblong hole, when its sliding shutter was slid, made a hagioscope through which the guard within could inspect whoever approached it from without. At the far end of the hall heavy curtains, similar indecent tapestries, covered a wide opening.
The late afternoon light, burning in through the clerestory slits, dappled the somber floor.
A rhythmic, subdued murmur swayed through the expectant crowd, and as slow figures came down the castle-path swelled into a tossing sea-like storm of deep and hushed execration, but the women smiled as they cursed, the children still sucked at their long sticks of sweet-cane and painted sugars, and the downy babies still sucked at the brown breasts of their mothers.
Tom-toms crashed, drums echoed, pipes screeled, skin and reed implements sounded tunelessly. A woman sobbed in ecstasy—others caught it up and chorused it.
The guard at the bolted door, a tiger-faced, panther-pelt-clad bronze giant, slipped back the “squint’s” shutter and looked through it, then unbolted and swung open the door.
Two lusty soldiers carried in and set down a rude mountain chair. Two other soldiers guarded it on either side, and in it, tight-lipped, proud-eyed, strapped to it securely, sat the English doctor, Basil Traherne.
Timed to the second, the Raja of Rukh appeared at the opposite door as the chair was borne in. His cloth-of-gold and rose and green satin robes, but shaped like a priest’s, barely showed through the barbaric blaze of the jewels that encrusted them. The autocrat-priest gestured, and the soldier-bearers put down the chair; he motioned again and the four soldiers drew away to the courtyard’s edge.
And victim and tyrant-judge eyed each other silent and grim.