in leaps of three at a time.

But long before he reached the top he was ascending one by one, with
straining limbs and laboring breath. Red slaughter down below, a very
inferno of sound; above, that shadowy stairway, still extending almost
to the heavens. Step after step, flight beyond flight!

Jim's lungs were bursting, and his heart hammering as if it would
break his chest. One flight more! One more! Another! Suddenly he
realized that his task was ended. In place of the stairs stood a vast
hall, and beyond that another hall, dim in the faint light that
filtered through the glass above.

Jim thought he remembered where he was. Beyond that next hall there
should be the tongue of flooring, crossing the amphitheatre and
joining the platform of the idols. But he stopped suddenly as he
emerged, not upon the tongue, but upon still another stairway.

He had gone astray, and out of his bursting lungs a cry of rage and
despair went up. For a moment he stood still. What use to proceed
further?

And then, amazingly, there came what might have been a sign from
heaven. Down through a small, square opening overhead, no larger than
a ventilator, it came ... a glimmer of violet flame!

And Jim hurled himself like a madman against the stairs, and
surmounted them with two bounds. There were no more. Instead, Jim
found himself looking down into the amphitheatre.

The thick walls had cut off all sound from his ears, save a confused
murmur, but now a hideous uproar assailed them. The whole floor of the
amphitheatre was a mass of moving shadows, of slayers and slain.

The Drilgoes had broken in and trapped the multitudes that had taken
refuge there. Their fearful stone-tipped spears thrust in and out, to
the accompaniment of their savage howls and the screams of the dying.

* * * * *

Never has such a shadow-play been seen, perhaps, as that below, where
death stalked in dense darkness, and the slayer did not even see his
victim. Only the thrust of spears, the soft, yielding flesh that they
encountered, the scream, the wrench of stone from tissue, and the
blended howl of triumph and scream of despair.

Yet only for a moment did Jim turn his eyes upon that sight. For he
knew where he was now. He had emerged upon the other side of the
amphitheatre, upon the platform where he had seen the priests and
dignitaries gathered when he was led forward to be sacrificed.

There, in the rear, were the hideous