Mr. Y - - and the colonel both grew pale under her stare, and Mr. Y - -
made a movement as if about to rise.
Needless to say that such an impression could not last. As soon
as the witch had turned her gleaming eyes to the kneeling crowd,
it vanished as swiftly as it had come. But still all our attention
was fixed on this remarkable creature.
Three hundred years old! Who can tell? Judging by her appearance,
we might as well conjecture her to be a thousand. We beheld a
genuine living mummy, or rather a mummy endowed with motion. She
seemed to have been withering since the creation. Neither time,
nor the ills of life, nor the elements could ever affect this living
statue of death. The all-destroying hand of time had touched her
and stopped short. Time could do no more, and so had left her.
And with all this, not a single grey hair. Her long black locks
shone with a greenish sheen, and fell in heavy masses down to her knees.
To my great shame, I must confess that a disgusting reminiscence
flashed into my memory. I thought about the hair and the nails of
corpses growing in the graves, and tried to examine the nails of
the old woman.
Meanwhile, she stood motionless as if suddenly transformed into
an ugly idol. In one hand she held a dish with a piece of burning
camphor, in the other a handful of rice, and she never removed her
burning eyes from the crowd. The pale yellow flame of the camphor
flickered in the wind, and lit up her deathlike head, almost
touching her chin; but she paid no heed to it. Her neck, as
wrinkled as a mushroom, as thin as a stick, was surrounded by
three rows of golden medallions. Her head was adorned with a
golden snake. Her grotesque, hardly human body was covered by a
piece of saffron-yellow muslin.
The demoniac little girls raised their heads from be-neath the
leaves, and set up a prolonged animal-like howl. Their example
was followed by the old man, who lay exhausted by his frantic dance.
The witch tossed her head convulsively, and began her invocations,
rising on tiptoe, as if moved by some external force.
"The goddess, one of the seven sisters, begins to take possession
of her," whispered Sham Rao, not even thinking of wiping away the
big drops of sweat that streamed from his brow. "Look, look at her!"
This advice was quite superfluous. We were looking at her, and
at nothing else.
At first, the movements of the witch were slow, unequal, somewhat
convulsive; then, gradually, they became less angular; at last,
as if catching the cadence of the drums, leaning all her long body
forward, and writhing like an eel, she rushed round and round the
blazing bonfire. A dry leaf caught in a hurricane could not fly
swifter.
