re were
other strange and massive mechanisms there too.

Flying spirals of ice climbed up inside the tower, spanning the great
stone well with spidery bridges, joining icy galleries. In some of those
galleries, Stark vaguely glimpsed rigid, gleaming figures like statues
of ice, but he could not see them clearly as he was carried on.

He was being carried downward. He passed slits in the wall, and knew
that the pallid lights he had seen through them were the moving bodies
of the creatures as they went up and down these high-flung, icy bridges.
He managed to turn his head to look down, and saw what was beneath him.

The well of the tower plunged down a good five hundred feet to bedrock,
widening as it went. The web of ice-bridges and the spiral ways went
down as well as up, and the creatures that carried him were moving
smoothly along a transparent ribbon of ice no more than a yard in width,
suspended over that terrible drop.

Stark was glad that he could not move just then. One instinctive start
of horror would have thrown him and his bearers to the rock below, and
would have carried Ciara with them.

Down and down, gliding in utter silence along the descending spiral
ribbon. The great glooming crystal grew remote above him. Ice was solid
now in the slots of the walls. He wondered if they had brought Balin
this way.

There were other openings, wide arches like the one they had brought
their captives through, and these gave Stark brief glimpses of broad
avenues and unguessable buildings, shaped from the pellucid ice and
flooded with the soft radiance that was like eerie moonlight.

At length, on what Stark took to be the third level of the city, the
creatures bore him through one of these archways, into the streets
beyond.

* * * * *

Below him now was the translucent thickness of ice that formed the floor
of this level and the roof of the level beneath. He could see the
blurred tops of delicate minarets, the clustering roofs that shone like
chips of diamond.

Above him was an ice roof. Elfin spires rose toward it, delicate as
needles. Lacy battlements and little domes, buildings star-shaped,
wheel-shaped, the fantastic, lovely shapes of snow-crystals, frosted
over with a sparkling foam of light.

The people of the city gathered along the way to watch, a living,
shifting rainbow of amethyst and rose and green, against the pure
blue-white. And there was no least whisper of sound