He moved his light slowly back and forth.
"See that. A certain way you look at it, that thing up there seems to be moving instead of the shadows."
"But what on earth can it be?" I asked, slowly advancing to his side. "And what is that white which, though so faint, yet gleams so horribly? It looks like teeth."
"It is teeth," said Milton, whose eyes were better than mine. "But the thing, of course, is not animate. You just thought that you saw it move. The thing is simply a man-made monster, like the great Sphinx of the Pyramids, like the Colossi of Thebes."
We were moving toward it now.
"And look at all those horrors along the walls," I said, "dragons, serpents, horrors never seen on land, in the air or in the sea—at any rate, in that world we have left. And look there. There is a demon—I mean a sculptured demon. And that's what the colossus itself is—a monstrous ape-bat."
"Not so, Bill. See, it is becoming plainer and plainer, and it is unequivocally a dragon."
Yes; it was a dragon. And I wondered if a monster more horrible than this thing before us ever had been fashioned by the wildest imagination of artist or madman.
The dragon (not carven from the rock but made of bronze) crouched upon a high rock, its wings outspread. At the base of this rock, upon which base rested the hind claws of the monster, was a platform some twenty feet square and raised five or six feet above the floor of the cavern. In the front and on either side of this platform, there were steps, and, in the center of it, a stone of curious shape—a stone that sent a shudder through me.
And up above rose the colossal dragon itself, its scaly foreclaws gripping the edge of the rock, twenty-five feet or so above the platform. The neck curved forward and down. The head hung over the platform, thirty feet or more up in the air—the great jaws wide open, the forked tongue protruding hungrily, the huge teeth and the huge eyes sending back the rays from our lights in demonical, indescribably horrible gleams.