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In the hollow eye-sockets glowed a weird fire that darted forth at irregular intervals like glances of demoniacal hate; at the altar foot a great censer erupted a dense cloud of pungent smoke that rendered the altar and those about it still more vague and ghostly.

On their feet they rocked to their knees! Faces grinding into the earth they strained and broke away. And always Harrigan came back and found him, blindly. Once his hairy hands searched O'Mara's face and O'Mara's forehead went wet with the agony of fingers tearing at his eye-sockets. Dropping he escaped that gouging grip, coming up he caught Harrigan's chin and turned him over backward.

The tragic mask was not intentionally ugly and caricatured like the comic, but the half-open mouth, the large eye-sockets, and sharply-defined features, in which every characteristic was presented in its utmost strength, and the bright and hard coloring were calculated to make the impression of a being agitated by the emotions and passions of human nature in a degree far above the standard of common life.

He was sunk in a big chair, gaunt as a mummy now, and all the life in him seemed to burn in the bottom of his deep eye-sockets. At the sight of him I fiddled with my knuckles and giggled. "You are going it, Benlian!" I said. "Am I not?" he replied, in a voice that was scarcely a breath. "You meant me to bring the camera and magnesium, didn't you?" "Yes. Go ahead."

He had come through many perils in the past, but he had never been nearer a fatal end than he was at that moment. But the thought of the undying Friend lifted him buoyantly above the dread of death, and he could look with an unwinking eye right into the fleshless eye-sockets of the skeleton, and say, 'I fear no evil, for Thou art with me.

Raising the torch, the Olema thrust it into one of the embrasures. There the Master beheld a human skull. The empty eye-sockets, peering out at him, seemed to hold a malevolent malice. That the skull had been but freshly cleaned, was obvious. "Abd el Rahman?" asked the Master. "Yea, the Apostate," answered Bara Miyan. "At last, Allah hath delivered him to us of El Barr."

There were twenty-five of them in all. Each stood on a small black pedestal on which was painted in white a number and a date; excepting one at the end, which had a scarlet pedestal and gold lettering. I looked at this last one curiously; a massive figure with traces of great muscularity, a broad, Mongoloid head with large cheekbones and square eye-sockets.

Its grey-blue trousers and thick boots were in excellent condition and a tin spoon and some papers were showing out of the top of one boot. Its face was a grinning skull and little black animals like ants were climbing in and out of the mouth and the eye-sockets. Its jacket was in good condition, its arms were flung out beyond its head.

Matrena noted the rosy freshness of his cheeks, the absence of down on his lip and not a hint of beard, the thick hair, with the curl over the forehead. Ah, that forehead the forehead was curious, with great over-hanging cranial lumps which moved above the deep arcade of the eye-sockets while the mouth was busy well, one would have said that Rouletabille had not eaten for a week.

Yet he was under the power of the blind man, as if hypnotized. He lifted his hand, and laid the fingers on the scar, on the scarred eyes. Maurice suddenly covered them with his own hand, pressed the fingers of the other man upon his disfigured eye-sockets, trembling in every fibre, and rocking slightly, slowly, from side to side.