great bolt
and link to the side of that crystalline prison.

Her hair, black as night, was pressed tight to the skull by the pressure
of the crystal, which must have been poured about her in a molten or
liquid state.

As I stood there agaze at the strangeness and wonder of her, a voice at
my shoulder made me whirl in surprise. A soft, silky familiar voice:

"Do you find the dead Goddess so fascinating, stranger from the world of
men?"

It was the girl of the forest, no longer in hunting garb, but dressed in
Turkish trousers, vest and slippers with upturned toes. Jewels glittered
about her waist and neck and arms, her wrists jangled with heavy
bangles, in her ears two great pendants swayed--her eyelids were
darkened and her lips reddened. She was a ravishing houri of the harem,
and I gasped a little at the change.

"Have you put on such clothes for my benefit?" I asked, for I really
thought perhaps she had.

She frowned and stamped her foot in sudden anger.

"I come here to save you from what has happened to your friends, and you
insult me. Don't you want to live? Do you want to become what they are
going to become?" She pointed to the bodies of Jake and Noldi and
Polter.

I turned where she pointed, to see a thing that very nearly made me
scream out in revulsion.

I shuddered, shrank back; for several creatures were bending over the
three, lifting them, bearing them away.

It was the strange, revolting difference from men in them that caused my
fear. Once they may have been men, their far-off ancestors, perhaps--or
in some other more recent way their bodies had been transformed, made
over into creatures not human, not beast, not ghoul. What they were was
not thinkable or acceptable by me. I turned my face away, shuddering.

They were men such as the wall-paintings pictured, something that had
been made from the main stock of mankind, changed unthinkably into a
creature who bore his tools of his trade in his own bone and flesh.
Mole-men, men with short heavy arms and wide-clawed hands, made for
digging through hard earth. They bore my friends away on their
hairy-naked shoulders, and I stood too shocked to say a word. Three
mole-men, accompanied by three tall, pale-white figures, figures
inexpressibly alien--even through the heavy white robes--that moved with
an odd hopping step that no human limb could manage, turned their
paper-white, long, expressionless faces toward me for an instant, then
were gone,