ans of
sight; they were like the points of contact of innumerable intersecting
crystal planes. They held strangest paradoxical suggestion of being
close to the surface and still infinite distances away.

And they were like--what was it they were like?--it came to me with a
distinct shock.

They were like the galaxies of little aureate and sapphire stars in the
clear gray heavens of Norhala's eyes.

I crept beside Drake, struck him with my head.

"Can't move," I shouted. "Can't lift my hands. Stuck fast--like a
fly--just as you said."

"Drag 'em over your knees," he cried, bending to me. "It slides 'em out
of the attraction."

Acting as he had suggested I found to my astonishment I could slip my
hands free; I caught his belt, tried to lift myself by it.

"No use, Doc." The old grin lightened for a moment his tense young face.
"You'll have to keep praying till the power's turned off. Nothing here
you can slide your knees on."

I nodded, waddling close to his side; then sank back on my haunches to
relieve the strain upon my aching leg-muscles.

"Can you see them ahead, Walter--Ruth and the woman?" Ventnor turned his
anxious eyes toward me.

I peered into the glimmering murk; shook my head. I could see nothing.
It was indeed, as though the clustered cubes sped within a bubble of the
now wanly glistening vapors; or rather as though in our passage--as a
projectile does in air--we piled before us a thick wave of the mists
which streaming along each side, closing in behind, obscured all that
lay around.

Yet I had, persistently, the feeling that beyond these shroudings was
vast and ordered movement; marchings and counter-marchings of hosts
greater even than those Golden Hordes of Genghis which ages agone had
washed about the outer bases of the very peaks that hid this place.
Came, too, flitting shadowings of huge shapes, unnameable, moving
swiftly beside our way; gleamings that thrust themselves through the
veils like wheeling javelins of flame.

And always, always, everywhere that constant movement, rhythmic,
terrifying--like myriads of feet of creatures of an unseen, stranger
world marking time just outside the threshold of our own. Preparing,
DRILLING there in some wide vestibule of space between the known and the
unknown, alert and menacing--poised for the signal which would send them
pouring over it.

Once again I seemed to stand upon the brink of an abyss of incredible
revelation, striving helplessly,