te
radiance that mantled Luar. And now, since Jaska too knew that
radiance, her beauty was greater even than that of Luar. Sarka
thrilled anew at the glory of her.

But even as he stepped into the base of the Cone, he stepped out of
the blue column at the lip of the Moon-crater. Swift as light, and
swifter, had been the flight upward from the Cavern of the Cone; yet,
so keen were his perceptions, he knew when he had passed through the
chamber of the bluish glow, into which he and Jaska had first dropped
upon arrival.

Now they were on the lip of the crater, and the people of the Gens who
had followed him, were slipping out of the blue column, like insects
out of a flame, and converging on the aircars whose tentacles still
waved as they had when Sarka had last seen them.

Sarka looked at these people in amazement. To him there was a divinity
now about their nudeness which nudity never before had suggested to
him. For the people shone, and there was something glorious in those
divinely white bodies. They reminded Sarka of his people's books of
antiquity, and his childhood's pictures of angels....

But the effect of those white flames!...

* * * * *

There was no explaining it. But Sarka felt that whatever he willed to
do he could do; that whatever he wished for was his, whether it was
his by right or no. He felt that he could move mountains, with only
the aid of his hands. Looking at Jaska he conceived all sorts of new
beauty in her, for she was the brightest, to him, of all the people
who had passed through the lake of white flames, and been cleansed in
their heat.

"No wonder Luar has mastered the Moon!" he cried to Jaska. "For when
she was bathed in the white flames, her will is paramount!"

"But how, if she passes the people of the Gens of Dalis through the
flames, will she retain her sovereignty?"

"Because Dalis, too, has passed through, and his will is the will of
the Gens! They will obey him, and he has sworn allegiance to Luar, or
given some sort of oath of fealty!"

"How strange that but one person on the Moon has been bathed in the
white flames!"

"How do we know," Sarka almost whispered it, "that she is, originally,
of the Moon? Does she not look too much like our people, to be from
another world entirely?"

"I do not know, but ... you mean ... you mean...?"

"I scarcely know; but Dalis would swear allegiance to no man, much
less to a woman, unless he knew that