"Goodness knows, Bill. Why won't some people sit down to a table if the party numbers thirteen? And why should _we_ stand hesitant? Suppose that they do plan to steal away from us. I don't believe it, but suppose that they do. What then? Are we going to run after them, like lambs after little Bopeep? Not I, old _tillicum_. If they are as treacherous a lot as that, the quicker we part company the better. For, sooner or later, their chance would come." "There may be something in that," I admitted. "Lead on, Macduff." A moment or two, and we had stepped from the passage and out into a great and lofty chamber. "Great Heaven!" I cried, my right hand going to my revolver. "What--what is that thing?" Rhodes made no answer. He stood peering intently. "Look out!" I cried, pulling out my weapon and drawing back towards the entrance. "_It's moving!_" Chapter 27 THE MONSTER Rhodes made no response. Still he stood there, peering towards the end of the chamber. Then of a sudden, to my inexpressible surprise, he began moving forward--moving towards that monstrous thing which reared itself up out of the gloom and the shadows, up and up, almost to the very roof itself. "What are you doing?" I cried. "I tell you, I saw it move!" Rhodes paused, but he did not look back. "It didn't move," he said. "How _could_ it move? It must have been only the shadows that you saw, Bill." "Shadows?" "Just so--shadows." He moved his light slowly back and forth. "See that. A certain way you look at it, that thing up there seems to be moving instead of the shadows." "But what on earth can it be?" I asked, slowly advancing to his side. "And what is that white which, though so faint, yet gleams so horribly? It looks like _teeth_." "It is teeth," said Milton, whose eyes were better than mine. "But the thing, of course, is not animate. You just thought that you saw it move. The thing is simply a man-made monster, like the great Sphinx of the Pyramids, like the Colossi of Thebes." We were moving toward it now. "And look at all those horrors along the walls," I said, "dragons, serpents, horrors never seen on land, in the air or in the sea--at any rate, in that world we have left. And look there. There is a demon--I mean a sculptured demon. And that's what the colossus itself is--a monstrous ape-bat." "Not so, Bill. See, it is becoming plainer and plainer, and it is unequivocally a dragon." Yes; it was a dragon. And I wondered if a monster more horrible than this thing before us ever had been fashioned by the wildest imagination of artist or madman.