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.  The soft muttering seemed to be a thread connecting us with life itself, and I dreaded the moment it would cease.

I do not know how long the chant continued.  It rose and fell, a soft rhythmic murmur, and I prayed that it would never end.  My ears sucked it in as if it was a life line to which my soul was clinging, and I dimly understood my eagerness to catch the sounds.  My ability to do so seemed to be wanted as proof to convince my half-paralyzed body that I was still alive.

The low chant ended with a little throaty cry, and I shut my eyes tight to save myself the final moment of agony which the falling of the stone would bring.  For an instant there was absolute silence, then some one gripped me by the legs and pulled madly.  The ramie fibre held my body to the supporting post of the centipede, and I heard Holman give a muttered order.  A knife sawed the cords, a pair of hands gripped my heels and flung me forward, and as I fell clear of the groove the stone horror crashed back into its bed with a jolt that shook the huge table!  I opened my eyes to see Kaipi looking at the face of the dancer he had stabbed in the back as the brute was muttering his prayer!

“Oh hell!” said the Fijian.  “Me thought him Soma.  Me made mistake!  Me going kill Soma, he kill Toni, Toni all same my brother, work long time with me at Suva!”

“Hurry up and cut these ropes,” cried Holman.  “There are two more of those devils and they’ll be back before we get the cramp out of our muscles.”

Kaipi sprang to obey, but when our bonds were cut away, we found that we could not get to our feet.  Legs and arms were completely numbed, and the many abrasions that we had come by during the towing process to which we had been subjected made Kaipi’s efforts to restore circulation by rubbing a species of torture that would surely have earned the commendation of Torquemada if it had been brought under his notice.