"The time approaches," he said
to Lu-don. "Prepare the sacrifice."
Lu-don nodded to the priests who were gathered about Tarzan. They
seized the ape-man and lifted him bodily to the altar where they laid
him upon his back with his head at the south end of the monolith,
but a few feet from where Jane Clayton stood. Impulsively and
before they could restrain her the woman rushed forward and bending
quickly kissed her mate upon the forehead. "Good-bye, John," she
whispered.
"Good-bye," he answered, smiling.
The priests seized her and dragged her away. Lu-don handed the
sacrificial knife to Obergatz. "I am the Great God," cried the
German, "thus falleth the divine wrath upon all my enemies!" He
looked up at the sun and then raised the knife high above his head.
"Thus die the blasphemers of God!" he screamed, and at the same
instant a sharp staccato note rang out above the silent, spell-bound
multitude. There was a screaming whistle in the air and Jad-ben-Otho
crumpled forward across the body of his intended victim. Again the
same alarming noise and Lu-don fell, a third and Mo-sar crumpled
to the ground. And now the warriors and the people, locating the
direction of this new and unknown sound turned toward the western
end of the court.
Upon the summit of the temple wall they saw two figures--a Ho-don
warrior and beside him an almost naked creature of the race
of Tarzan-jad-guru, across his shoulders and about his hips were
strange broad belts studded with beautiful cylinders that glinted
in the mid-day sun, and in his hands a shining thing of wood and
metal from the end of which rose a thin wreath of blue-gray smoke.
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