anic gateway, glowing before us.
	We were at its threshold; over it.


CHAPTER VIII.
THE DRUMS OF THUNDER

	Upon that threshold the mists foamed like breaking billows, then ceased abruptly to be. Keeping exactly the distance I had noted when our gaze had risen above the fog, glided the block that bore Ruth and  Norhala. In the strange light of the place into which we had emerged--and whether that place was canyon, corridor, or tunnel I could not then determine--it stood out sharply.
	One arm of Norhala held Ruth--and in her attitude I sensed a shielding intent, guardianship--the first really human impulse this shape of mystery and beauty had revealed.
	In front of them swept score upon score of her familiars --no longer dully lustrous, but shining as though cut from blue and polished steel. They--marched--in ordered rows, globes and cubes and pyramids; moving sedately now as units.
	I looked behind me; out of the spume boiling at the portal, were pouring forth other scores of the Metal Things, darting through like divers through a wave. And as they drew into our wake and swam into the light, their dim lustre vanished like a film; their surfaces grew almost radiant.
	Whence came the light that set them gleaming? Our pace had slackened--I looked about me. The walls of the cleft or tunnel were perpendicular, smooth and shining with a cold, metallic, greenish glow.
	Between the walls, like rhythmic flashing of fire-flies, pulsed soft and fugitive glimmerings that carried a sense of the infinitely minute--of electrons, it came to me, rather than atoms. Their irradiance was greenish, like the walls; but I was certain that these corpuscles did not come from them.
	They blinked and faded like motes within a shifting sunbeam; or, to use a more scientific comparison, like colloids within the illuminated field of the ultramicroscope; and like these latter it was as though the eyes took in not the minute particles themselves but their movement only.
	Save for these gleamings the light of the place, although  crepuscular, was crystalline clear. High above us --five hundred, a thousand feet--the walls merged into a haze of clouded beryl.
	Rock certainly the cliffs were--but rock cut and planed, smoothed and polished and PLATED!
	Yes, that was it--plated. Plated with some metallic substance that was itself a reservoir of luminosity and from which, it came to me, pulsed the force that lighted the winking ions. But who could have done such a thing? For what purpose? How?
	And the meticulousness, the perfection of these smoothed cliffs struck over my nerves as no rasp could, stirring a vague resentment, an irritated desire for human inharmonies, human disorder.
	Absorbed in my examination I had forgotten those who must share with me my doubts and dangers. I felt a grip on my arm.
	"If we get close enough and I can get my feet loose from this damned thing I'll jump," Drake said.
	"What?" I gasped, blankly, startled out of my preoccupation. "Jump where?"
	I followed his pointing finger. We were rapidly closing upon the other cube; it was now a scant twenty paces ahead; it seemed to be stopping. Ventnor was leaning forward, quivering with eagerness.
	"Ruth!" he called. "Ruth--are you all right?"
	Slowly she turned to us--my heart gave a great leap, then seemed to stop. For her sweet face was touched with that same unearthly tranquillity which was Norhala's; in her brown eyes was a shadow of that passionless spirit brooding in Norhala's own; her voice as she answered held within it more than echo of Norhala's faint, far-off golden chiming.
	"Yes," she sighed; "yes, Martin--have no fear for me--"
	And turned from us, gazing forward once more with the woman and as silent as she.
	I glanced covertly at Ventnor, at Drake--had I imagined, or had they too seen? Then I knew they had seen, for Ventnor's face was white to the lips, and Drake's jaw was set, his teeth clenched, his eyes blazing with anger.
	"What's she doing to Ruth--you saw her face," he gritted, half inarticulately.
	"Ruth!" There was anguish in Ventnor's cry.
	She did not turn again. It was as though she had not heard him.
	The cubes were now not five yards apart. Drake gathered himself; strained to loosen his feet from the shining surface, making ready to leap when they should draw close enough. His great chest swelled with his effort, the muscles of his neck knotted, sweat steamed down his face.
	"No use," he gasped, "no use, Goodwin. It's like trying to lift yourself by your boot-straps--like a fly stuck in molasses."
	"Ruth," cried Ventnor once more.
	As though it had been a signal the block darted forward, resuming the distance it had formerly maintained between us.
	The vanguard of the Metal Things began to race. With an incredible speed they fled into, were lost in an instant within, the luminous distances.
	The cube that bore the woman and girl accelerated; flew faster and faster onward. And as swiftly our own followed it. The lustrous walls flowed by, dizzily.
	We had swept over toward the right wall of the cleft and were gliding over a broad ledge. This ledge was, I judged, all of a hundred feet in width. From it the floor of the place was dropping rapidly.
	The opposite precipices were slowly drawing closer. After us flowed the flanking host.
	Steadily our ledge arose and the floor of the canyon dropped. Now we were twenty feet above it, now thirty. And the character of the cliffs was changing. Veins of quartz shone under the metallic plating like cut crystal, like cloudy opals; here was a splash of vermilion, there a patch of amber; bands of pallid ochre stained it.
	My gaze was caught by a line of inky blackness in the exact center of the falling floor. So black was it that at first glance I took it for a vein of jetty lignite.
	It widened. It was a crack, a fissure. Now it was a yard in width, now three, and blackness seemed to well up from within it, blackness that was the very essence of the depths. Steadily the ebon rift expanded; spread suddenly wide open in two sharp-edged, flying wedges--
	Earth had dropped away. At our side a gulf had opened, an abyss, striking down depth upon depth; profound; immeasurable.
	We were human atoms, riding upon a steed of sorcery and racing along a split rampart of infinite space.
	I looked behind--scores of the cubes were darting from the metal host trailing us; in a long column of twos they flashed by, raced ahead. Far in front of us a gloom began to grow; deepened until we were rushing into blackest night.
	Through the murk stabbed a long lance of pale blue  phosphorescence. It unrolled like a ribbon of wan flame, flicked like a serpent's tongue--held steady. I felt the Thing beneath us leap forward; its velocity grew prodigious; the wind beat upon us with hurricane force.
	I shielded my eyes with my hands and peered through the chinks of my fingers. Ranged directly in our path was a barricade of the cubes and upon them we were racing like a flying battering-ram. Involuntarily I closed my eyes against the annihilating impact that seemed inevitable.
	The Thing on which we rode lifted.
	We were soaring at a long angle straight to the top of the barrier; were upon it, and still with that awful speed unchecked were hurtling through the blackness over the shaft of phosphorescence, the ribbon of pale light that I had watched pierce it and knew now was but another span of the cubes that but a little before had fled past us. Beneath the span, on each side of it, I sensed illimitable void.
	We were over; rushing along in darkness. There began a mighty tumult, a vast crashing and roaring. The clangor waxed, beat about us with tremendous strokes of sound.
	Far away was a dim glowing, as of rising sun through heavy mists of dawn. The mists faded--miles away gleamed what at first glimpse seemed indeed to be the rising sun; a gigantic orb, whose lower limb just touched, was sharply, horizontally cut by the blackness, as though at its base that blackness was frozen.
