young girls run
together with the racing of the stars, for the unloosening of the holy
primal energies in a figure and a measure and a ritual old as time.

It was all very well for the instructor (blind instrument of unspeakably
mysterious forces) to pretend that he invented it, that august figure of
the seven-circled Maze; to explain it, as he does to the inquiring, by
the analogy of a billiard table with its pockets. For never yet, on any
billiard table, was a race run and a contest waged like that in which
these young men and girls ran and contended. Drawn up at the far end of
the hall under the east gallery in two ranks, four-breasted, the men on
the one side and the women on the other, they waited, and the leader of
each rank had a foot on a corner circle. They waited, marking time with
their feet, first, to the thudding beat of the barbell on the floor and
then to an unheard measure, secret and restrained, the murmur of life in
the blood, the rhythm of the soundless will, the beat of the unseen,
urging energy, that gathered to intensity, desirous of the race.

As yet the soul of it slept in their rigid bodies, their grave,
forward-looking faces, their behavior, so excessively correct. Somebody
whispered the word, and on a sudden they let themselves go; they
started. Young Tyser, breasting the wind of his own speed, his head
uplifted and thrown backward, led the men, and she with the questing
face and wide-pointing breasts of Artemis led the girls; and he had
young Ransome on his heels and she Winny; and behind them the fourfold
serried ranks thinned and thinned out and spun themselves in two lines
of single file, two threads, one white, one dark blue, both flecked with
crimson, two threads that in their running were wound and unwound and
woven in a pattern, dark blue and white and crimson, that ran and never
paused and never ended and was never the same. For first, each line was
flung slantwise from the corner circle whence it had started, and where
the two met, point by point perpetually, in the center circle, they as
it were intersected, men and women wriggling, sliding, and darting with
incredible dexterity through each other's ranks; and the pattern was a
cross, a tricolor. Then they wheeled round the circle that was and was
not their goal, and did it all over again; but instead of intersecting
at the center circle they struck off there at a tangent, and the
pattern, blue by blue divided from white by white, a