women beyond the pale, the thirty of them, for upon them had been
placed the mark of the beast.

They sat, flower-garlanded, in the perfumed, luminous night, and
their lips made uncouth noises and their throats rasped approval of
Koolau's speech. They were creatures who once had been men and
women. But they were men and women no longer. They were monsters--
in face and form grotesque caricatures of everything human. They
were hideously maimed and distorted, and had the seeming of
creatures that had been racked in millenniums of hell. Their hands,
when they possessed them, were like harpy claws. Their faces were
the misfits and slips, crushed and bruised by some mad god at play
in the machinery of life. Here and there were features which the
mad god had smeared half away, and one woman wept scalding tears
from twin pits of horror, where her eyes once had been. Some were
in pain and groaned from their chests. Others coughed, making
sounds like the tearing of tissue. Two were idiots, more like huge
apes marred in the making, until even an ape were an angel. They
mowed and gibbered in the moonlight, under crowns of drooping,
golden blossoms. One, whose bloated ear-lobe flapped like a fan
upon his shoulder, caught up a gorgeous flower of orange and scarlet
and with it decorated the monstrous ear that flip-flapped with his
every movement.

And over these things Koolau was king. And this was his kingdom,--a
flower-throttled gorge, with beetling cliffs and crags, from which
floated the blattings of wild goats. On three sides the grim walls
rose, festooned in fantastic draperies of tropic vegetation and
pierced by cave-entrances--the rocky lairs of Koolau's subjects. On
the fourth side the earth fell away into a tremendous abyss, and,