	The sun? Reason returned to me; told me this globe could not be that.
	What was it then? Ra-Harmachis, of the Egyptians, stripped of his wings, exiled and growing old in the corridors of the Dead? Or that mocking luminary, the cold phantom of the God of light and warmth which the old Norsemen believed was set in their frozen hell to torment the damned?
	I thrust aside the fantasies, impatiently. But sun or no sun, light streamed from this orb, light in multicolored, lanced rays, banishing the blackness through which we had been flying.
	Closer we came and closer; lighter it grew about us, and by the growing light I saw that still beside us ran the abyss. And even louder, more thunderous, became the clamor.
	At the foot of the radiant disk I glimpsed a luminous pool. Into it, out of the depths, protruded a tremendous rectangular tongue, gleaming like gray steel.
	On the tongue an inky shape appeared; it lifted itself from the abyss, rushed upon the disk and took form.
	Like a gigantic spider it was, squat and horned. For an instant it was silhouetted against the smiling sphere, poised itself--and vanished through it.
	Now, not far ahead, silhouetted as had been the spider shape, blackened into sight a cube and on it Ruth and Norhala. It seemed to hover, to wait.
	"It's a door," Drake's shout beat thinly in my ears against the hurricane of sound.
	What I thought had been an orb was indeed a gateway, a portal; and it was gigantic.
	The light streamed through it, the flaming colors, the lightning glare, the drifting shadows were all beyond it. The suggestion of sphere had been an illusion, born of the darkness in which we were moving and in its own luminescence.
	And I saw that the steel tongue was a ramp, a slide, dropping down into the gulf.
	Norhala raised her hands high above her head. Up from the darkness flew an incredible shape--like a monstrous, armored flat-backed crab; angled spikes protruded from it; its huge body was spangled with darting, greenish flames.
	It swept beneath us and by. On its back were multitudinous breasts from which issued blinding flashes-- sapphire blue, emerald green, sun yellow. It hung poised as had that other nightmare shape, standing out jet black and colossal, rearing upon columnar legs, whose outlines  were those of alternate enormous angled arrow-points and lunettes. Swiftly its form shifted; an instant it hovered, half disintegrate.
	Now I saw spinning spheres and darting cubes and pyramids click into new positions. The front and side legs lengthened, the back legs shortened, fitting themselves plainly to what must be a varying angle of descent beyond.
	And it was no chimera, no kraken of the abyss. It was a car made of the Metal Things. I caught again the flashes and thought that they were jewels or heaps of shining ores carried by the conscious machine.
	It vanished. In its place hung poised the cube that bore the enigmatic woman and Ruth. Then they were gone and we stood where but an instant before they had been.
	We were high above an ocean of living light--a sea of incandescent splendors that stretched mile upon uncounted mile away and whose incredible waves streamed thousands of feet in air, flew in gigantic banners, in tremendous streamers, in coruscating clouds of varicolored flame--as though torn by the talons of a mighty wind.
	My dazzled sight cleared, glare and blaze and searing  incandescence took form, became ordered. Within the sea of light I glimpsed shapes cyclopean, unnameable.
	They moved slowly, with an awesome deliberateness. They shone darkly within the flame-woven depths. From them came the volleys of the lightnings.
	Score upon score of them there were--huge and enigmatic. Their flaming levins threaded the shimmering veils, patterned them, as though they were the flying robes of the very spirit of fire.
	And the tumult was as ten thousand Thors, smiting with hammers against the enemies of Odin. As a forge upon whose shouting anvils was being shaped a new world.
	A new world? A metal world!
	The thought spun through my mazed brain, was gone-- and not until long after did I remember it. For suddenly all that clamor died; the lightnings ceased; all the flitting radiances paled and the sea of flaming splendors grew thin as moving mists. The storming shapes dulled with them, seemed to darken into the murk.
	Through the fast-waning light and far, far away-- miles it seemed on high and many, many miles in length --a broad band of fluorescent amethyst shone. From it dropped curtains, shimmering, nebulous as the marching folds of the aurora; they poured, cascaded, from the amethystine band.
	Huge and purple-black against their opalescence bulked what at first I thought a mountain, so like was it to one of those fantastic buttes of our desert Southwest when their castellated tops are silhouetted against the setting sun; knew instantly that this was but subconscious striving to translate into terms of reality the incredible.
	It was a City!
	A city full five thousand feet high and crowned with countless spires and turrets, titanic arches, stupendous domes! It was as though the man-made cliffs of lower New York were raised scores of times their height, stretched a score of times their length. And weirdly  enough it did suggest those same towering masses of masonry when one sees them blacken against the twilight skies.
	The pit darkened as though night were filtering down into it; the vast, purple-shadowed walls of the city sparkled out with countless lights. From the crowning arches and turrets leaped broad filaments of flame, flashing, electric.
	Was it my straining eyes, the play of the light and shadow--or were those high-flung excrescences shifting, changing shape? An icy hand stretched out of the unknown, stilled my heart. For they were shifting--arches and domes, turrets and spires; were melting, reappearing in ferment; like the lightning-threaded, rolling edges of the thundercloud.
	I wrenched my gaze away; saw that our platform had come to rest upon a broad and silvery ledge close to the curving frame of the portal and not a yard from where upon her block stood Norhala, her arm clasped about the rigid form of Ruth. I heard a sigh from Ventnor, an exclamation from Drake.
	Before one of us could cry out to Ruth, the cube glided to the edge of the shelf, dipped out of sight.
	That upon which we rode trembled and sped after it.
	There came a sickening sense of falling; we lurched against each other; for the first time the pony whinnied, fearfully. Then with awful speed we were flying down a wide, a glistening, a steeply angled ramp into the Pit, straight toward the half-hidden, soaring escarpments flashing afar.
	Far ahead raced the Thing on which stood woman and maid. Their hair streamed behind them, mingled, silken web of brown and shining veil of red-gold; little clouds of sparkling corpuscles threaded them, like flitting swarms of fire-flies; their bodies were nimbused with tiny, flickering tongues of lavender flame.
	About us, above us, began again to rumble the countless drums of the thunder.


CHAPTER IX.
THE PORTAL OF FLAME

	It was as though we were on a meteor hurtling through space. The split air shrieked and shrilled, a keening barrier against the avalanche of the thunder. The blast bent us far back on thighs held rigid by the magnetic grip.
	The pony spread its legs, dropped its head; through the hurricane roaring its screaming pierced thinly, that agonizing, terrible lamentation which is of the horse and the horse alone when the limit of its endurance is reached.
	Ventnor crouched lower and lower, eyes shielded behind arms folded over his brows, straining for a glimpse of Ruth; Drake crouched beside him, bracing him, supporting him against the tempest.
	Our line of flight became less abrupt, but the speed increased, the wind-pressure became almost insupportable. I twisted, dropped upon my right arm, thrust my head against my shoulder, stared backward. When first I had looked upon the place I had sensed its immensity;  now I began to realize how vast it must really be--for already the gateway through which we had come glimmered far away on high, shrunk to a hoop of incandescent brass and dwindling fast.
