ng arm. Below them the
hived clusters of disks changed from globules into wide coronets.

Seventeen minutes.

I dropped my wrist; seized the glasses from Drake; raised them to the
sun. For a moment I saw nothing--then a tiny spot of white incandescence
shone forth at the lower edge of the great spot. It grew into a point of
radiance, dazzling even through the shadowed lenses.

I rubbed my eyes; looked again. It was still there, larger--blazing with
an ever increasing and intolerable intensity.

I handed the glasses to Drake, silently.

"I see it!" he muttered. "I see it! And THAT did it--that! Goodwin!"
There was panic in his cry. "Goodwin! The spot! it's widening! It's
widening!"

I snatched the glasses from him. I caught again the dazzling flashing.
But whether Drake HAD seen the spot widen, change--to this day I do not
know.

To me it seemed unchanged--and yet--perhaps it was not. It may be that
under that finger of force, that spear of light, that wound in the side
of our sun HAD opened further--

That the sun had winced!

I do not to this day know. But whether it had or not--still shone the
intolerably brilliant light. And miracle enough that was for me.

Twenty minutes--subconsciously I had gone on counting--twenty minutes--

About the cratered girdle of the upthrust shields a glimmering mistiness
was gathering; a translucent mist, beryl pale and beryl clear. In a
heart-beat it had thickened into a vast and vaporous ring through whose
swarms of corpuscles the sun's reflected image upon each disk shone
clear--as though seen through clouds of transparent atoms of aquamarine.

Again the filaments of the Keeper moved--feebly. As one of the hosts of
circling shields shifted downward. Brilliant, ever more brilliant, waxed
the fast-thickening mists.

Abruptly, and again as one, the disks began to revolve. From every
concave surface, from the surfaces of the huge circlets below them,
flashed out a stream of green fire--green as the fire of green life
itself. Corpuscular, spun of uncounted rushing, dazzling ions the great
rays struck across, impinged upon the thousand-foot wheel that crowned
the cones; set it whirling.

Over it I saw form a limpid cloud of the brilliant vapors. Whence came
these sparkling nebulosities, these mists of light? It was as though the
clustered, spinning disks reached into the shadowless air, sucked from
it some unseen, rhythmic energy and transformed it into this visible,
corus