as of
escaping steam. The tribes of the ape-men waited in silent rapture.
Kirby saw Naida still looking down, and felt Ivana crouch against him,
fainting. He held his rifle tighter, and continued to stare.

Something red, like two small flames, licked up above the edge of the
pit. Then Kirby gasped and all but went limp. Up and out into the
moonlight slid a glistening white lump that moved from side to side and
licked at the night with flickering black and red tipped forked tongue.

The glistening white lump was the head of Quetzalcoatl, buried God of
the People of the Temple. It was wider and bigger than an elephant's,
and the round snake body could not have been encircled by a man's two
arms. Kirby guessed at the probable length of the Serpent in terms of
hundreds of feet.

* * * * *

Sick, numb, he glanced at Naida, who was still staring silently, and
hitched his rifle half up to his shoulder. But he did not look down the
sights yet. Although it was time, and more than time, that he fired, he
would not do it until the last possible second, when nothing else
remained.

Slowly from the hole slid a fifteen or twenty-foot column of the body,
and Quetzalcoatl, thus reared, looked about him with a pair of eyes
immense and not like snake's eyes, but heavily lidded and lashed; eyes
that stared in a wise, evil way; eyes glittering and round and black as
ink. After a time the mouth opened in a silent snarl, showing great
white fangs and recurved simitars of teeth. The head was snow white,
leperous in its scabby, scaly roughness, with here and there a patch of
what looked like greenish fungus. From the rounded body trailed a short,
unnatural, sickening growth of--feathers. Old and evil and very wise the
Feathered Serpent seemed as his forked tongue flickered in and out and
he stared at the ape horde, who stared back silently.

He seemed in no hurry to devote his attention to the cage set forth for
his delectation. The black eyes rolled beneath their lashes, staring now
at the Duca in his robes, and again at the huddled ape-people. But after
ghastly seconds, Quetzalcoatl at last had seen enough.

Again the moonlight glinted against simitar teeth as the great, white,
puffy mouth yawned in its silent snarl. Quetzalcoatl reared his head a
little higher, slid further from his hole, and then looked up at the
dangling cage of barked withes.

In Kirby's mind stirred cloudily a remembrance of mom