"Come,get on,old fellow,"said Good,"or we shall lose our fair guide."Thus adjured,I started down the passage,and after about twenty paces found myself in a gloomy apartment some forty feet long by thirty broad and thirty high,which in some past age had evidently been hollowed,by hand-labor,out of the mountain.This apartment was not nearly so well lighted as the vast stalactite ante-cave,and at the first glance all Icould make out was a massive stone table running its length,with a colossal white figure at its head,and life-sized white figures all round it.Next I made out a brown thing,seated on the table in the centre,and in another moment my eyes grew accustomed to the light,and I saw what all these things were,and I was tailing out of it as hard as my legs would carry me.Iam not a nervous man,in a general way,and very little troubled with superstitions,of which I have lived to see the folly;but I am free to own that that sight quite upset me,and had it not been that Sir Henry caught me by the collar and held me,I do honestly believe that in another five minutes I should have been outside that stalactite cave,and that the promise of all the diamonds in Kimberley would not have induced me to enter it again.
But he held me tight,so I stopped because I could not help myself.But next second his eyes got accustomed to the light,too,and he let go of me and began to mop the perspiration off his forehead.As for Good,he swore feebly,and Foulata threw her arms round his neck and shrieked.
Only Gagool chuckled loud and long.
It was a ghastly sight.There at the end of the long stone table,holding in his skeleton fingers a great white spear,sat Death himself,shaped in the form of a colossal human skeleton,fifteen feet or more in height.High above his head he held the spear,as though in the act of striking;one bony hand rested on the stone table before him,in the position a man assumes on rising from his seat,while his frame was bent forward so that the vertebrae of the neck and the grinning,gleaming skull projected towards us and fixed its hollow eye-places upon us,the jaws a little open,as though it were about to speak.
"Great heavens!"said I,faintly,at last,"what can it be?""And what are those things ?"said Good,pointing to the white company round the table.
"And what on earth is that thing ?"said Sir Henry,pointing to the brown creature seated on the table.
"Hee!hee!hee!"laughed Gagool."To those who enter the Hall of the Dead,evil comes.Hee!hee!hee!ha!""Come,Incubu,brave in battle,come and see him thou slewest;"and the old creature caught his coat in her skinny fingers,and led him away towards the table.We followed.
Presently she stopped and pointed at the brown object seated on the table.Sir Henry looked,and started back with an exclamation;and no wonder,for there,seated,quite naked,on the table,the head which Sir Henry's battle-axe had shorn from the body resting on its knees,was the gaunt corpse of Twala,last king of the Kukuanas.Yes,there,the head perched upon the knees,it sat in all its ugliness,the vertebrae projecting a full inch above the level of the shrunken flesh of the neck,for all the world like a black double of Hamilton Tighe.Over the whole surface of the corpse there was gathered a thin,glassy film,which made its appearance yet more appalling and for which,we were,at the moment,quite unable to account,till we presently observed that from the roof of the chamber the water fell steadily,drip!drip!drip!onto the neck of the corpse,from whence it ran down over the entire surface,and finally escaped into the rock through a tiny hole in the table.Then I guessed what it was -Twala's body was being transformed into a stalactite .
A look at the white forms seated on the stone bench that ran around that ghastly board confirmed this view.They were human forms,indeed,or rather had been human forms;now they were stalactites .This was the way in which the Kukuana people had from time immemorial preserved their royal dead.They petrified them.What the exact system was,if there was any beyond placing them for a.long period of years under the drip,I never discovered,but there they sat iced over and preserved forever by the silicious fluid.Anything more awe-inspiring than the spectacle of this long line of departed royalties,wrapped in a shroud of ice-like spar,through which the features could be dimly made out (there were twenty-seven of them,the last being Ignosi's father),and seated round that inhospitable board,with Death himself for a host,it is impossible to imagine.That the practice of thus preserving their kings must have been an ancient one is evident from the number,which,allowing for an average reign of fifteen years,would,supposing that every king who reigned was placed here -an improbable thing,as some are sure to have perished in battle far from home -fix the date of its commencement at four and a quarter centuries back.But the colossal.Death Who sits at the head of the board is far older than that,and,unless I am much mistaken,owes his origin to the same artist who designed the three colossi.He was hewn out of a single stalactite,and,looked at as a work of art,was most admirably conceived and executed.Good,who understood anatomy,declared that,so far as he could see,the anatomical design of the skeleton was perfect down to the smallest bones.
My own idea is that this terrific object was a freak of fancy on the part of some old-world sculptor,and that its presence had suggested to the Kukuanas the idea of placing their royal dead under its awful presidency.
Or perhaps it was placed there to frighten away any marauders who might have designs upon the treasure-chamber beyond.I cannot say.All I can do is to describe it as it is,and the reader must form his own conclusion.
Such,at any rate,was the white Death and such were the white dead!
