The part of my body that spanned the depression
became numb, and I breathed with difficulty.
Holman broke the silence. "Good-bye, Verslun," he said cheerfully. "It's
mighty tough to go out like this, but it's the fortune of war."
I endeavoured to answer him, but the words, as if afraid of the horror
that loomed above me, refused to come out of my throat. The fiendish
manner in which we were to be killed unmanned me. The slab paralyzed
thought, and it seemed to me that only the inmost kernel of my being, a
very pin-point of the refined essence of life, was throbbing within my
body.
The officiating wizard stepped around us for a final survey. He glanced
keenly at the position of our bodies, and, evidently satisfied that the
centipede had every opportunity to make a good job, he flung himself
down upon his face and started to murmur softly in the strange dialect
which Leith had spoken when addressing the three earlier in the night,
and which the dancer had used in the Cavern of Skulls. I remember that I
tried during those few minutes to catch a word or two of the queer
tongue, and curiously enough, in that moment of extreme peril, I
endeavoured to connect it with some of the dialects I had heard during
my long stay in the islands.
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