earth-sick I was.

Whence came the stream, I marvelled, forgetting for the moment, as we
passed on again, all else. Were we closer to the surface of earth than
I had thought, or was this some mighty flood falling through an
opening in sea floor, Heaven alone knew how many miles above us,
losing itself in deeper abysses beyond these? How near and how far
this was from the truth I was to learn--and never did truth come to
man in more dreadful guise!

The roaring fell away, the blue haze lessened. In front of us
stretched a wide flight of steps, huge as those which had led us into
the courtyard of Nan-Tauach through the ruined sea-gate. We scaled it;
it narrowed; from above light poured through a still narrower opening.
Side by side Larry and I passed out of it.

We had emerged upon an enormous platform of what seemed to be
glistening ivory. It stretched before us for a hundred yards or more
and then shelved gently into the white waters. Opposite--not a mile
away--was that prodigious web of woven rainbows Rador had called the
Veil of the Shining One. There it shone in all its unearthly grandeur,
on each side of the Cyclopean pillars, as though a mountain should
stretch up arms raising between them a fairy banner of auroral
glories. Beneath it was the curved, scimitar sweep of the pier with
its clustered, gleaming temples.

Before that brief, fascinated glance was done, there dropped upon my
soul a sensation as of brooding weight intolerable; a spiritual
oppression as though some vastness was falling, pressing, stifling me,
I turned--and Larry caught me as I reeled.

"Steady! Steady, old man!" he whispered.

At first all that my staggering consciousness could realize was an
immensity, an immeasurable uprearing that brought with it the same
throat-gripping vertigo as comes from gazing downward from some great
height--then a blur of white faces--intolerable shinings of hundreds
upon thousands of eyes. Huge, incredibly huge, a colossal amphitheatre
of jet, a stupendous semi-circle, held within its mighty arc the ivory
platform on which I stood.

It reared itself almost perpendicularly hundreds of feet up into the
sparkling heavens, and thrust down on each side its ebon
bulwarks--like monstrous paws. Now, the giddiness from its sheer
greatness passing, I saw that it was indeed an amphitheatre sloping
slightly backward tier after tier, and that the white blur of faces
against its blackness, the gleaming of countless