are they standing out there for, standing and waiting—waiting for what? Probably for their chance to steal away and leave us to our fate!"
"My gosh, Bill," said Milton, "your imagination goes like a jumping-jack!"
"Heaven help us if that's what you think when a. man would be cautious and watchful!"
"Cautious and watchful. Yes, certainly we want to be cautious and watchful. After all, there may be something in what you say. But not much, I think. No, Bill; this is not a trap. There is no faking about it: they are lost."
"I don't like it," I told him. "Why won't they come in?"
"Goodness knows, Bill. Why won't some people sit down to the table if the party numbers thirteen? And why should we stand hesitant? Suppose that they do plan to steal away from us. I don't believe it, but suppose that they do. What then? Are we going to run after them, like lambs after little Bo-peep? Not I, old tillicum. If they are as treacherous as that, the quicker we part company the better. For, sooner or later, their chance would come."
"There may be something in that," I admitted. "Lead on, Macduff."
A second or two, and we had stepped from the passage out into a great and lofty chamber.
"Great heaven!" I cried, my right hand going to my revolver. "What is that thing?"
Rhodes made no answer. He stood peering intently.
"Look out!" I cried, pulling out my weapon and drawing back toward the entrance. "It's moving!"
Chapter 27
The Monster
Rhodes made no response. Still he stood there, peering toward the end of the chamber. Then of a sudden, to my inexpressible surprize and horror, he began moving forward—moving toward that monstrous thing which reared itself up out of the gloom and the shadows, up and up, almost to the very roof itself.
"What are you doing?" I cried. "I tell you, I saw it move!"
Rhodes paused, but he did not look back.
"It didn't move," he said. "How could it move? It must have been only the shadows that you saw, Bill."
"Shadows!"
"Just so—shadows."
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, even though you did think that you saw it move. It is simply a carven monster, like the great Sphinx of the Pyramids or 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 air or in the sea. 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 it is unequivocally a dragon."
Yes; it was a dragon. And a monster more horrible than this thing before us never had been fashioned by even the wildest imagination of artist or madman.
The dragon (not carven from the rock but made of bronze) crouched
