most wonderful eyes I shall ever behold.

They seemed to pierce me through and through, and to search my very
soul, as I lay there and gazed back into them as a fascinated bird
gazes back into the eyes of the striking snake.

Power infinite there was in those commanding orbs, wisdom and knowledge
surpassing that of mere mankind infinite good or infinite evil I know
not which!

I shrank in mortal terror at their merciless scrutiny, but I could
neither close my eyes nor tear them away, until a hand was passed
across my brow, and the spell was broken.

Now a knife cut my bonds, and I was raised by a strong arm to a sitting
posture.

How is it possible to describe the horror of the appalling scene that
met my shrinking eyes, as for the first time since I had been a
prisoner I was able to look upon my surroundings.

The blood-red sun was setting in a stormy sky, from which in the
distance the lightning still flickered, close beside me stood the tall
form of the priestess, and below, on the lower tiers of the pyramid,
were grouped about twenty men priests I judged them to be all robed in
white garments, all white men, of fierce and sinister aspect.

But it was not upon these that my eyes rested, but upon the grim and
awful holocaust that stretched in all directions below and beyond.

For the pyramid stood as an island in a sea of dead men: from its base,
to the mighty walls that encircled the vast floor of the crater, it
stretched in an unbroken sheet unbroken, that is, except for the myriad
drowned bodies from which the rapidly receding flood was fast draining
away.

The glare from the crimson sunset turned it into a sea of blood, and
each moment the forms of the drowned multitude showed more and more
distinctly; clasping and clinging to each other in the awful
contortions of death, as they had struggled with each other in their
frantic fight against that awful cataclysm; heap upon heap, line after
line, thousands upon thousands of them a multitude a whole nation
overwhelmed and destroyed.

Not white men such as the priests, who alone had been saved upon the
pyramid, but brown men of Inyati's type, their bodies nude except for a
loincloth.

Stunned and dismayed at the fearful sight, I sat inert upon the altar,
and gazed upon the mighty hecatomb in utter forgetfulness of my own
awful position, till the priestess, who had awakened me, and who also
had stood in silent contemplation, turned and once more fixed her