In the coming days, a Sri Lankan woman is to be led to an outdoor pit in Saudi Arabia. Her arms and hands will be tightly bound, her body buried up to her breasts. Saudi men will then surround her and begin to hurl rocks at her head to kill her slowly.

A married housemaid, she was convicted of adultery, while the man, a bachelor, also a vulnerable Sri Lankan migrant worker, was given 100 lashes, as prescribed by Islamic law.

It is a measure of how violent Saudi Arabia’s capital punishment laws are that beheadings can at times seem compassionate. Decapitation, after all, is nothing compared to lapidation. Beheading is quick; stoning, slow. It’s death by torture.

“It doesn’t matter to me: two, four, ten—as long as I’m doing God’s will, it doesn’t matter how many people I execute,” Muhammad Saad al-Beshi, Saudi Arabia’s leading public executioner, said about beheadings in a 2003 interview with Arab News.

Proud of Beshi’s “godly” work, the Saudi kingdom gave him a special gift: a costly executioner’s sword, which he keeps razor sharp.