I gave a smothered cry and dashed forward. Rhodes was safe; at any rate, he was alive. A second or two, and I burst from the fern-growth. Surprize, amazement brought me up, and the next instant an indescribable horror had me in its grip.
The surprize, the amazement will be explained when I.say that there before me stood my companions, every one of them, safe and sound. There they stood, moveless and silent as so many statues, gazing, as though held in a baleful charm, upon that horror before them. Rhodes was the only one that moved as I burst into the scene.
"I wondered, Bill, why you didn't come."
"And I wondered why you all were so silent—after that exclamation and scream. I understand it now."
Shuddering, I pointed with my alpenstock.
"In the name of the Gorgons, what is that?"
"I wish that I knew, Bill."
A silence of some seconds followed, and then I remembered—that rustling sound.
I turned, and another shudder went through me. Drorathusa was standing very near that spot from which that rustling sound must have come.
"What is there?" I asked, pointing.
Rhodes whirled in the direction I indicated.
"Where?"
"In the ferns—behind Drorathusa. I heard something in there, something moving."
"When?"
"Some moments ago—just before you called."
A wan smile flitted across the face of Milton Rhodes.
"That was Drorathusa herself moving through that tangle of flowers."
"But I tell you that it was moving toward me!"
"It was Drorathusa," said Rhodes. "You only thought that the sound was moving toward you, away from us. No, Bill; it was Drorathusa. There was no other sound. To that I can swear."
So my imagination had tricked me! And yet how could I be sure that it had? For, in such a moment, with such a sight before him, Rhodes himself might have been the one deceived. In that case, any instant might see Death come leaping into our very midst.
"Who gave that scream?" I asked.
"One of the girls, when we broke out of the ferns and she saw that. Delphis, I believe."
This turned me again to that thing of horror. No wonder that that piercing, terrible scream had broken from the girl!
The spot into which we had stepped was, for a distance of perhaps one hundred and fifty feet, almost free from undergrowth. The twisted trunks and branches had a gnarled and savage aspect; the light had faded, and what with the gloom that had fallen and the weird shapes of the trees and the branches, the scene was a strange and terrible one. A fitting setting truly for what we saw there in the midst of it.
For, sixty feet or so distant, still, white and lifeless, naked save for a skin (spotted something like a leopard's) about the waist, the toes four or five feet from the ground, hung the body of a man.
That itself was horrible enough, but what we saw up in the branches above—how I shudder as that picture rises before me! It was a shape amorphous, monstrous, of mottled
