Power of Karma

Author(s): Alexander Cannon
Publisher: Rider and Co

Page 60

60
THE POWER OF KARMA made two fires, one small and one large. In the smaller she burnt some substance that gave off a most offensive odour, after which she sprinkled the embers with some kind of incense.
When the fire was little more than a heap of ashes, she poured on to it some yellowy-grey fluid from a small goat-skin flask; and she next commenced to knead the moist ashes into a kind of dough. All the time she kept muttering and crooning to herself.
Presently she came over and knelt beside my bed, pricked a vein in my left wrist with the point of a long, thin dagger, and mixed some of my blood in the “dough”. Going back to the fires, she continued to croon and knead the paste.
Her incantations—for such I presume they were now became more frenzied and quite incoherent.
In the end she flung the "dough” into the larger fire. She then took a small pitcher of water and walked round and round the fire, slowly pouring the water on to the embers. When the fire was completely extinguished, she began a new series of incantations over the pitcher, which she suddenly raised above her head and hurled-with amazing strength for so old a woman-against a rock outside the tent.
Then, all of a sudden, she quieted down and collapsed, as though in the last stages of fatigue.
In less than one hour I was perfectly well again, and sitting at the camp fire eating supper.
Stranger still, doctors tell me that there is now.no