"Please do! It may be a snake-charmer as you say.

He moves like a reptile himself.
And I--abhor snakes." But Dacre stood his ground.

He felt none of her shrinking horror of the bowed, misshapen creature approaching them.

In fact he was only curious to see how far a Kashmiri beggar's audacity would carry him.
Within half a dozen paces of them, in the full moonlight, the shambling figure halted and salaamed with clawlike hands extended.

His deformity bent him almost double, but he was so muffled in rags that it was difficult to discern any tangible human shape at all.