between consultation with a dozen different sets of priests, made up
his mind to drastic action. It dawned on his exasperated mind that every
single priest, including Jinendra's obese incumbent, was trying to take
advantage of his predicament in order to feather a priestly nest or forward
plans diametrically opposed to his own. (Not that recognition of priestly
deception made him less superstitious, or any less dependent on the
priest; if that were the way discovery worked, all priests would have
vanished long ago. It simply made him furious, like a tiger in a net,
and spurred him to wreak damage in which the priests might have no hand.)

Whisky, drugs, reflection and the hints of twenty dancing girls convinced
him that Jinendra's priest especially was playing a double game; for
what was there in the fat man's mental ingredients that should anchor
his loyalty to an ill-tempered prince, in case a princess of wit and youth
and brilliant beauty should stake her cunning in the game? Why was
not Yasmini already ten times dead of poison? Nothing but the cunning
inspired by partnership with priests, and alertness born of secret knowledge,
could have given her the intelligence to order her maids to boil a present
of twenty pairs of French silk stockings--nor the malice to hang them
afterward with her own hands on a line across her palace roof in full
view of Gungadhura's window!

Hatred of Yasmini was an obsession of his in any case. He had loathed
her mother, who dared try to wear down the rule that women must be
veiled. Even his own dancing girls were heavily veiled in public, and
all his relations with women of any sort took place behind impenetrable
screens. He was a stickler for that sort of thing and, like others of his
kidney, rather proud of the rumors that no curtains could confine. So
he loathed and despised Yasmini even more than he had detested
her mother, because she coupled to her mother's Western notions