“So he's holy, is he?”
“Very, very holy, sahib!”
Again the fakir chuckled, and again Brown held his breath and pushed the lantern closer to him.
“I believe the brute understands the Queen's English!”
“He understanding all things, sahib! He knowing all things what will happen! Mind, sahib! He may curse you!”
But Brown appeared indifferent to the danger that he ran. To the fakir's unconcealed discomfort, he proceeded to examine him minutely, going over him with the aid of the lantern inch by inch, from the toe-nails upward.
“Well,” he commented aloud, “if the army's got an opposite, here's it! I'd give a month's pay for the privilege of washing this brute, just as a beginning!”
The man's toe-nails—for he really was a man!—were at least two inches long. They were twisted spirally, and some of them were curled back on themselves into disgusting-looking knots. What walking he had ever done had been on his heels. His feet were bent upward, and fixed upward, by a deliberately cultivated cramp.
His legs, twisted one above the other in a squatting attitude, were lean and hairy, and covered with open sores which were kept open by the swarm of insects that infested him. His loin-cloth was rotting from him. His emaciated body—powdered and smeared with ashes and dust and worse—was perched bolt-up-right on a flat earth dais that had once on a time been the throne of a crossroads idol. One arm, his right one, hung by his side in an almost normal attitude, and his right fingers moved incessantly like a man's who is kneading clay. But his other arm was rigid—straight up in the air above his head; set, fixed, cramped, paralyzed in that position, with the fist clenched. And through the back of the closed fist the fakir's nails were growing.
But, worse than the horror of the arm was the creature's face, with the evidence of torture on it, and fiendish delight in torture for the torture's sake. His eyes were his only organs that really lived still, and they expressed the steely hate and cruelty, the mad fanaticism, the greedy self-love—self-immolating for the sake of self—that is the thoroughgoing fakir's stock in trade. And his lips were like the graven lips of a Hindu temple god, self-satisfied, self-worshiping, contemptuous and cruel. He chuckled again, as Brown finished his inspection.