“Can you see them?” I asked in the same low voice. “I think so, Baas. At any rate, I can smell them.” “Then keep your pistol ready,” I answered. A moment later I saw a lighted torch floating in the air in front of us, though the bearer of it I could not see. The torch was bent downwards, and I heard the sound of kindling taking fire. A little flame sprang up revealing a pile of logs arranged for burning, and beyond it the tall form of Dacha wearing a strange headdress and white, priestlike robes, different from those in which he had been clad at the feast. Between his hands, which he held in front of him, was a white human skull reversed, I mean that its upper part was towards the floor. “Burn, Dust of Illusion, burn,” he cried, “and show us our desires,” and out of the skull he emptied a quantity of powder on to the pile of wood. A dense, penetrating smoke arose which seemed to fill the cave, vast though it was, and blot out everything. It passed away and was followed by a blaze of brilliant flame that lit up all the place and revealed a terrific spectacle. Behind the fire, at a distance of ten paces or so, was an awful object, an appalling black figure at least twelve feet in height, a figure of Heu-Heu as we had seen him depicted in the Cave of the Berg, only there his likeness was far too flattering. For this was the very image of the devil as he might have been imagined by a mad monk, and from his eyes shot a red light. As I have said before, the figure was like to that of a huge gorilla and yet no ape but a man, and yet no man but a fiend. There was the long gray hair growing in tufts about the body. There was the great, red, bushy beard. There were the enormous limbs and the long arms and the hands with claws on them where the thumbs should be, and the webbed fingers. The bull neck on the top of which sat the small head that somehow resembled an old woman’s with a hooked nose; the huge mouth from which the baboon-like tushes protruded, the round, massive, able-looking brow, the deepset glaring eyes, now alight with red fire, the cruel smile—all were there intensified. There, too, was the shape of a dead man into the breast of which the clawed foot was driven, and in the left hand the head that had been twisted from the man’s body. Oh! evidently the painter of the picture in the Berg can have been no Bushman as once I had supposed, but some priest of Heu-Heu whom fate or chance had brought thither in past ages, and who had depicted it to be the object of his private worship. When I saw the thing I gasped aloud and felt as though I should fall to the ground through fear, so hellish was it. But Hans gripped my arm and said: “Baas, be not afraid. It is not alive; it is but a thing of stone and paint with fire set within.” I stared again; he was right. _Heu-Heu was but an idol! Heu-Heu did not live except in the hearts of his worshippers!_ Only out of what Satanic mind had this image sprung?