to believe or even to comprehend the truth of my origin and the
circumstances of my advent in Caspak; and finally they left me
saying that they would come for me before the dance of death upon
the morrow. Before they departed with their torches, I saw that
I had not been conducted to the farthest extremity of the cavern,
for a dark and gloomy corridor led beyond my prison room into the
heart of the cliff.

I could not but marvel at the immensity of this great underground
grotto. Already I had traversed several hundred yards of it, from
many points of which other corridors diverged. The whole cliff
must be honeycombed with apartments and passages of which this
community occupied but a comparatively small part, so that the
possibility of the more remote passages being the lair of savage
beasts that have other means of ingress and egress than that used
by the Band-lu filled me with dire forebodings.

I believe that I am not ordinarily hysterically apprehensive; yet
I must confess that under the conditions with which I was confronted,
I felt my nerves to be somewhat shaken. On the morrow I was to die
some sort of nameless death for the diversion of a savage horde,
but the morrow held fewer terrors for me than the present, and
I submit to any fair-minded man if it is not a terrifying thing
to lie bound hand and foot in the Stygian blackness of an immense
cave peopled by unknown dangers in a land overrun by hideous beasts
and reptiles of the greatest ferocity. At any moment, perhaps at
this very moment, some silent-footed beast of prey might catch my
scent where it laired in some contiguous passage, and might creep
stealthily upon me. I craned my neck about, and stared through the
inky darkness for the twin spots of blazing hate which I knew would