o
the circumference. Then the whole surface of the water began to tilt
and sway with a slow, shimmering, undulatory movement, as if it was a
giant roulette wheel in rotation.

And something was materializing out of the heart of the violet flame
itself.

It was a face--a human face, with bestial features, distorted and
enormously magnified through the substance in which it was. Such a
face as might look back upon an observer out of one of those
distorting mirrors at Coney Island, or some other place of popular
amusement, but twisted and enlarged beyond conception, so that it
covered half the area of a city block.

Curiously blurred, too, as if each atom of that face was in isolated
motion on its own account. And beneath the face appeared the vague
outlines of a hand, apparently manipulating some sort of infernal
mechanism.

And that face, enlarged as it was out of all proportion, filled Jim's
heart with greater horror than any face he had ever known.

For it was the visage of Lucius Tode, and on those huge and distorted
features was something that looked like a diabolical smile.

* * * * *

Everything vanished. Jim was back in the surrounding wall of fog.
Instinctively he banked again. He strove to drive the horror from his
brain. He must circle, circle incessantly, in the hope of finding
Lucille. She must have already arrived. But if she had not fallen
into Tode's power, she would hear the roaring of the plane and manage
to signal him.

He circled back into the clear space between the white and the violet,
and now he saw that the effect upon the pool was still more
pronounced. The waters were rising up in a rim all around, and yet not
overflowing. They were standing up like a bowl of clay upon the
potter's wheel, and down in the depths Jim could see the head and
shoulders of Tode, much less magnified, more natural in appearance,
and less blurred. And Tode was looking up at him and pointing that
infernal mechanism at him--something that looked like the tube of a
telescope.

Suddenly the plane shivered and stood still. The motor died abruptly.
The stick went dead. And yet the plane did not fall. As if upheld by
the same repulsive force that drove back the white fog, it simply hung
suspended three hundred feet above the heart of the violet flame.

Then--there was no longer any plane. The stick had melted in Jim's
hand, the wings dissolved like wreaths of mist. The entire body ha