The doctor was impatient to go.  Smith was willing enough to stay behind; he was already joyously examining the strange machine he had found.  Two minutes later Kinney, Van Emmon, and Jackson were standing before the portals of the great building.

There they halted, and no wonder.  The entire face of the building could now be seen to be covered with a mass of carvings; for the most part they were statues in bas relief.  All were fantastic in the extreme, but whether purposely so or not, there was no way to tell.  Certainly any such work on the part of an earthly artist would have branded him either as insane or as an incomprehensible genius.

Directly above the entrance was a group which might have been labeled, “The Triumph of the Brute.”  An enormously powerful man, nearly as broad as he was tall, stood exulting over his victim, a less robust figure, prostrate under his feet.  Both were clad in armor.  The victor’s face was distorted into a savage snarl, startlingly hideous by reason of the prodigious size of his head, planted as it was directly upon his shoulders; for he had no neck.  His eyes were set so close together that at first glance they seemed to be but one.  His nose was flat and African in type, while his mouth, devoid of curves, was simply revolting in its huge, thick-lipped lack of proportion.  His chin was square and aggressive; his forehead, strangely enough, extremely high and narrow, rather than low and broad.

His victim lay in an attitude that indicated the most agonizing torture; his head was bent completely back, and around behind his shoulders.  On the ground lay two battle-axes, huge affairs almost as heavy as the massively muscled men who had used them.

But the eyes of the explorers kept coming back to the fearsome face of the conqueror.  From the brows down, he was simply a huge, brutal giant; above his eyes, he was an intellectual.  The combination was absolutely frightful; the beast looked capable of anything, of overcoming any obstacle, mental or physical, internal or external, in order to assert his apparently enormous will.  He could control himself or dominate others with equal ease and assurance.

“It can’t be that he was drawn from life,” said the doctor, with an effort.  It wasn’t easy to criticize that figure, lifeless though it was.  “On a planet like this, with such slight gravitation, there is no need for such huge strength.  The typical Mercurian should be tall and flimsy in build, rather than short and compact.”

But the geologist differed.  “We want to remember that the earth has no standard type.  Think what a difference there is between the mosquito and the elephant, the snake and the spider!  One would suppose that they had been developed under totally different planetary conditions, instead of all right on the same globe.

“No; I think this monster may have been genuine.”  And with that the geologist turned to examine the other statuary.