. Slowly we walked
toward her, stood before her. The great clear eyes searched us--but no
more intently than our own wondering eyes did her.

CHAPTER VI. NORHALA OF THE LIGHTNINGS

We looked upon a vision of loveliness such, I think, as none has beheld
since Trojan Helen was a maid. At first all I could note were the eyes,
clear as rain-washed April skies, crystal clear as some secret spring
sacred to crescented Diana. Their wide gray irises were flecked with
golden amber and sapphire--flecks that shone like clusters of little
aureate and azure stars.

Then with a strange thrill of wonder I saw that these tiny
constellations were not in the irises alone; that they clustered even
within the pupils--deep within them, like far-flung stars in the depths
of velvety, midnight heavens.

Whence had come those cold fires that had flared from them, I
wondered--more menacing, far more menacing, in their cold tranquillity
than the hot flames of wrath? These eyes were not perilous--no. Calm
they were and still--yet in them a shadow of interest flickered; a ghost
of friendliness smiled.

Above them were level, delicately penciled brows of bronze. The lips
were coral crimson and--asleep. Sweet were those lips as ever master
painter, dreaming his dream of the very soul of woman's sweetness,
saw in vision and limned upon his canvas--and asleep, nor wistful for
awakening.

A proud, straight nose; a broad low brow, and over it the masses of the
tendriling tresses--tawny, lustrous topaz, cloudy, METALLIC. Like spun
silk of ruddy copper; and misty as the wisps of cloud that Soul'tze,
Goddess of Sleep, sets in the skies of dawn to catch the wandering
dreams of lovers.

Down from the wondrous face melted the rounded column of her throat
to merge into exquisite curves of shoulders and breasts, half revealed
beneath the swathing veils.

But upon that face, within her eyes, kissing her red lips and clothing
her breasts, was something unearthly.

Something that came straight out of the still mysteries of the
star-filled spaces; out of the ordered, the untroubled, the illimitable
void.

A passionless spirit that watched over the human passion in the scarlet
mouth, in every slumbering, sculptured line of her--guarding her against
its awakening.

Twilight calm dropping down from the sun sleep to still the restless
mountain tarn. Ishtar dreamlessly asleep within Nirvana.

Something not of this world we know--and yet of it as th