gs, but statues. I determined that I
would count fifty slowly, and was sure that the objects were not alive if
during that time I could detect no sign of motion.

How thankful was I when I came to the end of my fifty and there had been
no movement!

I counted a second time--but again all was still.

I then advanced timidly forward, and in another moment I saw that my
surmise was correct. I had come upon a sort of Stonehenge of rude and
barbaric figures, seated as Chowbok had sat when I questioned him in the
wool-shed, and with the same superhumanly malevolent expression upon
their faces. They had been all seated, but two had fallen. They were
barbarous--neither Egyptian, nor Assyrian, nor Japanese--different from
any of these, and yet akin to all. They were six or seven times larger
than life, of great antiquity, worn and lichen grown. They were ten in
number. There was snow upon their heads and wherever snow could lodge.
Each statue had been built of four or five enormous blocks, but how these
had been raised and put together is known to those alone who raised them.
Each was terrible after a different kind. One was raging furiously, as
in pain and great despair; another was lean and cadaverous with famine;
another cruel and idiotic, but with the silliest simper that can be
conceived--this one had fallen, and looked exquisitely ludicrous in his
fall--the mouths of all were more or less open, and as I looked at them
from behind, I saw that their heads had been hollowed.

I was sick and shivering with cold. Solitude had unmanned me already,
and I was utterly unfit to have come upon such an assembly of fiends in
such a dreadful wilderness and without preparation. I would have given
everything I had in the world to have been back at my master's station;
but that was not to be thought of: my head was failing, and I felt sure
that I could never get back alive.

Then came a gust of howling wind, accompanied with a moan from one of the
statues above me. I clasped my hands in fear. I felt like a rat caught
in a trap, as though I would have turned and bitten at whatever thing was
nearest me. The wildness of the wind increased, the moans grew shriller,
coming from several statues, and swelling into a chorus. I almost
immediately knew what it was, but the sound was so unearthly that this
was but little consolation. The inhuman beings into whose hearts the
Evil One had put it to conceive these statues, had made th