Chet, cursing insanely at strange machines—equilibrators that controlled the longitudinal and transverse and rotative stability of the ship and that refused to take their electrical charge—knew with horrible certainty that the last night had come. But to the two humans, in the depths of this world where all knowledge of time was lost, the knowledge came only when they were dragged by their guards into a familiar room.
Ape-men were all about; they stared unwinkingly at the captives who stared back again in an effort to keep their eyes averted from the monstrous repulsiveness on the platform above them, till their eyes were drawn to meet the compelling gaze of the "Master" of a lost race.
A something which, at first glance, seemed all head—this was the "Master." The naked body, so skeleton-thin, was shrunken and distorted; it was withered and leathery-brown, like the aged parchment of mummified flesh. It was seated in a resplendent chair, whose radiating handles were for its carrying; and, above it, the head, so incredibly repulsive, was made more hideous by its travestied resemblance to human form.
Soft, pulpy and wetly smooth—a ten-foot sac, enclosed in a membrane of dead gray shot through with flickerings of color that flamed and died—the whole pulsing mass was supported in a sling of golden cloth. And, dominating it, in the center of that flabby forehead, a focal point for the gaze of the horrified observers, was a single glassy and lidless eye.
Cold, unchanging, entirely expressionless except for the fixed ferocity that was there, the eye was a yellow disk of hate, where quivering lines of violet culminated in a central, flaming point; and that point of living fire swelled prodigiously before their staring eyes. It seemed to expand, to slowly draw their senses—their very selves—from their bodies, to plunge them down to annihilation in that fiery pit where a soundless voice was speaking.
"Slaves! Apes! Take the captives to the great altar rock of Vashta, to the Holy of Holies. The others you were permitted to slaughter for our food; hold these two safely. For one shall die slowly for Vashta's pleasure, and one shall live on for mine. And we would not have them under our mental control, so guard them well; the offering is more pleasing to Vashta when the blood in his cup flows from a creature unbound both in body and mind." And the two helpless humans found themselves released from the flaming pit that became again but an eye in the forehead of a loathsome thing.
They were fully conscious of their surroundings as they were herded up through the pyramid and out into the night, where rough, calloused hands seized them and dragged them to a smooth table-top of rock that stood only slightly above the ground before the great rocky pile. Stunned, waiting dumbly, they saw swarming ape-men clustered like bees on the lower pyramid face; they saw coverings of stone being removed and a great recess laid open, while the ape-things dropped in awe before a grotesque and horrible beast-head carved from a single piece of stone.
The eyes of the beast shone with some cold, hidden light. They seemed fixed hungrily upon a cup in a distorted hand, and, though the cup was empty, there was promise of its being filled. For little sluices of stone sloped from the place where the captives stood, and they ended above the cup so that the life-blood of a slaughtered creature, or a sacrificed man, might pour splashingly in, a streaming draught for this blood-thirsty god.