	Nor was it a cavern; I saw the stars, traced with deep relief the familiar Northern constellations. Pit it might be, but whatever terror, whatever ordeals were before us, we would not have to face them buried deep within earth. There was a curious comfort to me in the thought.
	Suddenly stars and sky were blotted out.
	We had plunged beneath the surface of the radiant sea.
	Lying in the position in which I was, I was sensible of a diminution of the cyclonic force; the blast streamed up and over the front of the cube. To me drifted only the wailings of our flight and the whimpering terror of the pony.
	I turned my head cautiously. Upon the very edge of the flying blocks squatted Drake and Ventnor, grotesquely frog-like. I crawled toward them--crawled, literally, like a caterpillar; for wherever my body touched the surface of the cubes the attracting force held it, allowed a creeping movement only, surface sliding upon surface--and  weirdly enough like a human measuring-worm I looped myself over to them,
	As my bare palms clung to the Things I realized with finality that whatever their activation, their life, they WERE metal.
	There was no mistaking now the testimony of touch. Metal they were, with a hint upon contact of highly polished platinum, or at the least of a metal as finely grained as it.
	Also they had temperature, a curiously pleasant warmth --the surfaces were, I judged, around ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. I looked deep down into the little sparkling points that were, I knew, organs of sight; they were like the points of contact of innumerable intersecting crystal planes. They held strangest paradoxical suggestion of being close to the surface and still infinite distances away.
	And they were like--what was it they were like?--it came to me with a distinct shock.
	They were like the galaxies of little aureate and sapphire stars in the clear gray heavens of Norhala's eyes.
	I crept beside Drake, struck him with my head.
	"Can't move," I shouted. "Can't lift my hands. Stuck fast--like a fly--just as you said."
	"Drag 'em over your knees," he cried, bending to me. "It slides 'em out of the attraction."
	Acting as he had suggested I found to my astonishment I could slip my hands free; I caught his belt, tried to lift myself by it.
	"No use, Doc." The old grin lightened for a moment his tense young face. "You'll have to keep praying till the power's turned off. Nothing here you can slide your knees on."
	I nodded, waddling close to his side; then sank back on my haunches to relieve the strain upon my aching leg-muscles.
	"Can you see them ahead, Walter--Ruth and the woman?" Ventnor turned his anxious eyes toward me.
	I peered into the glimmering murk; shook my head. I could see nothing. It was indeed, as though the clustered cubes sped within a bubble of the now wanly glistening vapors; or rather as though in our passage--as a projectile does in air--we piled before us a thick wave of the mists which streaming along each side, closing in behind, obscured all that lay around.
	Yet I had, persistently, the feeling that beyond these shroudings was vast and ordered movement; marchings and counter-marchings of hosts greater even than those Golden Hordes of Genghis which ages agone had washed about the outer bases of the very peaks that hid this  place. Came, too, flitting shadowings of huge shapes, unnameable,  moving swiftly beside our way; gleamings that thrust themselves through the veils like wheeling javelins of flame.
	And always, always, everywhere that constant movement, rhythmic, terrifying--like myriads of feet of creatures of an unseen, stranger world marking time just outside the threshold of our own. Preparing, DRILLING there in some wide vestibule of space between the known and the unknown, alert and menacing--poised for the signal which would send them pouring over it.
	Once again I seemed to stand upon the brink of an abyss of incredible revelation, striving helplessly, struggling for  realization--and so struggling became aware that our speed was swiftly slackening, the roaring blast dying down, the veils before us thinning.
	They cleared away. I saw Drake and Ventnor straighten up; raised myself to my own aching knees.
	We were at one end of a vortex, a funneling within the radiant vapors; a funnel whose further end a mile ahead broadened out into a huge circle, its mistily outlined edges impinging upon the towering scarp of the--city. It was as though before us lay, upon its side, a cone of crystalline clear air against whose curved sides some radiant medium heavier than air, lighter than water, pressed.
	The top arc of its prostrate base reached a thousand feet or more up the precipitous wall; above it all was hidden in sparkling nebulosities that were like still clouds of greenly glimmering fire-flies. Back from the curving sides of this cone, above it and below it, the pressing luminosities stretched into, it seemed, infinite distances.
	Through them, suddenly, thousands of bright beams began to dart, to dance, weaving and interweaving, shooting hither and yon--like myriads of great searchlights in a phosphorescent sea fog, like countless lances of the aurora thrusting through its own iridescent veils! And in the play of these beams was something appallingly ordered, appallingly rhythmic.
	It was--how can I describe it?--PURPOSEFUL; purposeful as the geometric shiftings of the Little Things of the ruins, of the summoning song of Norhala, of the Protean changes of the Smiting Shape and the Following Thing; and like all of these it was as laden with that baffling certainty of hidden meanings, of messages that the brain recognized as such yet knew it never could read.
	The rays seemed to spring upward from the earth. Now they were like countless lances of light borne by marching armies of Titans; now they crossed and angled and flew as though they were clouds of javelins hurled by battling swarms of the Genii of Light. And now they  stood upright while through them, thrusting them aside, bending them, passed vast, vague shapes like mountains forming and dissolving; like darkening monsters of some world of light pushing through thick forests of slender, high-reaching trees of cold flame; shifting shadows of monstrous chimerae slipping through jungles of bamboo with trunks of diamond fire; phantasmal leviathans swimming through brakes of giant reeds of radiance rising from the sparking ooze of a sea of star shine.
	Whence came the force, the mechanism that produced this cone of clarity, this NOT searchlight, but unlight in the midst of light? Not from behind, that was certain--for turning I saw that behind us the mist was as thick. I turned again--it came to me, why I knew not, yet with an absolute certainty, that the energy, the force emanated from the distant wall itself.
	The funnel, the cone, did not expand from where we were standing, now motionless.
	It began at the wall and focused upon us.
	Within the great circle the surface of the wall was smooth, utterly blank; upon it was no trace of those flitting lights we had seen before we had plunged down toward the radiant sea. It shone with a pale blue phosphorescence. It was featureless, smooth, a blind cliff of polished, blue metal--and that was all.
	"Ruth!" groaned Ventnor. "Where is she?"
	Aghast at my mental withdrawal from him, angry at myself for my callousness, awkwardly I tried to crawl over to him, to touch him, comfort him as well as I might.
	And then, as though his cry had been a signal, the great cone began to move. Slowly the circled base slipped down the shimmering facades; down, steadily down; I realized that we had paused at the edge of some steep declivity, for the bottom of the cone was now at a decided angle while the upper edge of the circle had dropped a full  two hundred feet below the place where it had rested-- and still it fell.
	There came a gasp of relief from Ventnor, a sigh from Drake while, from my own heart, a weight rolled. Not ten yards ahead of us and still deep within the luminosity had appeared the regal head of Norhala, the lovely head of Ruth. The two rose out of the glow like swimmers floating from the depths. Now they were clear before us, and now we could see the surface of the cube on which they rode.
