te sand and bones
diamonds lay thick as pebbles on a beach.

Across this floor ran the path now a raised causeway some feet above
the level of the sand and about five hundred yards from where I stood
the fire burnt in front of a building in the shape of a pyramid. Still
no sign of life could I see and I made my way towards it. As I did so
the sun's rays broke over the edge of the cliff above, and fell full
upon the top of the pyramid, and another flame seemed to shoot from it,
and remained there flashing brilliantly.

I was close to the fire now, and saw that it was no hand-fed flame, but
a column that rose from an orifice in the rock, and burnt fiercely with
a low roaring noise, and a strong mephitic odor. Probably it was some
kind of natural gas; at any rate there was no one near it and nothing
to fear from it. The pyramid behind it was made of ivory, thousands of
tons of magnificent tusks going to make up its forty feet of height,
and up it, in steps, ran the path, for the pyramid was the culmination
of this road of dead. I climbed up and reached the apex, a platform
some twenty feet square, above which something still towered, crowned
by a flashing light.

Its brilliance dazzled me, and it was only by shading my eyes with my
palm that I could discern what the object was that bore it.

Then, directly beneath the bright glare I gradually made out a gigantic
face, glaring down upon me, a face carved with such wondrous art that,
monstrous as it was, it appeared to live, and to be endowed with such
awful malevolence that for a moment I shrank back in dismay. It was the
face of a woman, but the body that it crowned was that of a snake, and
was coiled round an ivory pillar rising from the platform. Marvelously
fashioned of bronze, the face, with bared serpent fangs, bent down as
though to strike: and set in a strangely fashioned diadem above the
brows was a gigantic diamond, as large as a man's head, and of such
blinding luster that it was impossible to look closely at it as well
try to gaze full at the midday sun.

It was an idol, undoubtedly; a Moloch waiting for a sacrifice; and as
my fascinated eyes at length left the face of terror, and passed down
the coiled body and ivory pillar, I saw that the sacrifice was already
there. For at the base lay a dead man, and his blood was scarcely dry
upon the altar.

He was fast bound with hide thongs to stanchions cut in the rock a man
almost as white as myself, with long,