I thought about this the remainder of the afternoon, asking myself how a person might use a man’s honesty against him. Offhand, I couldn’t come up with anything terribly likely, but I had no doubt that, if it were possible, the maharaja of Khanpur would be the man to do it.

Well before dusk we came to the village the farmer had described to us, a small but prosperous collection of walls and trees, fields stretching out in all directions. I waited with the donkey and cart, surrounded by the excited twitter of the village children, while Holmes came to an agreement with the headman. We set up camp beneath the assigned tree, then hobbled the donkey and gave it food.

Dusk settled in; the men came in from their labours; the odours of dung fire and spices rose up in the soft air. I missed Bindra, more than I would have thought, and hoped the urchin had found safe haven on the other side of the border—and then I caught myself and chuckled aloud. That boy would survive in a pit of angry cobras.

The sky shed the sun’s light, giving way to half a moon, and Holmes and I readied ourselves for the evening performance.

It was a dramatic setting for a human sacrifice, give my murderer credit. He had drawn together the entire populace, crones to infants, in a dusty space between buildings that in England would be the village green, and all were agog at the sight. A circle of freshly lit torches cracked and flared in the slight evening breeze, their dashing light rendering the mud houses in stark contrast of pale wall and blackest shadow. The bowl of the sky I was forced to gaze up at was moonless, the stars—far, far from the electrical intrusions of civilisation—pinpricks in the velvet expanse. The evening air was rich with odours—the oily reek of the rag torches in counterpoint to the dusky cow-dung cook-fires and the curry and garlic that permeated the audience, along with the not unpleasant smell of unsoaped bodies and the savour of dust which had been dampened for the show.

I lay, bound with chains, on what could only be called an altar, waist-height to the man who held the gleaming knife. My sacrifice was to be the climax of the evening’s events, and he had worked the crowd into a near frenzy, playing on their rustic gullibility as on a fine instrument. It had been a long night, but it seemed that things were drawing to a finish.