glowing eyes upon me.

"Look well, O stranger, look well upon these thy dead," she said in a
clear, ringing voice; "upon these who would have sacrificed thee yet
who, dying, called upon thee, their bound sacrifice, to save them!
'Save us, Mighty One!' they supplicated, 'thou who art mightier than
the Snake save us!' . . . Poor fools they are dead all, all, are dead.
. . . And thou, thou helpless 'Mighty One'" she mocked, "art thou
content with this thy vengeance, or must we poor servants of the Snake
also die to appease thy wrath?"

The look and tone of fierce mockery brought back to me all the fear of
hideous torture I had felt before, and I begged that they should
mercifully kill me and have done.

"Nay," she replied, "fear not that shall not be I have told thee thy
life is safe. Well do I know that thou art but a man, and no god, such
as these poor fools thought thee at the last but the Snake hath spared
thee, and thy life is sacred. Free shalt thou go, free and with an
abundance of the bright stones these dead people deemed sacred and the
lust of which brought thee, O stranger, unasked and unwelcome to this
our land. Life shall be thine and thou shalt be guided back to the land
from whence thou earnest; but thou shalt eat first of the fruit of
forgetfulness, and never shalt thou find again the path by which thou
earnest hither, or that other by which thou shalt return."

The solemn tone and promise allayed my fears somewhat; at least my life
was to be spared; but this talk of not finding the path again did it
mean that they would blind me?

Even as the thought entered my mind the mysterious being who held me in
her power answered it as though I had spoken it aloud.

"Fear not, I say again," said she, "neither thine eyes, nor a hair of
thy head shall be injured. Rather do I grant thee a precious boon, such
as many crave for in vain the boon of forgetfulness . . . yet not of
all! Stand upon thy feet, O stranger, and look well upon this lake of
the dead, then turn and look upon me these things thou shalt not
forget."

Weak and shaken by my awful experience, I tottered as I tried to stand
upright, and but for her supporting hand I should have fallen. "Aye
thou art weak," said she again, "but that which I will give will bring
back the strength to thy palsied limbs. . . . Look well, I say, and
forget not this!"

Forget! How could I ever forget that awful scene the blood-red water,
the countless heaps of drowne