fairy webs, resting within the hearts of flowers.
In some shells were flaxen-haired dwarfish men of Lugur's type;
sometimes black-polled brother officers of Rador; often raven-tressed
girls, plainly hand-maidens of the women; and now and then beauties of
the lower folk went by with one of the blond dwarfs.

We swept around the turn that made of the jewel-like roadway an
enormous horseshoe and, speedily, upon our right the cliffs through
which we had come in our journey from the Moon Pool began to march
forward beneath their mantles of moss. They formed a gigantic
abutment, a titanic salient. It had been from the very front of this
salient's invading angle that we had emerged; on each side of it the
precipices, faintly glowing, drew back and vanished into distance.

The slender, graceful bridges under which we skimmed ended at openings
in the upflung, far walls of verdure. Each had its little garrison of
soldiers. Through some of the openings a rivulet of the green obsidian
river passed. These were roadways to the farther country, to the land
of the ladala, Rador told me; adding that none of the lesser folk
could cross into the pavilioned city unless summoned or with pass.

We turned the bend of the road and flew down that farther emerald
ribbon we had seen from the great oval. Before us rose the shining
cliffs and the lake. A half-mile, perhaps, from these the last of the
bridges flung itself. It was more massive and about it hovered a
spirit of ancientness lacking in the other spans; also its garrison
was larger and at its base the tangent way was guarded by two massive
structures, somewhat like blockhouses, between which it ran. Something
about it aroused in me an intense curiosity.

"Where does that road lead, Rador?" I asked.

"To the one place above all of which I may not tell you, Goodwin," he
answered. And again I wondered.

We skimmed slowly out upon the great pier. Far to the left was the
prismatic, rainbow curtain between the Cyclopean pillars. On the white
waters graceful shells--lacustrian replicas of the Elf chariots--swam,
but none was near that distant web of wonder.

"Rador--what is that?" I asked.

"It is the Veil of the Shining One!" he answered slowly.

Was the Shining One that which we named the Dweller?

"What is the Shining One?" I cried, eagerly. Again he was silent.
Nor did he speak until we had turned on our homeward way.

And lively as my interest, my scientific curiosity, were--I