The priests are irate, and the temple crowds with people. Slurring, he proudly declares that he has made the “Mark of the B-beasht” (242).

Fleete runs into the temple and grinds out his cigar on the forehead of Hanuman’s image. The narrator recognizes that this deity is important to the Indian people and “worthy of respect” (242). On their way, they pass a temple to the monkey-god, Hanuman. Strickland and the narrator help Fleete walk home. Fleete drinks heavily, and when the trio leaves in the cold, early morning, he is too drunk to mount his horse. On New Year’s Eve, the two men and the narrator celebrate at the club of their local colonial station. Unlike Strickland, who has a thorough understanding of the Indian people and their culture, Fleete has little knowledge or respect for Indian customs. The narrator assures the reader that both he and his friend Strickland, a policeman and long-time resident of India, and the local doctor Dumoise can corroborate the facts of the story despite Dumoise’s ability to corroborate, his incorrect reading of the facts leads to his misinformed conclusion.įleete, a large “inoffensive man” (241), has come to India to finance some land he inherited from his uncle. This idea helps to inform the remarkable, but true, tale he is about to recount.

The narrator suggests that in India, the Englishman’s god yields power to the “Gods and Devils of Asia” (241). An unnamed first-person narrator opens “The Mark of the Beast” with a “native,” or an East Indian proverb, that rhetorically asks whether one knows which gods are strongest.

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