“Go, you!” he ordered. “The goddess likes you not. Even if you take the girl, I can call her back or kill her by touching her flesh with a single scale from the Naga in the chest.”
He walked with me to the door. At the portal we stood for a space, silent.
The tiled entrance was flooded with moonlight. In the middle of it a cobra lay, stretched out, seemingly asleep—a small cobra, deadly none the less.
“You see,” the gross priest said, pointing to the deadly serpent there. “Nagy’s spirit watches you here, too. But the girl she did not harm.”
Filled with some spirit of Western bravado I could not stifle, I stepped close to the cobra and stamped on its head.
“That for all scaly serpents!” I jeered at him. I stood on the cobra’s head while it lashed out its life.
The fat yellow priest watched me, and I could see hatred and horror struggle for mastery on his face.
Coming close to me he began to talk in long, rolling sentences, of which I here and there caught a word. But I caught the sense of what he was saying.
Oh, yes—the fat priest. It was there, in front of the temple, that he put on me, in Sanskrit, the Curse of Siva, ending:
“With gurgling drops of blood, that plenteous stream
From throats quickly cut by us—”