Parsons might have been graven from the rock. His hands were caught upon the lapels of his jacket; his lips and teeth were slightly parted; his eyes burnt their steadfast gaze upon the Beast unblinkingly. But for the measured rise and fall of his chest, he was as unstirring as one of the cañon boulders.
Then I saw that the ghastly Thing was staring with concentration at Parsons. As I watched, it gaped upon him. Parsons opened his jaws with measured, automatic motion, and gaped back. The sinuous neck swayed. Parsons stretched his throat with horrifying imitation. The thing advanced three ponderous steps. Parsons lurched forward a like space draggingly. The long serrated tail lashed to and fro once and again. Parsons waggled his body monstrously.
I glanced at the glacier cave which opened invitingly fifty yards away. Then I turned to measure the Horror intently with my eye. Beyond a doubt his gigantic limbs could never pass it. I rushed at Parsons, and seized his coat-collar. He struck at me furiously and unseeingly, his eyes gluing themselves to the fascination before him. I yelled to the others, and then simultaneously we made a rush to the cleft in the glacier face, bearing with us the struggling sailor. He hit out madly, his frozen death-like eyes still rapt upon the Beast. Shrieking, fighting, but still staring, we shoved him through the icy waterway, and heaved him with great splashings round the corner that screened the entrance.
As we lugged him back into the blue dimness of the cavern I pressed my palms upon his eyelids, and bawled reassuringly into his ear. As if a garment fell from him his body lost its rigidity; as I removed my hand his eyes looked back into mine with the natural light soft within them. The tense glare of a moment before was gone. He began to sob and cling to me.
“Oh Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord,” he yammered, gripping my arm till I could have yelled with the pain; “the eyes of him—the blisterin’ eyes. They dragged me like a puppy on a string. I ’ad to go an’ be thankful for goin’. ’E’ll ’ave me yet, ’e’ll ’ave me yet. ’E’ll nip me up an’ break my back as if I was a bilge rat, an’ no more. Oh, for the Lord’s sake ’old on to me, or I’ll be cracked like a nut in ’is ’orrid jaws, an’ I didn’t sign for no dragons, m’lord, but only as deck ’and an’ not for no wanderin’s in devils’ lands.” And so on and so forth did he incoherently complain, covering his face from the sight of the approaching monster, grovelling at my feet on the damp sandy floor, as we others watched the gaunt Fearsomeness approach.
As it waddled clumsily up to the entrance we shrank further back into the gloom of the cavern. It stopped as it straddled across the out-gushing stream, damming the waters with its ungainly bulk, and forming a turbid pool. It lifted its pink, pointed snout curiously, and sniffed the air with parted lips. Then the little triangular head swung the full length of the neck into the cave, and the smell of noxious breath and musk clouded down upon us, making us cough with its disgusting effluvia.
The teeth snapped asunder as the lithe tongue licked across them, and as they closed again the breath hissed between them. The green light from its eyes shone luminous in the twilight of the overhanging ice. There was a swish and rush of released waters as it moved forward, and closed in upon the cave mouth. The dimness grew to utter night save for the faintest glow that filtered in from above, and the two pitiless eyes shone poised in the darkness like living coals.
I fumbled for the match-box, and tried to strike a vesta, but my trembling fingers spilled the half of them. The few seconds of horror, while I picked and fiddled at them in the darkness, and those two orbs of searching horror swayed above me, is an experience I am not likely to forget if I live to be a hundred.
As the dips took flame, and we saw the nearness of the Thing, we gasped with the freezing fear of it and backed still further into the recesses of the glacier. The ice began to melt where the heat of the horny excrescences pressed upon it, and for one unreasoning moment I seriously considered if he meant to break in upon us by this slow means. But the sight of the thick, curtain-like glacier, dark above us with its hundreds of feet of virgin ice, reassured me. Little by little, as the first shock of terror began to dull, I pulled myself together.
The others too, I noticed, were beginning to bear themselves more like men and less like whipped puppies. Lessaution actually donned a triumphant expression, and his lips moved. For a moment or so, though, his voice failed to respond to the call of his intelligence. Finally he burst into words.