“Well, you wait here,” ordered Holman.  “We’re going back, but we’ll return in a few hours and pick you up.  Don’t move from this ledge.”

Kaipi would promise anything if he was not forced to witness the performance, and we left him huddled up in the darkness, and returned to the spyhole in the wall.

The “tivo,” as the Fijian called it, was still in progress.  Without noise, the six half-nude figures were describing circles upon the smooth floor.  The silence and the serpentlike motions had a peculiar hypnotic effect upon us, and in a sort of dreamlike trance we watched them wriggle by the narrow aperture to which we pressed our faces.  With each circle more of the brown, sweat-polished bodies showed beneath the twisted mats.  The pace was beginning to tell upon them now.  Slower and slower they moved past the crevice, till at last all movement ceased, and, apparently lifeless, they lay face downward upon the floor.

I thought of the two girls at the lonely camp as we sat watching, and I knew well that Holman’s thoughts were turned in the same direction.  We had seen nothing of Leith, but an intuition that would not be put aside connected Leith with the strange ceremony that was in progress within the cavern, and we were chained to the spot.

I have no idea how long the six figures remained motionless upon the floor.  It may have been an hour, it may have been two.  The mystery of the performance we were witnessing seemed to drag us into a world where minutes and hours did not exist.  We were dumfounded by the confirmation of our suspicions and the peculiarly devilish exhibition, and I shook off the lethargy with an effort as Holman prodded me with his finger and pointed at a spot beyond the body of the dancer who lay immediately in front of the spyhole.

Looking in the direction Holman pointed I saw that another light was approaching through the gloom of the cavern.  It bobbed toward us slowly, a tiny pin point that came nearer and nearer as the bearer walked in the direction of the six.  The distance it was away from the dancers, which was evident from the time that elapsed from the moment we saw it till it was close up, convinced us that the cavern was of an enormous length, and the words “Long Gallery” in the note which Soma had dropped came up before my mind.  There was no doubt that the cave was the meeting spot which Leith had mentioned, and as I felt Holman’s body stiffen as he shouldered against me for a share of the peephole, I knew that he believed that the treacherous brute was one of the three that were approaching behind the bobbing lamp.