e crimson waters. As vultures swoop down upon the
dying, there came sailing swiftly to where the dead men floated,
dozens of the luminous globes. Their slender, varicoloured tentacles
whipped out; the giant iridescent bubbles _climbed_ over the cadavers.
And as they touched them there was the swift dissolution, the melting
away into putrescence of flesh and bone that I had witnessed when the
dart touched fruit that time I had saved Rador--and upon this the
Medusae gorged; pulsing lambently; their wondrous colours shifting,
changing, glowing stronger; elfin moons now indeed, but satellites
whose glimmering beauty was fed by death; alembics of enchantment
whose glorious hues were sucked from horror.

Sick, I turned away--O'Keefe as pale as I; passed back into the
corridor that had opened on the ledge from which we had watched; met
Lakla hurrying toward us. Before she could speak there throbbed
faintly about us a vast sighing. It grew into a murmur, a whispering,
shook us--then passing like a presence, died away in far distance.

"The Portal has opened," said the handmaiden. A fainter sighing, like
an echo of the other, mourned about us. "Yolara is gone," she said,
"the Portal is closed. Now must we hasten--for the Three have
commanded that you, Goodwin, and Larry and I tread that strange road
of which I have spoken, and which Olaf may not take lest his heart
break--and we must return ere he and Rador cross the bridge."

Her hand sought Larry's.

"Come!" said Lakla, and we walked on; down and down through hall after
hall, flight upon flight of stairways. Deep, deep indeed, we must be
beneath the domed castle--Lakla paused before a curved, smooth breast
of the crimson stone rounding gently into the passage. She pressed its
side; it revolved; we entered; it closed behind us.

The room, the--hollow--in which we stood was faceted like a diamond;
and like a cut brilliant its sides glistened--though dully. Its shape
was a deep oval, and our path dropped down to a circular polished
base, roughly two yards in diameter. Glancing behind me I saw that in
the closing of the entrance there had been left no trace of it save
the steps that led from where that entrance had been--and as I looked
these steps _turned_, leaving us isolated upon the circle, only the
faceted walls about us--and in each of the gleaming faces the three of
us reflected--dimly. It was as though we were within a diamond egg
whose graven angles had been turned