wo the girl drew a knife from her girdle, and,
leaning over Tarzan, cut the bonds from his legs. Then, as the men
stopped their dance, and approached, she motioned to him to rise.
Placing the rope that had been about his legs around his neck, she led
him across the courtyard, the men following in twos.

Through winding corridors she led, farther and farther into the remoter
precincts of the temple, until they came to a great chamber in the
center of which stood an altar. Then it was that Tarzan translated the
strange ceremony that had preceded his introduction into this holy of
holies.

He had fallen into the hands of descendants of the ancient sun
worshippers. His seeming rescue by a votaress of the high priestess of
the sun had been but a part of the mimicry of their heathen
ceremony--the sun looking down upon him through the opening at the top
of the court had claimed him as his own, and the priestess had come
from the inner temple to save him from the polluting hands of
worldlings--to save him as a human offering to their flaming deity.

And had he needed further assurance as to the correctness of his theory
he had only to cast his eyes upon the brownish-red stains that caked
the stone altar and covered the floor in its immediate vicinity, or to
the human skulls which grinned from countless niches in the towering
walls.

The priestess led the victim to the altar steps. Again the galleries
above filled with watchers, while from an arched doorway at the east
end of the chamber a procession of females filed slowly into the room.
They wore, like the men, only skins of wild animals caught about their
waists with rawhide belts or chains of gold; but the black masses of
their hair were incrusted with golden headgear composed of many
circular and oval pieces of gold ingeniously held together to form a
metal cap from which depended at each side of the head, long strings of
oval pieces falling to the waist.

The females were more symmetrically proportioned than the males, their
features were much more perfect, the shapes of their heads and their
large, soft, black eyes denoting far greater intelligence and humanity
than was possessed by their lords and masters.

Each priestess bore two golden cups, and as they formed in line along
one side of the altar the men formed opposite them, advancing and
taking each a cup from the female opposite. Then the chant began once
more, and presently from a dark passageway beyond