though--punctuating--the clamour, a
deep-toned, almost abysmal, booming sound--thunderously bass and
reverberant.

Abruptly the harpings ceased; the moon fires shuddered, fell, and
began to sweep back into the crystal globes; Yolara's swaying form
grew rigid, every atom of it listening. She threw aside the veiling
cloud of hair, and in the gleam of the last retreating spirals her
face glared out like some old Greek mask of tragedy.

The sweet lips that even at their sweetest could never lose their
delicate cruelty, had no sweetness now. They were drawn into a
square--inhuman as that of the Medusa; in her eyes were the fires of
the pit, and her hair seemed to writhe like the serpent locks of that
Gorgon whose mouth she had borrowed; all her beauty was transformed
into a nameless thing--hideous, inhuman, blasting! If this was the
true soul of Yolara springing to her face, then, I thought, God help
us in very deed!

I wrested my gaze away to O'Keefe. All drunkenness gone, himself
again, he was staring down at her, and in his eyes were loathing and
horror unutterable. So they stood--and the light fled.

Only for a moment did the darkness hold. With lightning swiftness the
blackness that was the chamber's other wall vanished. Through a portal
open between grey screens, the silver sparkling radiance poured.

And through the portal marched, two by two, incredible, nightmare
figures--frog-men, giants, taller by nearly a yard than even tall
O'Keefe! Their enormous saucer eyes were irised by wide bands of
green-flecked red, in which the phosphorescence flickered. Their long
muzzles, lips half-open in monstrous grin, held rows of glistening,
slender, lancet sharp fangs. Over the glaring eyes arose a horny
helmet, a carapace of black and orange scales, studded with foot-long
lance-headed horns.

They lined themselves like soldiers on each side of the wide table
aisle, and now I could see that their horny armour covered shoulders
and backs, ran across the chest in a knobbed cuirass, and at wrists
and heels jutted out into curved, murderous spurs. The webbed hands
and feet ended in yellow, spade-shaped claws.

They carried spears, ten feet, at least, in length, the heads of which
were pointed cones, glistening with that same covering, from whose
touch of swift decay I had so narrowly saved Rador.

They were grotesque, yes--more grotesque than anything I had ever seen
or dreamed, and they were--terrible!

And then, quiet