Her little feet made patterns in the dust as she turned slightly, this child of ten, until her snake-like arms seemed stretched in invitation to the four pairs of burning eyes fixed upon the virgin beauty of the little body.
Who noticed in all that crowd when four pairs of hands shot up and seized her about the knees, lifting her gently down, or who, in the tumult, heard the cry smothered in the muffling cloth of a white coat in a distant shadowed corner.
And one dead body more or less in the morning, what does it signify or matter in a place which reeks of blood?
And just as this happened, and just as a dishevelled pock-marked woman stole swiftly up the temple steps, every face turned in one direction, and wave after wave of indescribable excitement swept the multitude.
And yet there was nothing, no sound, no sight to account for it; only the high priest, tall and terrible, with the face of a Roman emperor or a Jesuit, came from behind the altar and stood at the open door, looking first at the throngs and then at a mass of black cloud which, as is sometimes the way in India, had suddenly spread itself towards the east, and was slowly climbing the heavens.
"The gods approve The depth, and not the tumult of the soul."--_Wordsworth_.
"What a frightful row the natives are making in the city," was the fractious comment of one heat-distracted tourist to another through the mosquito netting which divided the two beds.
"Disgraceful!" peevishly assented the other as she turned restlessly upon the thin, hot mattress, and heaved the one thin sheet to the foot of the hot bed.
A sharper note had topped the heavy murmur which, like the rumble of a distant sea, had beaten the air without ceasing throughout the night.
A film operator would have said that a crowd had woken up; a London policeman, that a crowd was turning nasty, as the sharp note went crescendo right along, until it took the definite tone of thousands of human voices upraised in unrest of some kind.
This way and that surged the multitude, bowing unconsciously before the gusts of passion which swept from every quarter.
The fret of the thousands of feet upon the paving sounded a silky accompaniment to the strange throaty murmur of fast rising religious hysteria; sharp, uncontrollable cries stood out like steel pencilling against the velvet monotony of the throbbing drums; the never ceasing tinkle of rings, and clanking of bracelets and holy chains against the blare of the horns sounded as out of place as a child singing in a thunder storm.