as though at
its base that blackness was frozen.

The sun? Reason returned to me; told me this globe could not be that.

What was it then? Ra-Harmachis, of the Egyptians, stripped of his wings,
exiled and growing old in the corridors of the Dead? Or that mocking
luminary, the cold phantom of the God of light and warmth which the old
Norsemen believed was set in their frozen hell to torment the damned?

I thrust aside the fantasies, impatiently. But sun or no sun, light
streamed from this orb, light in multicolored, lanced rays, banishing
the blackness through which we had been flying.

Closer we came and closer; lighter it grew about us, and by the growing
light I saw that still beside us ran the abyss. And even louder, more
thunderous, became the clamor.

At the foot of the radiant disk I glimpsed a luminous pool. Into it, out
of the depths, protruded a tremendous rectangular tongue, gleaming like
gray steel.

On the tongue an inky shape appeared; it lifted itself from the abyss,
rushed upon the disk and took form.

Like a gigantic spider it was, squat and horned. For an instant it was
silhouetted against the smiling sphere, poised itself--and vanished
through it.

Now, not far ahead, silhouetted as had been the spider shape, blackened
into sight a cube and on it Ruth and Norhala. It seemed to hover, to
wait.

"It's a door," Drake's shout beat thinly in my ears against the
hurricane of sound.

What I thought had been an orb was indeed a gateway, a portal; and it
was gigantic.

The light streamed through it, the flaming colors, the lightning glare,
the drifting shadows were all beyond it. The suggestion of sphere had
been an illusion, born of the darkness in which we were moving and in
its own luminescence.

And I saw that the steel tongue was a ramp, a slide, dropping down into
the gulf.

Norhala raised her hands high above her head. Up from the darkness flew
an incredible shape--like a monstrous, armored flat-backed crab; angled
spikes protruded from it; its huge body was spangled with darting,
greenish flames.

It swept beneath us and by. On its back were multitudinous breasts from
which issued blinding flashes--sapphire blue, emerald green, sun yellow.
It hung poised as had that other nightmare shape, standing out jet black
and colossal, rearing upon columnar legs, whose outlines were those of
alternate enormous angled arrow-points and lunettes. Swiftly its form
shifted; an instant it hovered, ha