icles--slender and straight as spears, or soaring in spirals, or
curving with undulations gracile as the white serpents of Tanit in
ancient Carthaginian groves--and all surmounted by a fantasy of spore
cases in shapes of minaret and turret, domes and spires and cones,
caps of Phrygia and bishops' mitres, shapes grotesque and
unnameable--shapes delicate and lovely!

They hung high poised, nodding and swaying--like goblins hovering over
_Titania's_ court; cacophony of Cathay accenting the _Flower Maiden_
music of "Parsifal"; _bizarrerie_ of the angled, fantastic beings that
people the Javan pantheon watching a bacchanal of houris in Mohammed's
paradise!

Down upon it all poured the amber light; dimmed in the distances by
huge, drifting darkenings lurid as the flying mantles of the
hurricane.

And through the light, like showers of jewels, myriads of birds,
darting, dipping, soaring, and still other myriads of gigantic,
shimmering butterflies.

A sound came to us, reaching out like the first faint susurrus of the
incoming tide; sighing, sighing, growing stronger--now its mournful
whispering quivered all about us, shook us--then passing like a
Presence, died away in far distances.

"The Portal!" said Rador. "Lugur has entered!"

He, too, parted the fronds and peered back along our path. Peering
with him we saw the barrier through which we had come stretching
verdure-covered walls for miles three or more away. Like a mole burrow
in a garden stretched the trail of the tunnel; here and there we could
look down within the rift at its top; far off in it I thought I saw
the glint of spears.

"They come!" whispered Rador. "Quick! We must not meet them here!"

And then--

"Holy St. Brigid!" gasped Larry.

From the rift in the tunnel's continuation, nigh a mile beyond the
cleft through which we had fled, lifted a crown of horns--of
tentacles--erect, alert, of mottled gold and crimson; lifted
higher--and from a monstrous scarlet head beneath them blazed two
enormous, obloid eyes, their depths wells of purplish phosphorescence;
higher still--noseless, earless, chinless; a livid, worm mouth from
which a slender scarlet tongue leaped like playing flames! Slowly it
rose--its mighty neck cuirassed with gold and scarlet scales from
whose polished surfaces the amber light glinted like flakes of fire;
and under this neck shimmered something like a palely luminous silvery
shield, guarding it. The head of horror mounted--and