nd all red-flecked,
was two wide V's set point to point, a pattern that ran away and
vanished as each thread, returning, wheeled round the circle whence the
other thread had started.

And all this at the top speed set by Tyser, and with the thud of the
men's feet and the pad of the women's; all this with a secret challenge
and defiance of one sex to the other, with separation and estrangement,
with a never-ending, baffling approach and flight, with the furtive
darting of man from woman and of woman from man, whirled in their
courses from each other as they met.

And now the lines doubled; they were running two abreast, slantwise; and
as they intersected in the sacred center circle it was with a mingling
of the threads, a weaving of blue with white, and white with blue; so
that each man had in flight before him a maiden, and so that at their
circles, east and west, where they wheeled they wheeled together, side
by side, as the Maze flung them. And now they were circling and
serpentining up and down, and down and up, with contrary motion, in a
double figure of eight; they were winding in and out among the pillars
and wheeling round the middle circles north and south, side by side,
till they split there and parted and met again in the center and were
flung from it, to wheel again deliriously, double-ringed, round all the
six outermost circles at once.

And now, as if they were torn from the ends of the earth by the
irresistible attraction of the seventh circle, they were whirling round
the center in a double ring, a ring of young men round a ring of girls;
and then, as by some mysterious compulsion, they divided and cast
themselves off in rows of two couples, man and girl by man and girl,
linked with arms on each other's shoulders, eight rows in all, eight
spokes that sprang from the sacred circle ringed with eight, four men
and four girls, who were the felly of the wheel, all running, all
revolving. Such was the magic of the Maze, and the unconscious genius of
the instructor, that the pattern of the running wound and unwound and
knit itself together in the supreme symbol of the great Wheel of Eight
Spokes, the Wheel of Life.

And the ancient rhythmic rush and race of the worlds, and the wheeling
of all stars, the swinging and dancing of all atoms, the streaming and
eddying of the ancestral stuff of life was in the whirling of that
living Wheel; it was one immortal motion, continuous and triumphant in
the bodies of th