hem into
helpless rigidity.

Paralyzing that sharp, unseen contact had been, but nothing of pain
followed it. Instead it created an extraordinary acuteness of sight and
hearing, an abnormal keying up of the observational faculties, as though
the energy so mysteriously drawn from our motor centers had been thrown
back into the sensory.

I could take in every minute detail of the flashing miracle of gemmed
fires and its flaming ministers. Halfway between them and us Norhala and
Ruth drifted; I could catch no hint of voluntary motion on their part
and knew that they were not walking, but were being borne onward by some
manifestation of that same force which held us motionless.

I forgot them in my contemplation of the Disk.

It was oval, twenty feet in height, I judged, and twelve in its greatest
width. A broad band, translucent as sun golden chrysolite, ran about its
periphery.

Set within this zodiac and spaced at mathematically regular intervals
were nine ovoids of intensely living light. They shone like nine
gigantic cabochon cut sapphires; they ranged from palest, watery blue
up through azure and purple and down to a ghostly mauve shot with sullen
undertones of crimson.

In each of them was throned a flame that seemed the very fiery essence
of vitality.

The--BODY--was convex, swelling outward like the boss of a shield;
shimmering rosy-gray and crystalline. From the vital ovoids ran a
pattern of sparkling threads, irised and brilliant as floss of molten
jewels; converging with interfacings of spirals, of volutes and of
triangles into the nucleus.

And that nucleus, what was it?

Even now I can but guess--brain in part as we understand brain,
certainly; but far, far more than that in its energies, its powers.

It was like an immense rose. An incredible rose of a thousand close
clustering petals. It blossomed with a myriad shifting hues. And instant
by instant the flood of varicolored flame that poured into its petalings
down from the sapphire ovoids waxed and waned in crescendoes and
diminuendoes of relucent harmonies--ecstatic, awesome.

The heart of the rose was a star of incandescent ruby.

From the flaming crimson center to aureate, flashing penumbra it was
instinct with and poured forth power--power vast and conscious.

Not with that same completeness could I realize the ministering star
shapes, half hidden as they were by the Disk. Their radiance was less,
nor had they its miracle of pulsing gem