Between the outer walls and the shrine was a space about a hundred feet square, shaded by a number of walnut trees. Hither the Sansi betook himself, and placing his earthen bowl on the ground, sat down behind it, staring stolidly before him as if trying to lose himself in that abstraction by which the devotee attains to nirvana. Some of the pilgrims piously dropped food into the vessel; but Beeroo took no heed of this, his eyes were fixed on vacancy, and his mind was revolving many things. So hour after hour passed, and Beeroo still sat motionless as a stone. Prem Sagar approached him once and spoke; but the holy man made no answer, judging it better to pretend to be under a vow of silence, than to betray anything by converse with the Brahmin. The high priest turned away smiling to himself. "Blue-throated Krishna," he murmured, "but the Sansi plays his part well! I had been deceived myself, had I not been warned by the--god," and he walked to the temple gates, and gazed down into the valley beneath him. At last the strain of the position he had assumed began to tell upon Beeroo. Tough as he was, he had not had practice in those incredible feats of patient endurance to which the regular _Bairajis_, or holy men, have accustomed themselves. Beeroo would have followed the track of a wounded stag like a jackal for three days; he would lifted a cow at Jagadri at nightfall, and by morning been in the Mohun Pass; he would have danced his tame bear at Umritsur at noontide, and when the moon rose would have been resting at the Taksali Gate of Lahore; but to sit without motion for hour after hour, to sit until his limbs seemed paralyzed and his blood dead--this was unbearable. At all hazards this must be ended; and he suddenly rose, and began to move up and down, gesticulating wildly. The people who looked on thought he was mad, and therefore more holy than ever. They little knew of the method in the Sansi's madness, and that he was making the frozen blood circulate once again in his cramped limbs. When he had done this he came back, ate a little, and coiling himself up in the dust went to sleep, his sack under his head.