Who'll hope if Tam will survive? IT seemed to Tam as he rushed up the spiral stairway that he would never reach the top. From time to time he plainly heard the frightened screams of Nina, which grew louder as he mounted higher, until at length he came to a second doorway, barred like the first. Wrenching two more golden bars apart, he pushed through, and into a great domed room ten times as large as the one he had just left, but constructed and decorated in much the same manner, though with an even more lavish hand.
In the center of the room stood an immense, seven-sided golden altar, from the middle of which yellow flames like those he had seen in the Abyss of Fire and evidently fed by a natural gas well, blazed upward, shedding a flickering radiance that caused the jewels in the dome to twinkle like stars and made shadowy objects appear to move.
From behind the altar came Nina, screaming, and running like a frightened deer. She was closely followed by the largest and most hideous quasi-human monster Tam had yet beheld in this land of strange beings. Gigantic, four-armed, and a sickly white in color like the Saivas, this creature was fully a head taller than any Saiva Tam had yet encountered. Five ugly faces, each with a third eye peeping from beneath the golden helmet, made it evident that this was Siva of Saivarta—Siva Panchanana, the Five-faced, Siva Trinetra, the Three-eyed. He wore a necklace of human skulls, and the skin of an immense tiger was wrapped about his loins. From his belt depended an immense tulwar, a mace, and a battle-ax.
Whipping out the yatagan which Luk had pressed upon him, Tam leaped between the monster and the girl.