o move. I tried to cry out to Stanton. I had not even the
will to move my lips. Goodwin--I could not even move my eyes!

"Stanton was in the range of my fixed vision. I watched him leap up
the steps and move toward the gateway. The curdled radiance seemed to
await him. He stepped into it--and was lost to my sight.

"For a dozen heart beats there was silence. Then a rain of tinklings
that set the pulses racing with joy and at once checked them with tiny
fingers of ice--and ringing through them Stanton's voice from the
courtyard--a great cry--a scream--filled with ecstasy insupportable
and horror unimaginable! And once more there was silence. I strove to
burst the bonds that held me. I could not. Even my eyelids were fixed.
Within them my eyes, dry and aching, burned.

"Then Goodwin--I first saw the--inexplicable! The crystalline music
swelled. Where I sat I could take in the gateway and its basalt
portals, rough and broken, rising to the top of the wall forty feet
above, shattered, ruined portals--unclimbable. From this gateway an
intenser light began to flow. It grew, it gushed, and out of it walked
Stanton.

"Stanton! But--God! What a vision!"

A deep tremor shook him. I waited--waited.

CHAPTER V

Into the Moon Pool

"Goodwin," Throckmartin went on at last, "I can describe him only as a
thing of living light. He radiated light; was filled with light;
overflowed with it. A shining cloud whirled through and around him in
radiant swirls, shimmering tentacles, luminescent, coruscating
spirals.

"His face shone with a rapture too great to be borne by living man,
and was shadowed with insuperable misery. It was as though it had been
remoulded by the hand of God and the hand of Satan, working together
and in harmony. You have seen that seal upon my own. But you have
never seen it in the degree that Stanton bore it. The eyes were wide
open and fixed, as though upon some inward vision of hell and heaven!

"The light that filled and surrounded him had a nucleus, a
core--something shiftingly human shaped--that dissolved and changed,
gathered itself, whirled through and beyond him and back again. And as
its shining nucleus passed through him Stanton's whole body pulsed
radiance. As the luminescence moved, there moved above it, still and
serene always, seven tiny globes of seven colors, like seven little
moons.

"Then swiftly Stanton was lifted--levitated--up the unscalable wall
and to its top. The glow fa