nto the inner court. I
took my place at the side of the grey rock. Edith crouched behind a
broken pillar twenty feet away; slipped her rifle-barrel over it so
that it would cover the opening.

"The minutes crept by. The darkness lessened and through the breaches
of the terrace I watched the far sky softly lighten. With the first
pale flush the silence of the place intensified. It deepened; became
unbearably--expectant. The moon rose, showed the quarter, the half,
then swam up into full sight like a great bubble.

"Its rays fell upon the wall before me and suddenly upon the
convexities I have described seven little circles of light sprang out.
They gleamed, glimmered, grew brighter--shone. The gigantic slab
before me glowed with them, silver wavelets of phosphorescence pulsed
over its surface and then--it turned as though on a pivot, sighing
softly as it moved!

"With a word to Edith I flung myself through the opening. A tunnel
stretched before me. It glowed with the same faint silvery radiance.
Down it I raced. The passage turned abruptly, passed parallel to the
walls of the outer courtyard and then once more led downward.

"The passage ended. Before me was a high vaulted arch. It seemed to
open into space; a space filled with lambent, coruscating,
many-coloured mist whose brightness grew even as I watched. I passed
through the arch and stopped in sheer awe!

"In front of me was a pool. It was circular, perhaps twenty feet
wide. Around it ran a low, softly curved lip of glimmering silvery
stone. Its water was palest blue. The pool with its silvery rim was
like a great blue eye staring upward.

"Upon it streamed seven shafts of radiance. They poured down upon the
blue eye like cylindrical torrents; they were like shining pillars of
light rising from a sapphire floor.

"One was the tender pink of the pearl; one of the aurora's green; a
third a deathly white; the fourth the blue in mother-of-pearl; a
shimmering column of pale amber; a beam of amethyst; a shaft of molten
silver. Such are the colours of the seven lights that stream upon the
Moon Pool. I drew closer, awestricken. The shafts did not illumine the
depths. They played upon the surface and seemed there to diffuse, to
melt into it. The Pool drank them?

"Through the water tiny gleams of phosphorescence began to dart,
sparkles and coruscations of pale incandescence. And far, far below I
sensed a movement, a shifting glow as of a radiant body slowly ri