I crept tremblingly down into the abominable pit and made my way toward the stone altar prepared now for any atrocious sight. But the climax of discovery came when I had crawled half way and the cocoanuts on the poles resolved themselves into withered, human heads, sun dried and yellow fringed.
These mummied skulls were for the most part trophies of old battles, but lying at the top of the rock was another which must have surmounted its living shoulders only a few days ago. The frizzled hair was tied into dozens of kinky knots. The facial angle was low and slanting and the coarse lips were hideously twisted in a snarl of death and defiance. On the scalp, which a war club had crushed, sat a very beautiful head-dress of gull feathers, brilliantly dyed in green and crimson and orange. The victim had worn to his obsequies such a decoration as might have crowned a princess of the Incas. He had been a warrior of rank and now, as befitted his station, his head lay drying out on a mat of yellow and brown wood pulp.
A stifling nausea assaulted the pit of my stomach. My retreating steps reeled drunkenly, and when, near the rim of the basin, I turned for a final gaze in the fascination of horror, I no longer had the place to myself.
Two human figures stood at the farther rim of the amphitheater, silently regarding me. Both were thin, pigmy-built men with long arms and low foreheads. Their faces, grotesquely disfigured with bone and shell ornaments spiked through noses and ears, were bestial yet not stupid. Their eyes were beady and sharp, and just now their thick lips hung pendulous with wonderment. For an instant I was incapable of motion; then, as they stood in equal petrification, I remembered and acted on the counsel of an east-side gang member whom I had once been privileged to know in New York. I had inconsequently inquired whether, in his acrimonious career, he never came eye to eye with fear.
"Sure thing," he had promptly replied, "but when a guy gets your goat—stall. If you makes de play strong enough it's a cinch you gets his goat too."
By that rule this was my moment to "stall." I drew myself up to the limit of stature and threw out my chest in the best semblance of arrogance I could assume.
They were decked like the head of their sacrificial victim, in brilliant feather work, beautifully and harmoniously wrought. Their flint-tipped spears were elaborately carved and their necklaces were fashioned of shells and teeth. Some of the teeth were human. For perhaps thirty seconds we held the strained tableau, then I glanced over my shoulder. Between me and retreat stood a third figure. Compared to his gaudiness of decking, the raiment of the others was mean and sober. One bare shoulder and arm was covered with festering ulcers. His monkey-like face had the same slant of brow and heaviness of lip, but it worked constantly with a keen and twitching play of expression which argued speculative thought. As I turned he was leaning on a knotted war-club, and regarding me with profound gravity.