Quicksands

Perhaps prescience brought to her mind's eye a picture; she saw her
father, and Bruce, and Winnie, and her sweetheart, and they seemed to
be toasting her from the end of a long table, under the blue California
sky. This vision renewed her strength. She proceeded onward.

She must have followed the river at least a mile when she espied a raft
moored to a clump of trees. Here she saw a way of saving her weary
limbs many a rugged mile. She forded the stream, freed the raft, and
poled out into the middle of the stream.

It happened that the Mohammedan hunters who owned the raft were at this
moment swinging along toward the temple. On the shoulders of two
rested a pole from which dangled the lifeless body of a newly killed
leopard. They were bringing it in as a gift to the head man of the
village, who was a thoroughgoing Mohammedan, and who held in contempt
Hinduism and all its amazing ramifications.

The white priestess was indeed a puzzle; for, while the handful of
Mohammedans in the village were fanatical in their belief in the true
prophet and his Koran, and put little faith in miracles and still less
in holy men who performed them, the advent of the white priestess
deeply mystified them. There was no getting around this: she was
there; with their own eyes they saw her. There might be something in
Hinduism after all.

When the hunters arrived at the portico of the temple they found two
greatly terrified holy men, shrilling their "Ai! Ai!" in lamentation
and beating their foreheads against the earth.