air became foetid with a strange, pungent,
nauseous odour. There were lateral clefts branching off the main
gallery, but of no depth, and to these he had given but small notice.
Now, however, something occurred of so appalling a nature that he stood
as one turned to stone.

There shot out from one of these lateral recesses two enormous
tentacles--black, wavy as serpents, covered with hair, armed at the
extremity with a strong double claw. They reached forth noiselessly to
within a couple of yards of where he stood, then two more followed with
a quick, wavy jerk. And now behind these, a head, as large as that of a
man, black, hairy, bearing a strange resemblance to the most awful and
cruel human face ever stamped with the devil's image--whose dull, goggle
eyes, fixed on the appalled ones of its discoverer, seemed to glow and
burn with a truly diabolical glare.

Laurence stood--staring into the countenance of this awful thing--his
blood curdled to ice within him, his hair literally standing up. Was it
the Fiend himself who had taken such unknown and fearful shape to appear
before him here in the gloom of this foul and loathsome cavern? Then, as
his eyes grew more and more used to the dim shades, he made out a huge
body crouched back in the recess, half hidden by a quivering mass of
black, hairy tentacles.

For a few moments thus he stood--then with a cry of horror he threw out
his hand as though instinctively to ward off an attack. The four
tentacles already protruded were quickly withdrawn, and the fearful
creature, whatever it was, seemed to shrink back into the cranny. One
last look upon the hairy heap of moving, writhing horror--upon those
dreadful demon eyes, and this man, who had faced death again and again
without shrinking, now felt it all he could do to resist an impulse to
turn and flee like a hunted hare. He did, however, resist it--yet it was
with flesh shuddering and knees trembling beneath him that he withdrew,
step by step, backwards, until he stood once more in the full light of
day.

CHAPTER XXVII.

THE HORROR.

Vampire--insect--devil--what _was_ the thing? From the length and
thickness of those frightful tentacle-like legs, stretching forth from
the cranny--Laurence--who had not halted until he had gained the ridge
dividing the hollow--estimated that the creature when spread out must be
eight or ten feet in diameter.

He looked back. It had not followed him from the cave. Why had it not?