At length I overcame my fears sufficiently to return not to the path but to the edge of the crater at some distance from it, and peering down could see that the fire was still burning, and here, hiding as best I could, I waited till morning. Daylight showed me no sign of life however, though still the pale flame flickered, and I could now make out that it burnt before a sort of building which seemed to be of white polished stone. Till well after broad daylight I lay and watched, but nothing stirred; and I determined that I would go down and see what manner of fire was this that burnt day and night without tending.
The skulls did not look as ghastly in sunlight as they had done in the pale light of the moon. I could see too that this path was ancient, and nowhere could I find traces of its being used. As I had seen the night before, it led straight across the desert, and in the distance in that direction I could now see faint blue mountains. So there was an end to this land of desolation after all, and I determined that after I had seen what was below, I would follow that road! The slope went down steeply and here the path was roughly stepped; as it led deeper, too, the slope narrowed, until at the bottom the entrance to the crater lay through a natural gateway of rock that rose high on either hand and almost shut out the light. Through it the strange path led, and here in the gloom the horror of this awful place again came upon me and I could scarce bring myself to enter the narrow defile. I remember clutching my revolver as I went forward at last: remember thinking too that it could avail me nothing, for here was no live being to fear, here was naught but the dead. . The utter silence and loneliness even after my months of silence and loneliness seemed to weigh upon me like a heavy burden, and when a bat came fluttering by me in the gloom I uttered a hoarse cry of alarm. But the distance was but short, and soon I stood safe in the daylight again, and on the floor of the crater. And now I could see that the white floor I had thought was sand was also strewn with bones, of animals principally, though men's skeletons also lay thick on every side. Bones of the elephant principally; for among them lay huge tusks in quantities, tusks the like of which I had never seen, except in pictures of the giant mammoth of prehistoric ages, tusks the girth of a man in size. Piled in all directions they lay, the whole vast floor was indeed a stupendous charnel house. And among the white sand and bones diamonds lay thick as pebbles on a beach.
Across this floor ran the path now a raised causeway some feet above the level of the sand and about five hundred yards from where I stood the fire burnt in front of a building in the shape of a pyramid. Still no sign of life could I see and I made my way towards it. As I did so the sun's rays broke over the edge of the cliff above, and fell full upon the top of the pyramid, and another flame seemed to shoot from it, and remained there flashing brilliantly.
I was close to the fire now, and saw that it was no hand-fed flame, but a column that rose from an orifice in the rock, and burnt fiercely with a low roaring noise, and a strong mephitic odor. Probably it was some kind of natural gas; at any rate there was no one near it and nothing to fear from it. The pyramid behind it was made of ivory, thousands of tons of magnificent tusks going to make up its forty feet of height, and up it, in steps, ran the path, for the pyramid was the culmination of this road of dead. I climbed up and reached the apex, a platform some twenty feet square, above which something still towered, crowned by a flashing light.
Its brilliance dazzled me, and it was only by shading my eyes with my palm that I could discern what the object was that bore it.
Then, directly beneath the bright glare I gradually made out a gigantic face, glaring down upon me, a face carved with such wondrous art that, monstrous as it was, it appeared to live, and to be endowed with such awful malevolence that for a moment I shrank back in dismay. It was the face of a woman, but the body that it crowned was that of a snake, and was coiled round an ivory pillar rising from the platform. Marvelously fashioned of bronze, the face, with bared serpent fangs, bent down as though to strike: and set in a strangely fashioned diadem above the brows was a gigantic diamond, as large as a man's head, and of such blinding luster that it was impossible to look closely at it as well try to gaze full at the midday sun.
It was an idol, undoubtedly; a Moloch waiting for a sacrifice; and as my fascinated eyes at length left the face of terror, and passed down the coiled body and ivory pillar, I saw that the sacrifice was already there. For at the base lay a dead man, and his blood was scarcely dry upon the altar.
He was fast bound with hide thongs to stanchions cut in the rock a man almost as white as myself, with long, straight black hair, and clothed in clean white flowing robes. His face was horribly disfigured, seared and burnt as though by red-hot irons, and his features quite indistinguishable. Apparently, then, he had been tortured, before being stabbed to the heart by the strangely fashioned knife of bronze that lay beside him.
It is beyond me to describe the terror with which the sight of this dead and mutilated victim inspired me. I had seen no human being for so long: dead Inyati's face had been the last that I had gazed upon; then, after long I had seen the skeleton in the pool the road of skulls and now at last I gazed upon a human form again, it was again that of the dead.
All around me was death, death everywhere, and I felt that unless I escaped, and found human companionship soon, my mind would give way beneath these horrors.