They seemed to pierce me through and through, and to search my very soul, as I lay there and gazed back into them as a fascinated bird gazes back into the eyes of the striking snake.
Power infinite there was in those commanding orbs, wisdom and knowledge surpassing that of mere mankind infinite good or infinite evil I know not which!
I shrank in mortal terror at their merciless scrutiny, but I could neither close my eyes nor tear them away, until a hand was passed across my brow, and the spell was broken.
Now a knife cut my bonds, and I was raised by a strong arm to a sitting posture.
How is it possible to describe the horror of the appalling scene that met my shrinking eyes, as for the first time since I had been a prisoner I was able to look upon my surroundings.
The blood-red sun was setting in a stormy sky, from which in the distance the lightning still flickered, close beside me stood the tall form of the priestess, and below, on the lower tiers of the pyramid, were grouped about twenty men priests I judged them to be all robed in white garments, all white men, of fierce and sinister aspect.
But it was not upon these that my eyes rested, but upon the grim and awful holocaust that stretched in all directions below and beyond.
For the pyramid stood as an island in a sea of dead men: from its base, to the mighty walls that encircled the vast floor of the crater, it stretched in an unbroken sheet unbroken, that is, except for the myriad drowned bodies from which the rapidly receding flood was fast draining away.
The glare from the crimson sunset turned it into a sea of blood, and each moment the forms of the drowned multitude showed more and more distinctly; clasping and clinging to each other in the awful contortions of death, as they had struggled with each other in their frantic fight against that awful cataclysm; heap upon heap, line after line, thousands upon thousands of them a multitude a whole nation overwhelmed and destroyed.
Not white men such as the priests, who alone had been saved upon the pyramid, but brown men of Inyati's type, their bodies nude except for a loincloth.