Explore "The Last Lemurian: A Westralian Romance" by G. Firth Scott on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
SHE stopped at the platform upon which the cushions were piled, and stood looking at me long and steadily. On her face there was a smile of fiendish cynicism, and her eyes took an expression of the most hideous cruelty and coldness, such as I have only seen equalled in those of a snake when it has struck its prey, and lies coiled round its victim, holding it in an embrace of merciless rigidity, gloating in its enjoyment of the gradually weakening death-struggles of the hapless creature. A cold thrill of horror passed over me as I met those eyes, and I felt my flesh quiver, and my heart flutter, as a feeling of faintness came upon me. Instinctively I knew that I was being dominated by her, and my mind leaped in a spasm of fear as the figures of the gruesome pigmies floated through my brain, and I understood the meaning of the words she had used when she told us that she was doomed to live upon the substance of those around her. Even now she was drawing the vital forces of my being from me, and soon I should be as those wretched creatures were, if I did not resist and overcome the glamour of her eyes.
The thought steeled my mind and I strained every nerve to meet and return her gaze. It was a terrible effort on my part to look into those pale, luminous orbs with the phosphorescent flames flickering away within their lambent depths. I could not have stood it much longer, when she shifted her glance to the Hatter and said in a softened voice: