Supping With Panthers by Tom Holland

wickedness in which desire and delight seemed equally mixed. They were all facing the temple’s far end, as though staring at the giant statues I had glimpsed from outside. I hurried on past them. At length the columns came to an end, and I saw a small courtyard just in front of me. Giant figures loomed against the stars. I walked on, and as I did so I felt a stickiness underfoot. I kneeled down and thought I could smell the odour of blood. I touched the stones, then raised my fingers to the light of the moon. I had been right; my fingertips were indeed red!
    I walked forward to inspect the giant statues more closely. There were six of them arranged symmetrically on rising steps, three on either side. They were all women staring upwards, as the faces on the columns had been, at an empty throne. Just before this throne, the most damnable tiling of all, stood a further statue, of a little girl. I climbed towards it up the steps. They too, I realised, felt sticky underfoot.
    Eliot followed me. Suddenly, I heard him stop and I turned round. ‘What is it?’ I asked.
    ‘Look,’ Eliot replied. ‘Do you recognise her?’ He was pointing at the nearest statue to us. Now that we had climbed the steps we could see her face, lit silver by the blazing moon. It was a coincidence, of course, for the temple was clearly centuries old, but I saw at once what Eliot had meant – the statue’s face was the very image of the woman we had captured, the beautiful prisoner who had subsequently escaped.
    I turned back to Eliot. ‘A great-great-grandmother, perhaps?’ I joked.
    But Eliot didn’t smile. His head was angled, as though he were trying to pick out some sound.
    ‘What is it?’ I asked. For a couple of seconds, he didn’t reply.
    ‘You didn’t hear anything?’ he answered at length. I shook my head and Eliot shrugged. ‘It must have been the wind,’ he said. He smiled faintly. ‘Or the beating of my heart, perhaps.’
    I took a step forward to climb to the empty throne and Eliot promptly froze again. ‘There,’ he said, ‘can you hear it now?’ I listened, and this time I realised I could indeed hear something faint. It sounded like drums -not as we have them in the West but rather the tabla with its hypnotic, limitless beat. It was coming from beyond the empty throne. I crept up towards it; I put my hand on its arm and, as I did so, I felt a shudder of overwhelming dread so physical that I almost staggered back. Looking down, I realised that the throne was absolutely drenched in gore, not just blood but bones and intestines, and lumps of flesh.
    ‘Goat?’ I asked, looking at Eliot. He bent down and looked at what appeared to be a heart. His face froze as slowly he shook his head.
    The tabla beat was clear now and picking up in pace. Beyond the throne was a crumbling wall; I approached it and, kneeling down, peered through a gap in the masonry. I gasped at what I saw. For I was staring at the ruins of a mighty town, overgrown – as the palace had been – by creepers and trees, and yet filled, it seemed, with inhabitants. They were shuffling and stumbling away from us, past the cracked arches and pillars of the town, towards some gathering which lay beyond our sight behind a further wall. In the distance I could see the haze of flames, and I wondered what their significance could be, for I remembered that the disease-afflicted creatures had a great horror of light. The whole scene was dominated by a colossal temple, the same tower I had glimpsed through the jungle earlier, and I could see even at a distance how its exterior was a mass of statuary, for it was silhouetted against the stars and its base was lit orange by the blaze of the flames.
    I saw that Eliot was testing the wind. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘the breeze will be against us.’
    ‘Beg pardon, sir?’ asked the Sergeant-Major.
    ‘I mean,’ explained Eliot, ‘that they shouldn’t be able to catch our scent. You have seen how they sometimes