tion. Nobody ever
yet improved a situation of peril by starving himself. Yet as he wended
his way up the long chasm wherein he had first awakened to life, it was
with a feeling of shuddering repulsion. The place bore such a close
resemblance now to that other cave; yet here, at any rate, he knew there
was nothing.

He opened the corn baskets and the calabash of _amasi_, and made a
fairly good meal. Then, by the glooming shades of the overhanging rock,
he judged that daylight was waning. Out into the open once more--the
open air might render such a life-and-death struggle with the monster a
trifle less horrible than here, shut in by these tomb-like rock walls.

The gray of the brief twilight was upon the faces of the surrounding
cliffs, which soon faded into misty gloom. Only the stars, leaping into
the misty gloom--only the stars, leaping forth into the inky sky, shed
an indistinct light into this vault of horror and of death. He was shut
in here--and shut in with this awful thing which should find him out
during the hours of darkness. And, marvellous to tell, a sudden
drowsiness came upon him--and whether the effects of the drug still
lingered about him, or was it the reaction from an overstrained mind? he
actually slept--slept hard and dreamlessly.

Suddenly he awoke--awoke with the weight of an indefinable terror upon
him. A broad moon in its third quarter was sailing aloft in the heavens,
flooding the hollow with its ghostly light. Instinctively he sprang to
his feet. As he did so there came upon him a resistless and shuddering
fear akin to that which had paralyzed him in the cave. What was it? The
magnetic proximity of the awful thing stealthily stalking him? No. The
reason now lay clear.

In the moonlight he could make out, shadowy and indistinct, the corpse
he had found during the afternoon. But, as he gazed, a change seemed to
have come over it. It had increased in size--had more than doubled its
bulk. Heavens! the dark mass began to move--to heave--and then he
thought the very acme of horror was reached. Not one body was there, but
two. Spread out over the human body was that of the monster. Now he
could make out almost every detail of its hideous shape, the convulsive
working of the frightful tentacles as it devoured its lifeless prey. He
could stand it no longer. His brain was bursting; he must do something.
Raising his voice he shouted--shouted as assuredly he had never shouted
in his life. There was a m