	But neither turned to us; each stared straightly, motionless along the axis of the sinking cone, the woman's left arm holding Ruth close to her side.
	Drake's hand caught my shoulder in a grip that hurt-- nor did he need to point toward that which had wrung the exclamation from him. The funnel had broken from its slow falling; it had made one swift, startling drop and had come to rest. Its recumbent side was now flattened into a triangular plane, widening from the narrow tip in which we stood to all of five hundred feet where its base rested against the blue wall, and falling at a full thirty-degree pitch.
	The misty-edged circle had become an oval, a flattened ellipse another five hundred feet high and three times that in length. And in its exact center, shining forth as though it opened into a place of pale azure incandescence was another rectangular Cyclopean portal.  On each side of it, in the apparently solid face of the gleaming, metallic cliffs, a slit was opening.
	They began as thin lines a hundred yards in height through which the intense light seemed to hiss; quickly they opened--widening like monstrous cat pupils until at last, their widening ceasing, they glared forth, the blue incandescence gushing from them like molten steel from an opened sluice.
	Deep within them I sensed a movement. Scores of towering shapes swam within and glided out of them, each reflecting the vivid light as though they themselves were incandescent. Around their crests spun wide and flaming coronets.
	They rushed forth, wheeling, whirling, driven like leaves in a whirlwind. Out they swirled from the cat's eyes of the glimmering wall, these dervish obelisks crowded with spinning fires. They vanished in the mists. Instantly with their going, the eyes contracted; were but slits; were gone. And before us within the oval was only the waiting portal.
	The leading block leaped forward. As abruptly, those that bore us followed. Again under that strain of projectile flight we clutched each other; the pony screamed in terror. The metal cliff rushed to meet us like a thunder cloud of steel; the portal raced upon us--a square mouth of cold blue flame.
	And into it we swept; were devoured by it.
	Light in blinding, intolerable flood beat about us, blackening the sight with agony. We pressed, the three of us, against the side of the pony, burying our faces in its shaggy coat, striving to hide our eyes from the radiance which, strain closely as we might, seemed to pierce through the body of the little beast, through our own heads, searing the sight.


CHAPTER X.
"WITCH! GIVE BACK MY SISTER"

	How long we were within that glare I do not know; it seemed unending hours; it was of course only minutes-- seconds, perhaps. Then I was sensible of a permeating shadow, a darkness gentle and healing.
	I raised my head and opened my eyes. We were moving tranquilly, with a curious suggestion of homing leisureliness, through a soft, blue shimmering darkness. It was as though we were drifting within some high borderland of light; a region in which that rapid vibration we call the violet was mingled with a still more rapid vibration whose quick pulsing was felt by the brain but ever fled ere that brain  could register it in terms of color. And there seemed to be a film over my sight; dazzlement from the unearthly blaze, I thought, shaking my head impatiently.
	My eyes focused upon an object a little more than a foot away; my neck grew rigid, my scalp prickled while I stared, unbelieving. And that at which I stared was--a skeleton hand. Every bone a grayish black, sharply silhouetted, clean as some master surgeon's specimen, it was extended as though clutching at--clutching at--what was that toward which it was reaching?
	Again the icy prickling over scalp and skin--for its talons stretched out to grasp a steed that Death himself might have ridden, a rack whose bare skull hung drooping upon bent vertebrae.
	I raised my hands to my face to shut out the ghostly sight--and swiftly the clutching bony hand moved toward me--was before my eyes--touched me.
	The cry that sheer horror wrested from me was strangled by realization. And so acute was my relief, so reassuring was it to have in the midst of these mysteries some sane, understandable thing occur that I laughed aloud.
	For the skeleton hand was my own. The mournful ghastly mount of death was--our pony. And when I looked again I knew what I would see--and see them I did--two tall skeletons, skulls resting on their bony arms, leaning against the frame of the beast.
	While ahead of us, floating poised upon the surface of the glistening cube, were two women skeletons--Ruth and Norhala!
	Weird enough was the sight. Dureresque, grimly awful as materialization of a scene of the Dance Macabre--and yet--vastly comforting.
	For here was something which was well within the range of human knowledge. It was the light about us that did it; a vibration that even as I conjectured, was within the only partly explored region of the ultraviolet and the comparatively unexplored region above it.
	Yet there were differences, for there was none of that misty halo around the bones, the flesh which the X-rays cannot render wholly invisible. The skeletons stood out clean cut, with no trace of fleshly vestments.
	I crept over, spoke to the two.
	"Don't look up yet," I said. "Don't open your eyes. We're going through a queer light. It has an X-ray quality. You're going to see me as a skeleton--"
	"What?" shouted Drake. Disobeying my warning he straightened, glared at me. And disquieting as the spectacle had been before, fully understanding it as I did, I could not restrain my shudder at the utter weirdness of that skull which was his head thrusting itself toward me.
	The skeleton that was Ventnor turned to me; was arrested by the sight of the flitting pair ahead. I saw the fleshless jaws clamp, then opened to speak.
	Abruptly, upon the skeletons in front the flesh dropped back. Girl and woman stood there once again robed in beauty.
	So swift was that transition from the grisly unreal to the normal that even to my unsuperstitious mind it smacked of necromancy. The next instant the three of us stood looking at each other, clothed once more in the flesh, and the pony no longer the steed of death, but our shaggy, patient little companion.
	The light had changed; the high violet had gone from it, and it was shot with yellow gleamings like fugitive sunbeams. We were passing through a wide corridor that seemed to be unending. The yellow light grew stronger.
	"That light wasn't exactly the Roentgen variety," Drake  interrupted my absorption in our surroundings. "And I hope to God it's as different as it seemed. If it's not we may be up against a lot of trouble."
	"More trouble than we're in?" I asked, a trifle satirically.
	"X-ray burns," he answered, "and no way to treat them in this place--if we live to want treatment," he ended grimly.
	"I don't think we were subjected to their action long enough--" I began, and was silent.
	The corridor had opened without warning into a place for whose immensity I have no images that are adequate. It was a chamber that was vaster than ten score of the Great Halls of Karnac in one; great as that fabled hall in dread Amenti where Osiris sits throned between  the Searcher of Hearts and the Eater of Souls, judging the jostling hosts of the newly dead.
	Temple it was in its immensity, and its solemn vastness --but unlike any temple ever raised by human toil. In no ruin of earth's youth giants' work now crumbling under the weight of time had I ever sensed a shadow of the strangeness with which this was instinct. No--nor in the shattered fanes that once had held the gods of old Egypt, nor in the pillared shrines of Ancient Greece, nor Imperial Rome, nor mosque, basilica nor cathedral.
	All these had been dedicated to gods which, whether created by humanity as science believes, or creators of humanity as their worshippers believed, still held in them that essence we term human.
