A black cavernous hole is revealed, into which the girl peers anxiously. For the moment nothing can be descried in the murky gloom, but even as she summons courage to venture within, a hideous affrighting apparition looms out of the darkness before her face. She shrinks back, startled: fear giving place to sheer nightmare horror as a foul and bestial monster crawls slowly forth from the noisome den. The creature is followed by others, which with dreadful deliberateness emerge from the lair their unsuspecting victim has thus incautiously opened. There are some that drag their black and scaly lengths laboriously, like obese lizards, along the pavement of the shrine, others with gross heads and grinning masks that present a dreadful travesty of human beings in their red, ungainly forms, in the horrid leaps and bounds of squat and ugly legs by which they move. The girl has fled in panic to the gates across the fissure in the rocks. She clings to them in an agony of fright. But leaping clumsily in pursuit, the crimson monsters seize her in their filthy paws, and bear her bodily away. She slips from their grasp and darts across the shrine, only to find herself surrounded by her captors’ crawling allies. The latter do not offer to seize her, but they eye her with a devilish intentness, and at every step she takes display a paralysing nimbleness, for all the seeming inertness of their flabby bodies, in intercepting her movements and keeping her surrounded by their watchful visages. In a last paroxysm of fright the girl falls prostrate before the lotus pool. The monsters range themselves around, motionless, but vigilant and intent. But as their victim, bethinking herself of prayer, pours forth a passionate entreaty to the deities of the place, they stir uneasily and presently retire, writhing, a distance of some paces. A brilliant blue light irradiates the pool, the lotus flower that floats within it opens, and slowly there rise into view the god and goddess, tutelary spirits of the shrine. The goddess is enthroned; the god, with reedy pipe in hand, sits with legs and upraised arms bent angularly--a painted Hindu sculpture come to life. Stepping from the lotus, the Blue God raises and supports the amazed and awe-struck girl. Then, as confidence returns, he gently seats her beside the pool, and before the uneasy monsters begins a solemn dance. Dance it must be called, though it is rather a series of postures--postures which, executed in the flesh, vivify for the onlooker all that he has ever seen in Hindu art purporting to represent the human figure. It becomes apparent that there is a beauty in the harmonious adjustment of angles not previously realised, or even, perhaps, suspected. [Illustration]