ough them, and as though growing in some medium
thicker than air, was mass upon mass of verdure--fruiting trees and
trees laden with pale blossoms, arbours and bowers of pallid blooms,
like that sea fruit of oblivion--grapes of Lethe--that cling to the
tide-swept walls of the caverns of the Hebrides.

Through them, beyond them, around and about them, drifted and eddied a
horde--great as that with which Tamerlane swept down upon Rome, vast
as the myriads which Genghis Khan rolled upon the califs--men and
women and children--clothed in tatters, half nude and wholly naked;
slant-eyed Chinese, sloe-eyed Malays, islanders black and brown and
yellow, fierce-faced warriors of the Solomons with grizzled locks
fantastically bedizened; Papuans, feline Javans, Dyaks of hill and
shore; hook-nosed Phoenicians, Romans, straight-browed Greeks, and
Vikings centuries _beyond_ their lives: scores of the black-haired
Murians; white faces of our own Westerners--men and women and
children--drifting, eddying--each stamped with that mingled horror and
rapture, eyes filled with ecstasy and terror entwined, marked by God
and devil in embrace--the seal of the Shining One--the dead-alive; the
lost ones!

The loot of the Dweller!

Soul-sick, I gazed. They lifted to us visages of dread; they swept
down toward us, glaring upward--a bank against which other and still
other waves of faces rolled, were checked, paused; until as far as I
could see, like billows piled upon an ever-growing barrier, they
stretched beneath us--staring--staring!

Now there was a movement--far, far away; a concentrating of the
lambency; the dead-alive swayed, oscillated, separated--forming a long
lane against whose outskirts they crowded with avid, hungry
insistence.

First only a luminous cloud, then a whirling pillar of splendours
through the lane came--the Shining One. As it passed, the dead-alive
swirled in its wake like leaves behind a whirlwind, eddying, twisting;
and as the Dweller raced by them, brushing them with its spirallings
and tentacles, they shone forth with unearthly, awesome
gleamings--like vessels of alabaster in which wicks flare suddenly.
And when it had passed they closed behind it, staring up at us once
more.

The Dweller paused beneath us.

Out of the drifting ruck swam the body of Throckmartin! Throckmartin,
my friend, to find whom I had gone to the pallid moon door; my friend
whose call I had so laggardly followed. On his face was the Dwel