	The spirit, the force, that filled this place had in it nothing, NOTHING of the human.
	No place? Yes, there was one--Stonehenge. Within that monolithic circle I had felt a something akin to this, as inhuman; a brooding spirit stony, stark, unyielding--as though not men but a people of stone had raised the great Menhirs.
	This was a sanctuary built by a people of metal!
	It was filled with a soft yellow glow like pale sunshine. Up from its floor arose hundreds of tremendous, square pillars down whose polished sides the crocus light seemed to flow.
	Far, far as the gaze could reach, the columns marched,  oppressively ordered, appallingly mathematical. From their massiveness distilled a sense of power, mysterious, mechanical yet--living; something priestly, hierophantic-- as though they were guardians of a shrine.
	Now I saw whence came the light suffusing this place. High up among the pillars floated scores of orbs that shone like pale gilt frozen suns. Great and small, through all the upper levels these strange luminaries gleamed, fixed and motionless, hanging unsupported in space. Out from their shining spherical surfaces darted rays of the same pale gold, rigid, unshifting, with the same suggestion of frozen stillness.
	"They look like big Christmas-tree stars," muttered Drake.
	"They're lights," I answered. "Of course they are. They're not matter--not metal, I mean--"
	"There's something about them like St. Elmo's fire, witch  lights--condensations of atmospheric electricity," Ventnor's voice was calm; now that it was plain we were nearing the heart of this mystery in which we were enmeshed he had clearly taken fresh grip, was again his observant, scientific self.
	We watched, once more silent; and indeed we had spoken little since we had begun that ride whose end we sensed close. In the unfolding of enigmatic happening after happening the mind had deserted speech and crouched listening at every door of sight and hearing to gather some clue to causes, some thread of understanding.
	Slowly now we were gliding through the forest of pillars; so effortless, so smooth our flight that we seemed to be standing still, the tremendous columns flitting past us, turning and wheeling around us, dizzyingly. My head swam with the mirage motion, I closed my eyes.
	"Look," Drake was shaking me. "Look. What do you make of that?"
	Half a mile ahead the pillars stopped at the edge of a shimmering, quivering curtain of green luminescence. High, high up past the pale gilt suns its smooth folds ran, into the golden amber mist that canopied the columns.
	In its sparkling was more than a hint of the dancing corpuscles of the aurora; it was, indeed, as though woven of the auroral rays. And all about it played shifting, tremulous shadows formed by the merging of the golden light with the curtain's emerald gleaming.
	Up to its base swept the cube that bore Ruth and Norhala --and stopped. From it leaped the woman, and drew Ruth down beside her, then turned and gestured toward us.
	That upon which we rode drew close. I felt it quiver beneath me; felt on the instant, the magnetic grip drop from me, angle downward and leave me free. Shakily I arose from aching knees, and saw Ventnor flash down and run, rifle in hand, toward his sister.
	Drake bent for his gun. I moved unsteadily toward the side of the clustered cubes. There came a curious pushing motion driving me to the edge. Sliding over upon me came Drake and the pony--
	The cube tilted, gently, playfully--and with the slightest of jars the three of us stood beside it on the floor, we two men gaping at it in renewed wonder, and the little beast stretching its legs, lifting its feet and whinnying with relief.
	Then abruptly the four blocks that had been our steed broke from each other; that which had been the woman's glided to them.
	The four clicked into place behind it and darted from sight.
	"Ruth!" Ventnor's voice was vibrant with his fear. "Ruth! What is wrong with you? What has she done to you?"
	We ran to his side. He stood clutching her hands, searching her eyes. They were wide, unseeing, dream filled. Upon her face the calm and stillness, which were mirrored reflections of Norhala's unearthly tranquillity, had deepened.
	"Brother." The sweet voice seemed far away, drifting out of untroubled space, an echo of Norhala's golden chimings --"Brother, there is nothing wrong with me. Indeed --all is--well with me--brother."  He dropped the listless palms, faced the woman, tall figure tense, drawn with mingled rage and anguish.
	"What have you done to her?" he whispered in Norhala's own tongue.
	Her serene gaze took him in, undisturbed by his anger save for the faintest shadow of wonder, of perplexity.
	"Done?" she repeated, slowly. "I have stilled all that was  troubled within her--have lifted her above sorrow. I have given her the peace--as I will give it to you if--"
	"You'll give me nothing," he interrupted fiercely; then, his passion breaking through all restraint--"Yes, you damned witch--you'll give me back my sister!"
	In his rage he had spoken English; she could not, of course, have understood the words, but their anger and hatred she did understand. Her serenity quivered, broke. The strange stars within her eyes began to glitter forth as they had when she had summoned the Smiting Thing. Unheeding, Ventnor thrust out a hand, caught her roughly by one bare, lovely shoulder.
	"Give her back to me, I say!" he cried. "Give her back to me!"
	The woman's eyes grew--awful. Out of the distended pupils the strange stars blazed; upon her face was something of the goddess outraged. I felt the shadow of Death's wings.
	"No! No--Norhala! No, Martin!" the veils of inhuman calm shrouding Ruth were torn; swiftly the girl we knew looked out from them. She threw herself between the two, arms outstretched.
	"Ventnor!" Drake caught his arms, held them tight; "that's not the way to save her!"
	Ventnor stood between us, quivering, half sobbing. Never until then had I realized how great, how absorbing was that love of his for Ruth. And the woman saw it, too, even though dimly; envisioned it humanly. For, under the shock of human passion, that which I thought then as utterly unknown to her as her cold serenity was to us, the sleeping soul--I use the popular word for those emotional complexes that are peculiar to mankind--stirred, awakened.
	Wrath fled from her knitted brows; her eyes dropping to the girl, lost their dreadfulness; softened. She turned them upon Ventnor, they brooded upon him; within their depths a half-troubled interest, a questioning.
	A smile dawned upon the exquisite face, humanizing it,  transfiguring it, touching with tenderness the sweet and sleeping mouth--as a hovering dream the lips of the slumbering maid.
	And on the face of Ruth, as upon a mirror, I watched that same slow, understanding tenderness reflected!
	"Come," said Norhala, and led the way through the sparkling curtains. As she passed, an arm around Ruth's neck, I saw the marks of Ventnor's fingers upon her white shoulder, staining its purity, marring it like a blasphemy.
	For an instant I hung behind, watching their figures grow misty within the shining shadows; then followed hastily. Entering the mists I was conscious of a pleasant tingling, an acceleration of the pulse, an increase of that sense of well-being which, I grew suddenly aware, had since the beginning of our strange journey minimized the nervous attrition of constant contact with the abnormal.
	Striving to classify, to reduce to order, my sensations I drew close to the others, overtaking them in a dozen paces. A dozen paces more and we stepped out of the curtainings.


CHAPTER XI.
THE METAL EMPEROR

	We stood at the edge of a well whose walls were of that same green vaporous iridescence through which we had just come, but finer grained, compact; as though here the corpuscles of which they were woven were far closer spun. Thousands of feet above us the mighty cylinder uprose, and in the lessened circle that was its mouth I  glimpsed the bright stars; and knew by this it opened into the free air.
