--like, I thought, the radiant shower of particles
hurled out by radium when seen under the microscope. Mistier still it
grew--there trembled before us for a moment a faintly luminous shadow
which held, here and there, tiny sparkling atoms like those that
pulsed in the light about us! The glowing shadow vanished, the
sparkling atoms were still for a moment--and shot away, joining those
dancing others.

Where the gnomelike form had been but a few seconds before--there was
nothing!

O'Keefe drew a long breath, and I was sensible of a prickling along my
scalp.

Yolara leaned toward us.

"You have seen," she said. Her eyes lingered tigerishly upon Olaf's
pallid face. "Heed!" she whispered. She turned to the men in green,
who were laughing softly among themselves.

"Take these two, and go!" she commanded.

"The justice of Lora," said the red dwarf. "The justice of Lora and
the Shining One under Thanaroa!"

Upon the utterance of the last word I saw Marakinoff start violently.
The hand at his side made a swift, surreptitious gesture, so fleeting
that I hardly caught it. The red dwarf stared at the Russian, and
there was amazement upon his face.

Swiftly as Marakinoff, he returned it.

"Yolara," the red dwarf spoke, "it would please me to take this man of
wisdom to my own place for a time. The giant I would have, too."

The woman awoke from her brooding; nodded.

"As you will, Lugur," she said.

And as, shaken to the core, we passed out into the garden into the
full throbbing of the light, I wondered if all the tiny sparkling
diamond points that shook about us had once been men like Songar of
the Lower Waters--and felt my very soul grow sick!

[1] Later I was to find that Murian reckoning rested upon the
extraordinary increased luminosity of the cliffs at the time of full
moon on earth--this action, to my mind, being linked either with the
effect of the light streaming globes upon the Moon Pool, whose source
was in the shining cliffs, or else upon some mysterious affinity of
their radiant element with the flood of moonlight on earth--the
latter, most probably, because even when the moon must have been
clouded above, it made no difference in the phenomenon. Thirteen of
these shinings forth constituted a laya, one of them a lat. Ten was
sa; ten times ten times ten a said, or thousand; ten times a thousand
was a sais. A sais of laya was then literally ten thousand years. What
we would call an hour was by them