What a mysterious creature this woman was! Try as I would, yet I feared her.
"Lepraylya!" she said again.
"Lepraylya," Mil ton nodded. "I wonder who or what this Lepraylya can be, Bill."
"King maybe—or something worse."
"Queen, I hope," said Milton Rhodes.
He drew forth his note-book and pencil and handed them to Drorathusa, pronouncing as she took them that mysterious name: "Lepraylya?"
A few strokes with the pencil, and Drorathusa had given us the answer.
"You see, Bill?" said Rhodes, smiling. "A woman—undoubtedly, too, the queen."
Drorathusa's Sibylline look was upon him once more—and she did not smile.
Chapter 33
Face to Face
We pound the wall even more broken and savage than it had appeared from the entrance. It was almost destitute of vegetation, a circumstance that contributed not a little to the difficulties of the descent. Indeed, making our way down over those pitching naked rocks was a ticklish, unpleasant business, I want to tell you—at times really precarious.
We had halted to rest above one of these difficult spots, and everyone was either seated or leaning against the rock, when of a sudden Milton, who was nearest the edge, arose and pointed, pointed down and off to the right.
"Hello!" said he. "What's that?"
All of us arose, moved forward and looked.
"Where?" I asked.
"Down there by that strange clump of sycadaceous trees. But 'tis gone now."
"What was it?"
"I haven't the faintest idea, Bill. But there was something there, something moving. And, if I were imaginative, I would probably say that it was watching us, that, the moment I arose and pointed, it glided back to the concealment of the trees."
"Well, did it?"
"It certainly seemed to do so, Bill."
I peered down there again, but I could not see anything moving. There was silence for some moments. The Dromans stood watching, waiting; stood expectant, puzzled.
"Oh, well," Rhodes said, turning a quizzical look in my direction and then to the face of Drorathusa, "we must expect to find live things in that forest."
I saw Drorathusa's eyes fixed upon his face, then, a few moments after he ceased speaking, return to the clump of cycads.
"Live things?" said I. "There may be things in this place of mystery more terrible than any live thing."
"Come, Bill, come. It can't be so bad as you think it, or our Dromans wouldn't be here. I wish," he added, "I knew what that thing is that I saw."
"Hello!" I cried the next moment, my look raised up to the vaulted roof, "what does that mean? Good heaven, what next?"
The light, which was brightest up along the roof—in fact, it seemed pressed up against the rock canopy like glowing, diaphanous mist—was changing, fading. The wonderful opalescence of it was disappearing before our eyes.
Of a sudden the spot where we stood was involved in a gloom strange, indescribable, unearthly. Up above, the light-mist was quivering and flickering, pale and dreadful.
