struggling for realization--and so
struggling became aware that our speed was swiftly slackening, the
roaring blast dying down, the veils before us thinning.

They cleared away. I saw Drake and Ventnor straighten up; raised myself
to my own aching knees.

We were at one end of a vortex, a funneling within the radiant vapors; a
funnel whose further end a mile ahead broadened out into a huge
circle, its mistily outlined edges impinging upon the towering scarp
of the--city. It was as though before us lay, upon its side, a cone of
crystalline clear air against whose curved sides some radiant medium
heavier than air, lighter than water, pressed.

The top arc of its prostrate base reached a thousand feet or more up the
precipitous wall; above it all was hidden in sparkling nebulosities that
were like still clouds of greenly glimmering fire-flies. Back from
the curving sides of this cone, above it and below it, the pressing
luminosities stretched into, it seemed, infinite distances.

Through them, suddenly, thousands of bright beams began to dart, to
dance, weaving and interweaving, shooting hither and yon--like myriads
of great searchlights in a phosphorescent sea fog, like countless lances
of the aurora thrusting through its own iridescent veils! And in the
play of these beams was something appallingly ordered, appallingly
rhythmic.

It was--how can I describe it?--PURPOSEFUL; purposeful as the geometric
shiftings of the Little Things of the ruins, of the summoning song of
Norhala, of the Protean changes of the Smiting Shape and the Following
Thing; and like all of these it was as laden with that baffling
certainty of hidden meanings, of messages that the brain recognized as
such yet knew it never could read.

The rays seemed to spring upward from the earth. Now they were like
countless lances of light borne by marching armies of Titans; now they
crossed and angled and flew as though they were clouds of javelins
hurled by battling swarms of the Genii of Light. And now they stood
upright while through them, thrusting them aside, bending them, passed
vast, vague shapes like mountains forming and dissolving; like darkening
monsters of some world of light pushing through thick forests of
slender, high-reaching trees of cold flame; shifting shadows of
monstrous chimerae slipping through jungles of bamboo with trunks of
diamond fire; phantasmal leviathans swimming through brakes of giant
reeds of radiance rising from the sp