torrents of moon flame that poured through the
septichromatic, high crystals in the Moon Pool's chamber roof.

Swam out of the coruscating haze the--face!

Both of man and of woman it was--like some ancient, androgynous deity
of Etruscan fanes long dust, and yet neither woman nor man; human and
unhuman, seraphic and sinister, benign and malefic--and still no more
of these four than is flame, which is beautiful whether it warms or
devours, or wind whether it feathers the trees or shatters them, or
the wave which is wondrous whether it caresses or kills.

Subtly, undefinably it was of our world and of one not ours. Its
lineaments flowed from another sphere, took fleeting familiar
form--and as swiftly withdrew whence they had come; something
amorphous, unearthly--as of unknown unheeding, unseen gods rushing
through the depths of star-hung space; and still of our own earth,
with the very soul of earth peering out from it, caught within it--and
in some--unholy--way debased.

It had eyes--eyes that were now only shadows darkening within its
luminosity like veils falling, and falling, _opening_ windows into the
unknowable; deepening into softly glowing blue pools, blue as the Moon
Pool itself; then flashing out, and this only when the--face--bore its
most human resemblance, into twin stars large almost as the crown of
little moons; and with that same baffling suggestion of peep-holes
into a world untrodden, alien, perilous to man!

"Steady!" came Lakla's voice, her body leaned against mine.

I gripped myself, my brain steadied, I looked again. And I saw that
of body, at least body as we know it, the Shining One had
none--nothing but the throbbing, pulsing core streaked with lightning
veins of rainbows; and around this, never still, sheathing it, the
swirling, glorious veilings of its hell and heaven born radiance.

So the Dweller stood--and gazed.

Then up toward us swept a reaching, questing spiral!

Under my hand Lakla's shoulder quivered; dead-alive and their master
vanished--I danced, flickered, _within_ the rock; felt a swift sense of
shrinking, of withdrawal; slice upon slice the carded walls of stone,
of silvery waters, of elfin gardens slipped from me as cards are
withdrawn from a pack, one by one--slipped, wheeled, flattened, and
lengthened out as I passed through them and they passed from me.

Gasping, shaken, weak, I stood within the faceted oval chamber; arm
still about the handmaiden's white shoulder;