King Solomon's Mines , page 190 by H. Rider Haggard
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th, with a colossal white figure at its head, and life- sized white figures all round it. Next I discovered a brown thing, seated on the table in the centre, and in another moment my eyes grew accustomed to the light, and I saw what all these things were, and was tailing out of the place as hard as my legs could carry me.
I am not a nervous man in a general way, and very little troubled with superstitions, of which I have lived to see the folly; but I am free to own that this sight quite upset me, and had it not been that Sir Henry caught me by the collar and held me, I do honestly believe that in another five minutes I should have been outside the stalactite cave, and that a promise of all the diamonds in Kimberley would not have induced me to enter it again. But he held me tight, so I stopped because I could not help myself. Next second, however, /his/ eyes became accustomed to the light, and he let go of me, and began to mop the perspiration off his forehead. As for Good, he swore feebly, while Foulata threw her arms round his neck and shrieked.
Only Gagool chuckled loud and long.
It /was/ a ghastly sight. There at the end of the long stone table, holding in his skeleton fingers a great white spear, sat /Death/ himself, shaped in the form of a colossal human skeleton, fifteen feet or more in height. High above his head he held the spear, as though in the act to strike; one bony hand rested on the stone table before him, in the position a man assumes on rising from his seat, whilst his frame was bent forward so that the vertebræ of the neck and the grinning, gleaming skull projected towards us, and fixed its hollow eye-places upon us, the jaws a little open, as though it were about to speak.
"Great heavens!" said I faintly, at last, "what can it be?"
"And what are /those things/?" asked Good, pointing to the white company round the table.
"And what on earth is /that thing/?" said Sir Henry, pointing to the brown creature seated on the table.
"/Hee! hee! hee