on high in that dark place of blood and fear. Indeed, in the unearthly
light she looked like a spirit, the spirit of beauty triumphing over
the hideousness of hell, the angel of light trampling the Devil and his
works.

It was not wonderful that this fierce and barbarous people sighed
like reeds before the wind when her loveliness dawned upon them, made
ethereal by the moon, or that thenceforth Leonard could never think of
her quite as he thought of any other woman. Under such conditions most
well-favoured women would have appeared beautiful; Juanna did more, she
seemed divine.

As the light grew downward and the shadows thinned before it, Leonard
followed with his eyes, and presently he discovered Otter. The dwarf,
naked except for his girdle and the fringe upon his head, was also
enthroned, holding the ivory sceptre in his hand, but in a seat of ebony
placed upon the knees of the colossus, nearly forty feet below Juanna.

Then Leonard turned to consider Francisco's position and his own, and
found it terrible enough. Indeed, the moment that he discovered it was
nigh to being his last. In company with two priests of the Snake, they
were standing on the palm of the right hand of the idol, that formed a
little platform some six feet square, which they had won in the darkness
through a tunnel hewn in the arm of stone. There they stood unprotected
by any railing or support, and before them and on either side of them
was a sheer drop of some ninety feet to the water beneath or of fifty to
the rock of the platform.

Leonard saw, and for a moment turned faint and dizzy, then, setting the
butt of his rifle on to the stone, he leaned upon the barrel till