catch of the locked box--due to some movement from within--flew open, and
the king-cobra-killer flew at her with a venomous fury impossible to
describe. As it seized her throat, she caught hold of it, and, with a
fury superior to its own, tore it in two just as if it had been a sheet
of paper. The strength used for such an act must have been terrific. In
an instant, it seemed to spout blood and entrails, and was hurled into
the well-hole. In another instant she had seized Oolanga, and with a
swift rush had drawn him, her white arms encircling him, down with her
into the gaping aperture.

Adam saw a medley of green and red lights blaze in a whirling circle, and
as it sank down into the well, a pair of blazing green eyes became fixed,
sank lower and lower with frightful rapidity, and disappeared, throwing
upward the green light which grew more and more vivid every moment. As
the light sank into the noisome depths, there came a shriek which chilled
Adam's blood--a prolonged agony of pain and terror which seemed to have
no end.

Adam Salton felt that he would never be able to free his mind from the
memory of those dreadful moments. The gloom which surrounded that
horrible charnel pit, which seemed to go down to the very bowels of the
earth, conveyed from far down the sights and sounds of the nethermost
hell. The ghastly fate of the African as he sank down to his terrible
doom, his black face growing grey with terror, his white eyeballs, now
like veined bloodstone, rolling in the helpless extremity of fear. The
mysterious green light was in itself a milieu of horror. And through it
all the awful cry came up from that fathomless pit, whose entrance was
flooded with spots of fresh blood. Even the death of the fearless little
snake-killer--so fierce, so frightful, as if stained with a ferocity
which told of no living force above earth, but only of the devils of the