It shone with a pale blue phosphorescence. It was featureless, smooth, a blind cliff of polished, blue metal — and that was all.
“Ruth!” groaned Ventnor. “Where is she?”
Aghast at my mental withdrawal from him, angry at myself for my callousness, awkwardly I tried to crawl over to him, to touch him, comfort him as well as I might.
And then, as though his cry had been a signal, the great cone began to move. Slowly the circled base slipped down the shimmering facades; down, steadily down; I realized that we had paused at the edge of some steep declivity, for the bottom of the cone was now at a decided angle while the upper edge of the circle had dropped a full two hundred feet below the place where it had rested — and still it fell.
There came a gasp of relief from Ventnor, a sigh from Drake while, from my own heart, a weight rolled. Not ten yards ahead of us and still deep within the luminosity had appeared the regal head of Norhala, the lovely head of Ruth. The two rose out of the glow like swimmers floating from the depths. Now they were clear before us, and now we could see the surface of the cube on which they rode.
But neither turned to us; each stared straightly, motionless along the axis of the sinking cone, the woman’s left arm holding Ruth close to her side.
Drake’s hand caught my shoulder in a grip that hurt — nor did he need to point toward that which had wrung the exclamation from him. The funnel had broken from its slow falling; it had made one swift, startling drop and had come to rest. Its recumbent side was now flattened into a triangular plane, widening from the narrow tip in which we stood to all of five hundred feet where its base rested against the blue wall, and falling at a full thirty-degree pitch.
The misty-edged circle had become an oval, a flattened ellipse another five hundred feet high and three times that in length. And in its exact center, shining forth as though it opened into a place of pale azure incandescence was another rectangular Cyclopean portal.
On each side of it, in the apparently solid face of the gleaming, metallic cliffs, a slit was opening.
They began as thin lines a hundred yards in height through which the intense light seemed to hiss; quickly they opened — widening like monstrous cat pupils until at last, their widening ceasing, they glared forth, the blue incandescence gushing from them like molten steel from an opened sluice.
Deep within them I sensed a movement. Scores of towering shapes swam within and glided out of them, each reflecting the vivid light as though they themselves were incandescent. Around their crests spun wide and flaming coronets.
They rushed forth, wheeling, whirling, driven like leaves in a whirlwind. Out they swirled from the cat’s eyes of the glimmering wall, these dervish obelisks crowded with spinning fires. They vanished in the mists. Instantly with their going, the eyes contracted; were but slits; were gone. And before us within the oval was only the waiting portal.
The leading block leaped forward. As abruptly, those that bore us followed. Again under that strain of projectile flight we clutched each other; the pony screamed in terror. The metal cliff rushed to meet us like a thunder cloud of steel; the portal raced upon us — a square mouth of cold blue flame.
And into it we swept; were devoured by it.
Light in blinding, intolerable flood beat about us, blackening the sight with agony. We pressed, the three of us, against the side of the pony, burying our faces in its shaggy coat, striving to hide our eyes from the radiance which, strain closely as we might, seemed to pierce through the body of the little beast, through our own heads, searing the sight.
CHAPTER X
“WITCH! GIVE BACK MY SISTER”
How long we were within that glare I do not know; it seemed unending hours; it was of course only minutes — seconds, perhaps. Then I was sensible of a permeating shadow, a darkness gentle and healing.
I raised my head and opened my eyes. We were moving tranquilly, with a curious suggestion of homing leisureliness, through a soft, blue shimmering darkness. It was as though we were drifting within some high borderland of light; a region in which that rapid vibration we call the violet was mingled with a still more rapid vibration whose quick pulsing was felt by the brain but ever fled ere that brain could register it in terms of color. And there seemed to be a film over my sight; dazzlement from the unearthly blaze, I thought, shaking my head impatiently.
My eyes focused upon an object a little more than a foot away; my neck grew rigid, my scalp prickled while I stared, unbelieving. And that at which I stared was — a skeleton hand. Every bone a grayish black, sharply silhouetted, clean as some master surgeon’s specimen, it was extended as though clutching at — clutching at — what was that toward which it was reaching?
Again the icy prickling over scalp and skin — for its talons stretched out to grasp a steed that Death himself might have ridden, a rack whose bare skull hung drooping upon bent vertebrae.
I raised my hands to my face to shut out the ghostly sight — and swiftly the clutching bony hand moved toward me — was before my eyes — touched me.
The cry that sheer horror wrested from me was strangled by realization. And so acute was my relief, so reassuring was it to have in the midst of these mysteries some sane, understandable thing occur that I laughed aloud.
For the skeleton hand was my own. The mournful ghastly mount of death was — our pony. And when I looked again I knew what I would see — and see them I did — two tall skeletons, skulls resting on their bony arms, leaning against the frame of the beast.
While ahead of us, floating poised upon the surface of the glistening cube, were two women skeletons — Ruth and Norhala!
Weird enough was the sight. Dureresque, grimly awful as materialization of a scene of the Dance Macabre — and yet — vastly comforting.
For here was something which was well within the range of human knowledge. It was the light about us that did it; a vibration that even as I conjectured, was within the only partly explored region of the ultraviolet and the comparatively unexplored region above it.
Yet there were differences, for there was none of that misty halo around the bones, the flesh which the X-rays cannot render wholly invisible. The skeletons stood out clean cut, with no trace of fleshly vestments.
I crept over, spoke to the two.
“Don’t look up yet,” I said. “Don’t open your eyes. We’re going through a queer light. It has an X-ray quality. You’re going to see me as a skeleton —”
“What?” shouted Drake. Disobeying my warning he straightened, glared at me. And disquieting as the spectacle had been before, fully understanding it as I did, I could not restrain my shudder at the utter weirdness of that skull which was his head thrusting itself toward me.
The skeleton that was Ventnor turned to me; was arrested by the sight of the flitting pair ahead. I saw the fleshless jaws clamp, then opened to speak.
Abruptly, upon the skeletons in front the flesh dropped back. Girl and woman stood there once again robed in beauty.
So swift was that transition from the grisly unreal to the normal that even to
