_inward_.

But the oval was not perfect; at my right a screen cut it--a screen
that gleamed with fugitive, fleeting luminescences--stretching from
the side of our standing place up to the tip of the chamber; slightly
convex and crisscrossed by millions of fine lines like those upon a
spectroscopic plate, but with this difference--that within each line I
sensed the presence of multitudes of finer lines, dwindling into
infinitude, ultramicroscopic, traced by some instrument compared to
whose delicacy our finest tool would be as a crowbar to the needle of
a micrometer.

A foot or two from it stood something like the standee of a compass,
bearing, like it a cradled dial under whose crystal ran concentric
rings of prisoned, lambent vapours, faintly blue. From the edge of the
dial jutted a little shelf of crystal, a keyboard, in which were cut
eight small cups.

Within these cups the handmaiden placed her tapering fingers. She
gazed down upon the disk; pressed a digit--and the screen behind us
slipped noiselessly into another angle.

"Put your arm around my waist, Larry, darlin', and stand close," she
murmured. "You, Goodwin, place your arm over my shoulder."

Wondering, I did as she bade; she pressed other fingers upon the
shelf's indentations--three of the rings of vapour spun into intense
light, raced around each other; from the screen behind us grew a
radiance that held within itself all spectrums--not only those seen,
but those _unseen_ by man's eyes. It waxed brilliant and ever more
brilliant, all suffusing, passing through me as day streams through a
window pane!

The enclosing facets burst into a blaze of coruscations, and in each
sparkling panel I saw our images, shaken and torn like pennants in a
whirlwind. I turned to look--was stopped by the handmaiden's swift
command: "Turn not--on your life!"

The radiance behind me grew; was a rushing tempest of light in which I
was but the shadow of a shadow. I heard, but not with my ears--nay with
_mind_ itself--a vast roaring; an _ordered_ tumult of sound that came
hurling from the outposts of space; approaching--rushing--hurricane
out of the heart of the cosmos--closer, closer. It wrapped itself
about us with unearthly mighty arms.

And brilliant, ever more brilliant, streamed the radiance through us.

The faceted walls dimmed; in front of me they melted, diaphanously,
like a gelatinous wall in a blast of flame; through their vanishing,
under the torrent of dri