slucent walls admitted a
subdued glow from outside. There was food on a table, strange fruits,
and a clear scarlet liquid in a crystal glass. Rawson ate ravenously,
then followed Gor.

Outside were houses, whose timbered frames of jet-black contrasted
startlingly with the quartz walls they enclosed. The street was
thronged with people who drew back to let them pass, and who dropped
to their knees in humble worship. Like Gor, the men wore only the loin
cloth, but for this gala day, that simple apparel added a note of
flashing color. The long cloths wrapped about their hips, and brought
up and about the waist where the ends hung free, were brilliant with
countless variations of crimson and blue and gold. The same rainbow
hues were found in the loose folded cloths that draped themselves like
short skirts from the women's waists. Here and there, in the sea of
white bodies and scintillant jeweled breast-plates, was one with an
additional flash of color, where brilliant silken scarves had been
thrown about the shoulders of the younger girls.

"From all the land," said Gor, "they have come to do you honor."

* * * * *

Hardly more than a village, this cluster of strangely beautiful
shelters for the People of the Light. Beyond, Rawson saw the country,
pastures where animals, weird and strange, were cropping the grass so
vividly green; fields of growing things; little crystal houses like
fanciful, glistening toys that had miraculously grown to greater size.
The dwellings were sprinkled far into the distance across the
landscape. Beyond them was the base of the mountain, magnificent and
glorious in its crystal purity of white, and the striations, vertical
and diagonal, that flashed brilliantly with black jet and peacock
green.

Rawson knew them for mineral intrusions, and knew that the mountain
was only one crystalline mass of all the quartz formation that made of
the world's inner core a gigantic geode, gleaming in eternal
brilliance under the glow of the central sun. And still, in it all,
Dean Rawson had seen a lack without which perfection could not be
complete.

"Where is Loah?" he asked of Gor. "I thought--I had hoped...."

Something in Gor's face told Rawson that his companion was troubled.
"She refused to come," he said. "But the wish of one of the great ones
from the Land of the Sun is a command." He shouted an order before
Rawson could put in a protest. A man darted away.

"Alway