Extraterrestrial beings -- Fiction; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; Science fiction
He led the way to the second floor and to a chamber which I had not
previously visited. It closely resembled the others except that all the
bodies therein were of young women, many of them of great beauty.
Following closely at the heels of the old man the woman inspected the
gruesome exhibit with painstaking care. Thrice she passed slowly among
the tables examining their ghastly burdens. Each time she paused longest
before a certain one which bore the figure of the most beautiful
creature I had ever looked upon; then she returned the fourth time to it
and stood looking long and earnestly into the dead face. For awhile she
stood there talking with the old man, apparently asking innumerable
questions, to which he returned quick, brusque replies, then she
indicated the body with a gesture and nodded assent to the withered
keeper of this ghastly exhibit.
Immediately the old fellow sounded a blast upon his whistle, summoning a
number of servants to whom he issued brief instructions, after which he
led us to another chamber, a smaller one in which were several empty
tables similar to those upon which the corpses lay in adjoining rooms.
Two female slaves or attendants were in this room and at a word from
their master they removed the trappings from the old woman, unloosed her
hair and helped her to one of the tables. Here she was thoroughly
sprayed with what I presume was an antiseptic solution of some nature,
carefully dried and removed to another table, at a distance of about
twenty inches from which stood a second parallel table.
Now the door of the chamber swung open and two attendants appeared
bearing the body of the beautiful girl we had seen in the adjoining
room. This they deposited upon the table the old woman had just quitted
and as she had been sprayed so was the corpse, after which it was
transferred to the table beside that on which she lay. The little old
man now made two incisions in the body of the old woman, just as he had
in the body of the red-man who had fallen to my sword; her blood was
drawn from her veins and the clear liquid pumped into them, life left
her and she lay upon the polished ersite slab that formed the table top,
as much a corpse as the poor, beautiful, dead creature at her side.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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