n. I had used to the utmost my somewhat limited medical
knowledge.

We had found no mark nor burn upon him, not even upon his hands over
which had run the licking flame. The slightly purplish, cyanotic
tinge of his skin had given way to a clear pallor; the skin was itself
disquietingly cold, the blood-pressure only slightly subnormal. The
pulse was more rapid, stronger; the breathing faint but regular, and
with no laboring. The pupils of his eyes were contracted almost to the
point of invisibility.

I could get no nervous reactions whatever. I am familiar with the
effects of electric shock and know what to do in such cases, but
Ventnor's symptoms, while similar in part, presented other features
unknown to me and most puzzling. There was a passive automatism, a
perplexing muscular rigidity which caused arms and legs, hands and head
to remain, doll-like, in any position placed.

Several times during my labors I had been aware of Norhala gazing down
upon us; but she made no effort to help, nor did she speak.

Now, my strained attention relaxing, I began to receive and note
impressions from without. There was a different feeling in the air,
a diminution of the magnetic tension; I smelled the blessed breath of
trees and water.

The light about us was clear and pearly, about the intensity of the moon
at full. Looking back along the way we had been traveling, I saw a half
mile away vertical, knife-sharp edges of two facing cliffs, the gap
between them a mile or more wide.

Through them we must have passed, for beyond them were the radiant mists
of the pit of the city, and through this precipitous gateway filtered
the enveloping luminosity. On each side of us uprose gradually
converging and perpendicular scarps along whose base huddled a sparse
foliage.

There came a low whistle of astonishment from Drake; I turned. We were
slowly gliding toward something that looked like nothing so much as a
huge and shimmering bubble of mingled sapphire and turquoise, swimming
up from and two-thirds above and the balance still hidden within earth.
It seemed to draw to itself the light, sending it back with gleamings
of the gray-blue of the star sapphire, with pellucid azures and lazulis
like clouded jades, with glistening peacock iridescences and tender,
milky greens of tropic shallows.

Little turrets globular and topaz, yellow and pierced with tiny
hexagonal openings clustered about it like baby bubbles just nestling
down to rest