Suddenly the long neck stiffened. It set stiff as a rope that warps a ship from harbor. The eyes settled into a glassy stare. The swallowings that had pulsed at the junctions of the neck and dewlap ceased. The muscles became rigid. A hideous paralysis seemed to fall upon it as if by magic.

A sigh—almost a sob—shivered up into the stillness, and I looked at my companions. All of them were staring, staring, staring—three of them with eager, human, living faces, the fourth with the carven visage of the dead.

Parsons might have been graven from the rock. His hands were caught upon the lapels of his jacket; his lips and teeth were slightly parted; his eyes burnt their steadfast gaze upon the Beast unblinkingly. But for the measured rise and fall of his chest, he was as unstirring as one of the cañon boulders.

Then I saw that the ghastly Thing was staring with concentration at Parsons. As I watched, it gaped upon him. Parsons opened his jaws with measured, automatic motion, and gaped back. The sinuous neck swayed. Parsons stretched his throat with horrifying imitation. The thing advanced three ponderous steps. Parsons lurched forward a like space draggingly. The long serrated tail lashed to and fro once and again. Parsons waggled his body monstrously.

I glanced at the glacier cave which opened invitingly fifty yards away. Then I turned to measure the Horror intently with my eye. Beyond a doubt his gigantic limbs could never pass it. I rushed at Parsons, and seized his coat-collar. He struck at me furiously and unseeingly, his eyes gluing themselves to the fascination before him. I yelled to the others, and then simultaneously we made a rush to the cleft in the glacier face, bearing with us the struggling sailor. He hit out madly, his frozen death-like eyes still rapt upon the Beast. Shrieking, fighting, but still staring, we shoved him through the icy waterway, and heaved him with great splashings round the corner that screened the entrance.

As we lugged him back into the blue dimness of the cavern I pressed my palms upon his eyelids, and bawled reassuringly into his ear. As if a garment fell from him his body lost its rigidity; as I removed my hand his eyes looked back into mine with the natural light soft within them. The tense glare of a moment before was gone. He began to sob and cling to me.

“Oh Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord,” he yammered, gripping my arm till I could have yelled with the pain; “the eyes of him—the blisterin’ eyes. They dragged me like a puppy on a string. I ’ad to go an’ be thankful for goin’. ’E’ll ’ave me yet, ’e’ll ’ave me yet. ’E’ll nip me up an’ break my back as if I was a bilge rat, an’ no more. Oh, for the Lord’s sake ’old on to me, or I’ll be cracked like a nut in ’is ’orrid jaws, an’ I didn’t sign for no dragons, m’lord, but only as deck ’and an’ not for no wanderin’s in devils’ lands.” And so on and so forth did he incoherently complain, covering his face from the sight of the approaching monster, grovelling at my feet on the damp sandy floor, as we others watched the gaunt Fearsomeness approach.

Chapter XII, page 185-187