he towers of Lel and Lek, Neerib and Akathooma, and the cliffs
of Toldenarba a-glistening in the twilight like an alabaster statue of
the Evening. Towards them he wrenched the halter, towards Toldenarba
and the Under Pits; the wings of the hippogriff roared as the halter
turned him. Of the Under Pits who shall tell? Their mystery is secret.
It is held by some that they are the sources of night, and that
darkness pours from them at evening upon the world; while others hint
that knowledge of these might undo our civilization.

There watched him ceaselessly from the Under Pits those eyes whose duty
it is; from further within and deeper, the bats that dwell there arose
when they saw the surprise in the eyes; the sentinels on the bulwarks
beheld that stream of bats and lifted up their spears as it were for
war. Nevertheless when they perceived that that war for which they
watched was not now come upon them, they lowered their spears and
suffered him to enter, and he passed whirring through the earthward
gateway. Even so he came, as foretold, to the City of Never perched upon
Toldenarba, and saw late twilight on those pinnacles that know no other
light. All the domes were of copper, but the spires on their summits
were gold. Little steps of onyx ran all this way and that. With cobbled
agates were its streets a glory. Through small square panes of
rose-quartz the citizens looked from their houses. To them as they
looked abroad the World far-off seemed happy. Clad though that city was
in one robe always, in twilight, yet was its beauty worthy of even so
lovely a wonder: city and twilight were both peerless but for each
other. Built of a stone unknown in the world we tread were its bastions,
quarried we know not where, but called by the gnomes _abyx_, it so
flashed back to the twilight its glories, colour for colour, that none
can say of them where their boundary is, and which the eternal twilight,
and which the City of Never; they are the twin-born children, the
fairest daughters of Wonder. Time had been there, but not to work
destruction; he had turned to a fair, pale green the domes that were
made of copper, the rest he had left untouched, even he, the destroyer
of cities, by what bribe I know not averted. Nevertheless they often
wept in Never for change and passing away, mourning catastrophes in
other worlds, and they built temples sometimes to ruined stars that had
fallen flaming down from the Milky Way, giving them worship