straight black hair, and clothed
in clean white flowing robes. His face was horribly disfigured, seared
and burnt as though by red-hot irons, and his features quite
indistinguishable. Apparently, then, he had been tortured, before being
stabbed to the heart by the strangely fashioned knife of bronze that
lay beside him.

It is beyond me to describe the terror with which the sight of this
dead and mutilated victim inspired me. I had seen no human being for so
long: dead Inyati's face had been the last that I had gazed upon; then,
after long I had seen the skeleton in the pool the road of skulls and
now at last I gazed upon a human form again, it was again that of the
dead.

All around me was death, death everywhere, and I felt that unless I
escaped, and found human companionship soon, my mind would give way
beneath these horrors.

And I must quit this place of sacrifice at once, for the fiends who had
laid this victim there would probably give me but scant mercy were I
found there.

I examined the body again: it might well have been that of a South
European, so light was the skin; and now I noted that on one wrist was
a copper bracelet exactly similar to the one Inyati had given me, and
which I now wore on my own wrist. I compared them, and found them
identical, and now I noted that the rude attempt at a snake's head into
which their fastenings were fashioned, was undoubtedly an imitation of
the head of the idol above me.

This, then, doubtless was Inyati's land, and this one of the priests he
had spoken of. Mayhap he had killed one of them and taken his bracelet
before he fled for he had spoken of jealousy and of a woman I---

But of the idol, the road, the craters he had said nothing . . . maybe
he knew not himself?

True, he had feared the priests, till the "little gun" had become his
with it he would, doubtless, have faced all the priests living but I,
looking at the dead man and realizing something of the manner of his
death, was in deadly fear . . . my revolver would be but little use
against fiends who served their own priests thus!

I must fly from this place at once if indeed it were not already too
late! But gaze as I could, no sign of life showed anywhere; no sound
broke the silence except the low hissing murmur of the flame that burnt
everlasting incense to the shrine of horror before me.

And so, glancing from side to side in mortal terror, starting at the
sound of my own soft footsteps, and feel