It was Shaitan, young Bellairs' Khaubuli charger, with his haunches
under him, plunging across the flagstones, through the black-dark
archway, out on the plain beyond--in answer to the long, sharp-roweled
spurs of the Risaldar Mahommed Khan.
X.
Dawn broke and the roofs of old Hanadra became resplendent with the
varied colors of turbans and pugrees and shawls. As though the rising
sun had loosed the spell, a myriad tongues, of women chiefly, rose
in a babel of clamor, and the few men who had been left in. Hanadra
by the night's armed exodus came all together and growled prophetically
in undertones. Now was the day of days, when that part of India,
at least, should cast off the English yoke.
To the temple! The cry went up before the sun was fifteen minutes
high. There are a hundred temples in Hanadra, age-old all of them
and carved on the outside with strange images of heathen gods in high
relief, like molds turned inside out. But there is but one temple
that that cry could mean--Kharvani's; and there could be but one
meaning for the cry.
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