Our rifles would be worse than useless, we knew;
our pistols we decided to carry as Drake put it, "for comfort." Canteens
filled with water; a couple of emergency rations, a few instruments,
including a small spectroscope, a selection from the medical kit--all
these packed in a little haversack which he threw over his broad
shoulders.

I pocketed my compact but exceedingly powerful field-glasses. To my
poignant and everlasting regret my camera had been upon the bolting
pony, and Ventnor had long been out of films for his.

We were ready for our journey.

Our path led straight away, a smooth and dark-gray road whose surface
resembled cement packed under enormous pressure. It was all of fifty
feet wide and now, in daylight, glistened faintly as though overlaid
with some vitreous coating. It narrowed abruptly into a wedged way that
stopped at the threshold of Norhala's door.

Diminishing through the distance, it stretched straight as an arrow
onward and vanished between perpendicular cliffs which formed the
frowning gateway through which the night before we had passed upon the
coursing cubes from the pit of the city. Here, as then, a mistiness
checked the gaze.

Ruth with us, we made a brief inspection of the surroundings of
Norhala's house. It was set as though in the narrowest portion of
an hour-glass. The precipitous walls marched inward from the gateway
forming the lower half of the figure; at the back they swung apart at a
wider angle.

This upper part of the hour-glass was filled with a park-like forest. It
was closed, perhaps twenty miles away, by a barrier of cliffs.

How, I wondered, did the path which Yuruk had pointed out to me pierce
them? Was it by pass or tunnel; and why was it the armored men had not
found and followed it?

The waist between these two mountain wedges was a valley not more than
a mile wide. Norhala's house stood in its center; and it was like a
garden, dotted with flowering and fragrant lilies and here and there a
tiny green meadow. The great globe of blue that was Norhala's dwelling
seemed less to rest upon the ground than to emerge from it; as though
its basic curvatures were hidden in the earth.

What was its substance I could not tell. It was as though built of the
lacquer of the gems whose colors it held. And beautiful, wondrously,
incredibly beautiful it was--an immense bubble of froth of molten
sapphires and turquoises.

We had not time to study its beauties. A few last