	All of half a mile in diameter was this shaft, and ringed  regularly along its height by wide amethystine bands-- like rings of a hollow piston. They were, in color, replicas of that I had glimpsed before our descent into this place and against whose gleaming cataracts the outlines of the incredible city had lowered. And they were in motion, spinning smoothly, and swiftly.
	Only one swift glance I gave them, my eyes held by a most extraordinary--edifice--altar--machine--I could not find the word for it--then.
	Its base was a scant hundred yards from where we had paused and concentric with the sides of the pit. It stood upon a thick circular pedestal of what appeared to be cloudy rock crystal supported by hundreds of thick rods of the same material.
	Up from it lifted the structure, a thing of glistening cones and spinning golden disks; fantastic yet disquietingly symmetrical; bizarre as an angled headdress worn by a mountainous Javanese god--yet coldly, painfully mathematical. In every direction the cones pointed, seemingly interwoven of strands of metal and of light.
	What was their color? It came to me--that of the mysterious element which stains the sun's corona, that diadem seen only when our day star is in eclipse; the unknown element which science has named coronium, which never yet has been found on earth and that may be  electricity in its one material form; electricity that is ponderable; force whose vibrations are keyed down to mass; power transmuted into substance.
	Thousands upon thousands the cones bristled, pyramiding to the base of one tremendous spire that tapered up almost to the top of the shaft itself.
	In their grouping the mind caught infinite calculations carried into infinity; an apotheosis of geometry compassing the rhythms of unknown spatial dimensions; concentration of the equations of the star hordes.
	The mathematics of the Cosmos.
	From the left of the crystalline base swept an enormous sphere. It was twice the height of a tall man, and it was a paler blue than any of these Things I had seen, almost, indeed, an azure; different, too, in other subtle, indefinable ways.
	Behind it glided a pair of the pyramidal shapes, their pointed tips higher by a yard or more than the top of the sphere. They paused--regarding us. Out from the opposite arc of the crystal pedestal moved six other globes, somewhat smaller than the first and of a deep purplish luster.
	They separated, lining up on each side of the leader now standing a little in advance of the twin tetrahedrons, rigid and motionless as watching guards.
	There they stood--that enigmatic row, intent, studying us beneath their god or altar or machine of cones and disks within their cylinder walled with light.
	And at that moment there crystallized within my consciousness the sublimation of all the strangenesses of all that had gone before, a panic loneliness as though I had wandered into an alien world--a world as unfamiliar to humanity, as unfamiliar with it as our own would seem to a thinking, mobile crystal adrift among men.
	Norhala raised her white arms in salutation; from her throat came a lilting theme of her weirdly ordered, golden chanting. Was it speech, I wondered; and if so--prayer or entreaty or command?
	The great sphere quivered and undulated. Swifter than the eye could follow it dilated; opened!
	Where the azure globe had been, flashed out a disk of flaming splendors, the very secret soul of flowered flame! And simultaneously the pyramids leaped up and out behind it--two gigantic, four-rayed stars blazing with cold blue fires.
	The green auroral curtainings flared out, ran with streaming radiance--as though some Spirit of Jewels had broken bonds of enchantment and burst forth jubilant, flooding the shaft with its freed glories. Norhala's song ceased; an arm dropped down upon the shoulders of Ruth.
	Then woman and girl began to float toward the radiant disk.
	As one, the three of us sprang after them. I felt a shock that was like a quick, abrupt tap upon every nerve and muscle, stiffening them into helpless rigidity.
	Paralyzing that sharp, unseen contact had been, but nothing of pain followed it. Instead it created an extraordinary acuteness of sight and hearing, an abnormal keying up of the observational faculties, as though the energy so mysteriously drawn from our motor centers had been thrown back into the sensory.
	I could take in every minute detail of the flashing miracle of gemmed fires and its flaming ministers. Halfway between them and us Norhala and Ruth drifted; I could catch no hint of voluntary motion on their part and knew that they were not walking, but were being borne  onward by some manifestation of that same force which held us motionless.
	I forgot them in my contemplation of the Disk.
	It was oval, twenty feet in height, I judged, and twelve in its greatest width. A broad band, translucent as sun golden chrysolite, ran about its periphery.
	Set within this zodiac and spaced at mathematically regular intervals were nine ovoids of intensely living light. They shone like nine gigantic cabochon cut sapphires; they ranged from palest, watery blue up through azure and purple and down to a ghostly mauve shot with sullen undertones of crimson.
	In each of them was throned a flame that seemed the very fiery essence of vitality.
	The--BODY--was convex, swelling outward like the boss of a shield; shimmering rosy-gray and crystalline. From the vital ovoids ran a pattern of sparkling threads, irised and brilliant as floss of molten jewels; converging with interfacings of spirals, of volutes and of triangles into the nucleus.
	And that nucleus, what was it?
	Even now I can but guess--brain in part as we understand brain, certainly; but far, far more than that in its energies, its powers.
	It was like an immense rose. An incredible rose of a thousand close clustering petals. It blossomed with a myriad shifting hues. And instant by instant the flood of varicolored flame that poured into its petalings down from the sapphire ovoids waxed and waned in crescendoes and diminuendoes of relucent harmonies--ecstatic, awesome.
	The heart of the rose was a star of incandescent ruby.
	From the flaming crimson center to aureate, flashing penumbra it was instinct with and poured forth power--power vast and conscious.
	Not with that same completeness could I realize the ministering star shapes, half hidden as they were by the Disk. Their radiance was less, nor had they its miracle of pulsing gem fires. Blue they were, blue of a peculiar vibrancy, and blue were the glistening threads that ran down from blue-black circular convexities set within each of the points visible to me.
	Unlike in shape, their flame of vitality dimmer than the ovoids of the Disk's golden zone, still I knew that they were even as those--ORGANS, organs of unknown senses, unknown potentialities. Their nuclei I could not observe.
	The floating figures had drawn close to that disk and had paused.
	And on the moment of their pausing I felt a surge of strength, a snapping of the spell that had bound us, an instantaneous withdrawal of the inhibiting force. Ventnor broke into a run, holding his rifle at the alert. We raced after him; were close to the shining shapes. And, gasping, we stopped short not a dozen paces away.
	For Norhala had soared up toward the flaming rose of the Disk as though lifted by gentle, unseen hands. Close to it for an instant she swung. I saw the exquisite body gleam through her thin robes as though bathed in soft flames of rosy pearl.
	Higher she floated, and toward the right of the zodiac. From the edges of three of the ovoids swirled a little cloud of tentacles, gossamer filaments of opal. They whipped out a full yard from the Disk's surface, touching her, caressing her.
	For a moment she hung there, her face hidden from us; then was dropped softly to her feet and stood, arms stretched wide, her copper hair streaming cloudily about her regal head.
