desperately, striving in study of the Disk to erect a barrier of
preoccupation against the power pouring from it.

A dozen feet away from us the sapphire ovals centered upon us their
regard. They were limpid, pellucid as gems whose giant replicas they
seemed to be. The surface of the Disk ringed about by the aureate zodiac
in which the nine ovals shone was a maze of geometric symbols traced
in the lines of living gem fires; infinitely complex those patterns and
infinitely beautiful; an infinite number of symmetric forms in which I
seemed to trace all the ordered crystalline wonders of the snowflakes,
the groupings of all crystalline patternings, the soul of ordered beauty
that are the marvels of the Radiolaria, Nature's own miraculous book of
the soul of mathematical beauty.

The flashing, petaled heart was woven of living rainbows of cold flame.

Silently we floated there while the Disk--LOOKED--at us.

And as though I had been not an actor but an observer, the weird picture
of it all came to me--two men swinging like motes in mid air, on one
side the flickering scarlet and orange Cruciform shape, on the other
side the radiant Disk, behind the two manikins the pallid mount of the
bristling cones; and high above the wan circle of the shields.

There was a ringing about us--an elfin chiming, sweet and crystalline.
It came from the cones--and strangely was it their vocal synthesis,
their voice. Into the vast circle of sky pierced a lance of green fire;
swift in its wake uprose others.

We slid gently down, stood swaying at the Disk's base. The Keeper bent;
angled. Again the planes above the supporting square hovered over the
tablet. The tendrils swept down, pushed here and there, playing upon the
rods some unknown symphony of power.

Thicker pulsed the lances of the aurora; changed to vast billowing
curtains. The faceted wheel at the top of the central spire of the cones
swung upward; a light began to stream from the cones themselves--no
pillar now, but a vast circle that shot whirling into the heavens like a
noose.

And like a noose it caught the aurora, snared it!

Into it the coruscating mists of mysterious flame swirled; lost their
colors, became a torrent of light flying down through the ring as though
through a funnel top.

Down poured the radiant corpuscles, bathing the cones. They did not glow
as they had beneath the flood from the shields, and if they grew it was
too slowly for me to see; the shields w