lten glass sprayed on and allowed to harden. Behind this glasseous
protective surface, paintings and carvings spread a fantasy of strange
form and color, but the light was too dim to make much of it, except
that it was alien to my experience, and exceedingly well done, speaking
of a culture second to none.

Beyond the central form of the strange golden statue, was the dais which
I had noticed at once, and now my eyes picked out the fact that on it
was also a glasseous protective sheath about a form--another statue, I
thought.

Thoughtfully I prowled along the rim of the room, examining the wall
frescoes foot by foot, seeing on them a strange depiction of semi-human
forms, of crab-men and crab-women, of snake-men and snake-women, of men
half-goat and half-man, of creatures hardly human with great jaws that
looked like rock-cutters, with hands like moles on short powerful arms,
fish people with finned legs and arms, their hands engaged in catching
great fish and placing them in nets, a nightmare of weird half-human
shapes that gradually brought to me a message that I could not accept.

If that rock painting was telling a true story and not some allegorical
fantasy--these people who had built this place had been a race who knew
the secrets of life so intimately they could manipulate the unborn child
into shapes intended to give it powers and physical attributes fitting
it for amphibious life, for the underground boring life of a mole, for
the tending of flocks in the goat-legged men--the whole gamut of these
monstrous diversions from the normal human seemed to me
designed--purposely--to build a race which, like ants, has a shape
fitted to its trade.

I threw off the illusion of a deformed past race the wall art gave me,
and passed on to examine the crystalline pillar on the dais. I stood a
long time, before the dais, drinking in the beauty of the form locked
within the prisoning glass.

No human, no earth woman--she was different from anything I had ever
even imagined.

Female, vaguely human in form she was, with an unearthly beauty; but
four-armed, with a forehead that went up and up and ended in a single
tall horn, as on the fabled unicorn.

Her eyes were closed, if she had eyes beneath the heavy purple-veined
lids, so like the petals of some night-flower, pungent with perfume.

Naked the figure was, except for a belt of what looked iron chain around
the waist, black and corroded with time, holding her with a