	And up past her floated Ruth, levitated as had been she --and her face, ecstatic as though she were gazing into Paradise, yet drenched with the tranquillity of the infinite. Her wide eyes stared up toward that rose of splendors through which the pulsing colors now raced more  swiftly. She hung poised before it while around her head a faint aureole began to form.
	Again the gossamer threads thrust forth, searched her. They ran over her rough clothing--perplexedly. They coiled about her neck, stole through her hair, brushed shut her eyes, circled her brow, her breasts, girdled her.
	Weirdly was it like some intelligence observing, studying, some creature of another species--puzzled by its similarity and unsimilarity with the one other creature of its kind it knew, and striving to reconcile those differences. And like such a questioning brain calling upon others for counsel, it swung Ruth upward to the watching star at the right.  A rifle shot rang out.
	Another--the reports breaking the silence like a profanation.  Unseen by either of us, Ventnor had slipped to one side where he could cover the core of ruby flame that must have seemed to him the heart of the Disk's rose of fire. He knelt a few yards away, white lipped, eyes cold gray ice, sighting carefully for a third shot.
	"Don't! Martin--don't fire!" I shouted, leaping toward him.
	"Stop! Ventnor--" Drake's panic cry mingled with my own.
	But before we could reach him, Norhala flew to him, like a darting swallow. Down the face of the Disk glided the upright body of Ruth, struck softly, stood swaying.
	And out of the blue-black convexity within a star point of one of the opened pyramids a lance of intense green flame darted, a lightning bolt as real as any hurled by tempest, upon Ventnor.
	The shattered air closed behind the streaming spark with the sound of breaking glass.
	It struck--Norhala.
	It struck her. It seemed to splash upon her, to run down her like water. One curling tongue writhed over her bare shoulder and leaped to the barrel of the rifle in Ventnor's hands. It flashed up it and licked him. The gun was torn from his grip, hurled high in air, exploding as it went. He leaped convulsively from his knees and dropped.
	I heard a wailing, low, bitter and heartbroken. Past us ran Ruth, all dream, all unearthliness gone from a face now a tragic mask of human woe and terror. She threw herself down beside her brother, felt of his heart; then raised herself upon her knees and thrust out supplicating hands to the shapes.
	"Don't hurt him any more! He didn't mean it!" she cried out to them piteously--like a child. She reached up, caught one of Norhala's hands. "Norhala--don't let them kill him. Don't let them hurt him any more. Please!" she sobbed.
	Beside me I heard Drake cursing.
	"If they touch her I'll kill the woman! I will, by God I will!" He strode to Norhala's side.
	"If you want to live, call off these devils of yours." His voice was strangled.
	She looked at him, wonder deepening on the tranquil brow, in the clear, untroubled gaze. Of course she could not understand his words--but it was not that which made my own sick apprehension grow.
	It was that she did not understand what called them forth. Did not even understand what reason lay behind Ruth's sorrow, Ruth's prayer.
	And more and more wondering grew in her eyes as she looked from the threatening Drake to the supplicating Ruth, and from them to the still body of Ventnor.
	"Tell her what I say, Goodwin. I mean it."
	I shook my head. That was not the way, I knew. I looked toward the Disk, still flanked with its sextette of spheres, still guarded by the flaming blue stars. They were motionless, calm, watching. I sensed no hostility, no anger; it was as though they were waiting for us to--to-- waiting for us to do what?
	It came to me--they were indifferent. That was it--as indifferent as we could be to the struggle of an ephemera; and as mildly curious.
	"Norhala," I turned to the woman, "she would not have him suffer; she would not have him die. She loves him."
	"Love?" she repeated, and all of her wonderment seemed crystallized in the word. "Love?" she asked.
	"She loves him," I said; and then, why I did not know, but I added, pointing to Drake: "and he loves her."
	There was a tiny, astonished sob from Ruth. Again Norhala brooded over her. Then with a little despairing shake of her head, she paced over and faced the great Disk.
	Tensely we waited. Communication there was between them, interchange of--thought; how carried out I would not hazard even to myself.
	But of a surety these two--the goddess woman, the wholly unhuman shape of metal, of jeweled fires and conscious force--understood each other.
	For she turned, stood aside--and the body of Ventnor quivered, arose from the floor, stood upright and with closed eyes, head dropping upon one shoulder, glided toward the Disk like a dead man carried by those messengers never seen by man who, the Arabs believe, bear the death drugged souls before Allah for their awakening.
	Ruth moaned and hid her eyes; Drake reached down, gathered her up in his arms, held her close.
	Ventnor's body stood before the Disk, then swam up along its face. The tendrils waved out, felt of it, thrust themselves down through the wide collar of the shirt. The floating form passed higher, over the edge of the Disk; lay high beside the right star point of the rayed shape to which Ruth had been passing when Ventnor's shot brought the tragedy upon us. I saw other tentacles whip forth, examine, caress.
	Then down the body swung, was borne through air, laid gently at our feet.
	"He is not--dead," it was Norhala beside me; she lifted Ruth's face from Drake's breast. "He will not die. It may be he will walk again. They can not help," there was a shadow of apology in her tones. "They did not know. They thought it was the"--she hesitated as though at loss for words--"the--the Fire Play."
	"The Fire Play?" I gasped.
	"Yes," she nodded. "You shall see it. And now I will take him to my house. You are safe--now, nor need you trouble. For he has given you to me."
	"Who has given us to you--Norhala?" I asked, as calmly as I could.
	"He"--she nodded to the Disk, then spoke the phrase that was both ancient Assyria's and ancient Persia's title for their all-conquering rulers, and that meant--"the King of Kings. The Great King, Master of Life and Death."
	She took Ruth from Drake's arms, pointing to Ventnor.
	"Bear him," she commanded, and led the way back through the walls of light.
	As we lifted the body, I slipped my hand through the shirt, felt at the heart. Faint was the pulsation and slow, but regular.
	Close to the encircling vapors I cast one look behind me. The shapes stood immobile, flashing disks, gigantic radiant stars and the six great spheres beneath their geometric super-Euclidean god or shrine or machine of interwoven threads of luminous force and metal--still motionless, still watching.
	We emerged into the place of pillars. There stood the hooded pony and its patience, its uncomplaining acceptance of its place as servant to man brought a lump into my throat, salved, I suppose, my human vanity, abased as it had been by the colossal indifference of those things to which we were but playthings.
	Again Norhala sent forth her call. Out of the maze glided her quintette of familiars; again the four clicked into one. Upon its top we lifted, Drake ascending first, the pony; then the body of Ventnor.
	I saw Norhala lead Ruth to the remaining cube; saw the girl break away from her, leap beside me, and kneeling at her brother's head, cradle it against her soft breast. Then as I found in the medicine case the hypodermic needle and the strychnine for which I had been searching, I began my examination of Ventnor.
	The cubes quivered--swept away through the forest of columns.
	We crouched, the three of us, blind to anything that lay about us, heedless of whatever road of wonders we were on, striving to strengthen in Ventnor the spark of life so near extinction.


