Sangster reached the bridge in this frame of mind, and as he crossed it came upon a curious scene. Under the shade of a peepul, whose heart-shaped leaves sheltered him from the sun, sat a devotee staring fixedly into space with his lustreless eyes. Beyond a cloth around his waist he had no clothing, his body was smeared with ashes, and on his ash-covered forehead was drawn a trident in red ochre. His hair, which was of great length, and had been bleached by exposure from black to a russet brown, fell over his thin shoulders in a long matted mane. Sitting there, he was, up to this point, like any one of the hundred wandering mendicants a man might meet in a week's march in India; but here the resemblance ceased, for this man was of those who, in the fulfilment of a vow, was prepared to inflict upon himself and to endure any torture. He sat cross-legged, and what at first Sangster thought was the dry and blasted bough of a stunted _kikur_ tree behind the man he saw, at a second glance, was nothing less than the devotee's arm, which he had held out at a right angle to his body, until it had stiffened immovably in that position, and had shrunk until it seemed that the cracked skin alone covered the bone. How long the arm had been held to reach this condition no one can say. But it was long enough for the nails to have grown through the palm of the clenched hand, over which they curled and drooped like tendrils. The ascetic's gourd lay before him, into which some pious passer-by had dropped a handful of parched rice, and behind him gambolled a grey monkey, an entellus or _lungoor_, who gibbered and mowed at Sangster as he rode up, but made no attempt to retreat--evidently he was tame, and used to people.