Accounts of such affairs, as found in contemporary records, might be multiplied indefinitely. Colonel Sleeman’s report of the Thug depredations for a year or two when they were most virulent--1836-37--fills one large volume. On a map which he made of a portion of the kingdom of Oude, showing a territory one hundred miles wide from north to south, and one hundred and seventy miles from east to west, are marked an endless number of spots between Lucknow, Cawnpore, Manickpur, Pertabgurh and Fyzabad, all of them indicating _beles_ or scenes of murders perpetrated. These places were pointed out by captured Thugs and “approvers” who had been actively present and taken part in the murders. There were some 274 _beles_ in all, or one for about every five miles; the fact was proved by the continual disinterment of skulls and skeletons of the often nameless victims. Each recorded great atrocities and many wholesale murders. The number of deaths for which each Thug miscreant was personally responsible seems incredible. One man, Buhran by name, killed 931 victims in forty years of active Thuggee, and another, Futteh Khan, killed 508 persons in twenty years, making an average of two monthly for each assassin. When the British government was roused to the determination to suppress Thuggee, nearly every village was tainted with the system and no district was without its resident gangs of Thugs, or free from their depredations. The campaign once undertaken was prosecuted with extraordinary vigour, and the pursuit organised was so keen that very rapid progress was made in putting down this terrible scourge. Whole gangs were arrested, one after the other; the ringleaders were quickly tried and executed, or bought their lives at the price of informing against and contributing to the capture of their fellows. Difficulties often arose in securing conviction. Fear kept witnesses from testifying; bankers were reluctant to acknowledge their losses; relations were loth to identify corpses; and the revelations made by the approvers could not always be corroborated. But the work of extermination never slackened, and a few short years sufficed to put down the seemingly hydra-headed evil. It is possible that some more distant and inaccessible regions escaped, such as the Concan or Malabar coast, to which the gangs never penetrated; and gangs were not permanently located in such districts as Khandeish and Rohilcund; but they were visited by robbers from other neighbourhoods, for a gang generally avoided a district occupied by their own families and friends. And the tide of murder swept unsparingly year after year over the whole face of India from the Himalayan mountains in the north, to the east, west and south as far as the most remote limits of Madras. CHAPTER III CEREMONIES OF THUGGEE