CHAPTER XII.
"I WILL GIVE YOU PEACE"

	In our concentration upon Ventnor none of us had given thought to the passing of time, nor where we were going. We stripped him to the waist, and while Ruth massaged head and neck, Drake's strong fingers  kneaded chest and abdomen. I had used to the utmost my somewhat limited medical knowledge.
	We had found no mark nor burn upon him, not even upon his hands over which had run the licking flame. The slightly purplish, cyanotic tinge of his skin had given way to a clear pallor; the skin was itself disquietingly cold, the blood-pressure only slightly subnormal. The pulse was more rapid, stronger; the breathing faint but regular, and with no laboring. The pupils of his eyes were contracted almost to the point of invisibility.
	I could get no nervous reactions whatever. I am familiar with the effects of electric shock and know what to do in such cases, but Ventnor's symptoms, while similar in part, presented other features unknown to me and most puzzling. There was a passive automatism, a perplexing muscular rigidity which caused arms and legs, hands and head to remain, doll-like, in any position placed.
	Several times during my labors I had been aware of Norhala gazing down upon us; but she made no effort to help, nor did she speak.
	Now, my strained attention relaxing, I began to receive and note impressions from without. There was a different feeling in the air, a diminution of the magnetic tension; I smelled the blessed breath of trees and water.
	The light about us was clear and pearly, about the intensity of the moon at full. Looking back along the way we had been traveling, I saw a half mile away vertical, knife-sharp edges of two facing cliffs, the gap between them a mile or more wide.
	Through them we must have passed, for beyond them were the radiant mists of the pit of the city, and through this precipitous gateway filtered the enveloping luminosity. On each side of us uprose gradually converging and perpendicular scarps along whose base huddled a sparse foliage.
	There came a low whistle of astonishment from Drake; I turned. We were slowly gliding toward something that looked like nothing so much as a huge and shimmering bubble of mingled sapphire and turquoise, swimming up from and two-thirds above and the balance still hidden  within earth. It seemed to draw to itself the light, sending it back with gleamings of the gray-blue of the star sapphire, with pellucid azures and lazulis like clouded jades, with glistening peacock iridescences and tender, milky greens of tropic shallows.
	Little turrets globular and topaz, yellow and pierced with tiny hexagonal openings clustered about it like baby bubbles just nestling down to rest.
	Great trees shadowed it, unfamiliar trees among whose glossy leaves blossomed in wreaths flowers pink and white as apple-blossoms. From their graceful branches strange fruits, golden and scarlet and pear-shaped, hung pendulous.
	It was an elfin palace; a goblin dwelling; such a bower as some mirthful, beauty-loving Jinn King of Jewels might have built from enchanted hoards for some well-beloved daughter of earth.
	All of fifty feet in height was the blue globe, and up to a wide and ovaled entrance ran a broad and shining roadway. Along this the cubes swept and stopped.
	"My house," murmured Norhala.
	The attraction that had held us to the surface of the blocks relaxed, angled through changed and assisting lines of force; the hosts of minute eyes sparkling quizzically, interestedly, at us, we gently slid Ventnor's body; lifted down the pony.
	"Enter," sighed Norhala, and waved a welcoming hand.
	"Tell her to wait a minute," ordered Drake.
	He slipped the bandage from off the pony's head, threw off the saddlebags, and led it to the side of the roadway where thick, lush grass was growing, spangled with flowerets. There he hobbled it and rejoined us. Together we picked up Ventnor and passed slowly through the portal.
	We stood in a shadowed chamber. The light that filled it was translucent, and oddly enough with little of the bluish quality I had expected. Crystalline it was; the shadows crystalline, too, rigid--like the facets of great crystals. And as my eyes accustomed themselves I saw that what I had thought shadows actually were none.
	They were slices of semitransparent stone like pale moonstones, springing from the curving walls and the high dome, and bisecting and intersecting the chamber. They were pierced with oval doorways over which fell glimmering metallic curtains--silk of silver and gold.
	I glimpsed a pile of this silken stuff near by, and as we laid our burden upon it Ruth caught my arm with a little frightened cry.
	Through a curtained oval sidled a figure.
	Black and tall, its long and gnarled arms swung apelike; its shoulders were distorted, one so much longer than the other that the hand upon that side hung far below the knee.
	It walked with a curious, crablike motion. Upon its face were stamped countless wrinkles and its blackness seemed less that of pigmentation than the weathering of unbelievable years, the very stain of ancientness. And about neither face nor figure was there anything to show whether it was man or woman.
	From the twisted shoulders a short and sleeveless red tunic fell. Incredibly old the creature was--and by its corded muscles, its sinewy tendons, as incredibly powerful. It raised within me a half sick revulsion, loathing. But the eyes were not ancient, no. Irisless, lashless, black and brilliant, they blazed out of the face's carven web of wrinkles, intent upon Norhala and filled with a flame of worship.
	It threw itself at her feet, prostrate, the inordinately long arms outstretched.
	"Mistress!" it whined in a high and curiously unpleasant falsetto. "Great lady! Goddess!"
	She stretched out a sandaled foot, touched one of the black taloned hands, and at the contact I saw a shiver of ecstasy run through the lank body. "Yuruk--" she began, and paused, regarding us.
	"The goddess speaks! Yuruk hears! The goddess speaks!" It was a chant of adoration.
	"Yuruk. Rise. Look upon the strangers."
	The creature--and now I knew what it was--writhed, twisted, and hideously apelike crouched upon its haunches, hands knuckling the floor.
	By the amazement in the unwinking eyes it was plain that not till now had the eunuch taken cognizance of us. The amazement fled, was replaced with a black fire of malignancy, of hatred--jealousy.
	"Augh!" he snarled; leaped to his feet; thrust an arm toward Ruth. She gave a little cry, cowered against Drake.
	"None of that!" He struck down the clutching arm.
	"Yuruk!" There was a hint of anger in the bell-toned voice. "Yuruk, these belong to me. No harm must come to them. Yuruk--beware!"
	"The goddess commands. Yuruk obeys." If fear quavered in the words, beneath was more than a trace of a sullenness, too, sinister enough.
	"That's a nice little playmate for her new playthings," muttered Drake. "If that bird gets the least bit gay--I shoot him pronto." He gave Ruth a reassuring hug. "Cheer up, Ruth. Don't mind that thing. He's something we can handle."
	Norhala waved a white hand; Yuruk sidled over to one of the curtained ovals and through it, reappearing almost instantly with a huge platter upon which were fruits, and a curdly white liquid in bowls of thick porcelain.
	"Eat," she said, as the gnarled black arms placed the platter at our feet.
	"Hungry?" asked Drake. Ruth shook her head violently.
	"I'm going out for the saddlebags," said Drake. "We'll use our own stuff--while it lasts. I'm taking no chances on what the Yuruk lad brings--with all due respect to Norhala's good intentions."
	He started for the doorway; the eunuch block