rry and
aught else. For this was no rainbow, no thing born of light and mist,
no Bifrost Bridge of myth--no! It was a flying arch of stone, stained
with flares of Tyrian purples, of royal scarlets, of blues dark as the
Gulf Stream's ribbon, sapphires soft as midday May skies, splashes of
chromes and greens--a palette of giantry, a bridge of wizardry; a
hundred, nay, a thousand, times greater than that of Utah which the
Navaho call Nonnegozche and worship, as well they may, as a god, and
which is itself a rainbow in eternal rock.

It sprang from the ledge and winged its prodigious length in one low
arc over the sea's crimson breast, as though in some ancient paroxysm
of earth it had been hurled molten, crystallizing into that stupendous
span and still flaming with the fires that had moulded it.

Closer we came and closer, while I watched spellbound; now we were at
its head, and the litter-bearers swept upon it. All of five hundred
feet wide it was, surface smooth as a city road, sides low walled,
curving inward as though in the jetting-out of its making the edges of
the plastic rock had curled.

On and on we sped; the high thrusting precipices upon which the
bridge's far end rested, frowned close; the enigmatic, dully shining
dome loomed ever greater. Now we had reached that end; were passing
over a smooth plaza whose level floor was enclosed, save for a rift in
front of us, by the fanged tops of the black cliffs.

From this rift stretched another span, half a mile long, perhaps,
widening at its centre into a broad platform, continuing straight to
two massive gates set within the face of the second cliff wall like
panels, and of the same dull gold as the dome rising high beyond. And
this smaller arch leaped a pit, an abyss, of which the outer
precipices were the rim holding back from the pit the red flood.

We were rapidly approaching; now upon the platform; my bearers were
striding closely along the side; I leaned far out--a giddiness seized
me! I gazed down into depth upon vertiginous depth; an abyss
indeed--an abyss dropping to world's base like that in which the
Babylonians believed writhed Talaat, the serpent mother of Chaos; a
pit that struck down into earth's heart itself.

Now, what was that--distance upon unfathomable distance below? A
stupendous glowing like the green fire of life itself. What was it
like? I had it! It was like the corona of the sun in eclipse--that
burgeoning that makes of our luminary