f those
jointed, fantastic, little painted reptiles the Japanese toy-makers cut
from wood.

It seemed to regard us--mockingly. The pointed head dropped--past us
streamed the body. Upon it other pyramids clustered--like the spikes
that guarded the back of the nightmare Brontosaurus. Its end came
swiftly into sight--its tail another pyramid twin to its head.

It FLIRTED by--gaily; vanished.

I had thought the span must disintegrate to follow--and it did not
need to! It could move as a COMPOSITE as well as in UNITS. Move
intelligently, consciously--as the Smiting Thing had moved.

"Come!" Norhala's command checked my thoughts; we fell in behind her.
Looking up I caught the friendly sparkle of a star; knew the cleft was
widening.

The star points grew thicker. We stepped out into a valley small as
that hollow from which we had fled; ringed like it with heaven-touching
summits. I could see clearly. The place was suffused with a soft
radiance as though into it the far, bright stars were pouring all their
rays, filling it as a cup with their pale flames.

It was luminous as the Alaskan valleys when on white arctic nights they
are lighted, the Athabascans believe, by the gleaming spears of hunting
gods. The walls of the valley seemed to be drawn back into infinite
distances.

The shimmering mists that had nimbused Norhala had vanished--or merging
into the wan gleaming had become one with it.

I stared straight at her, striving to clarify in my own clouded thought
what it was that I had sensed as inhuman--never of OUR world or its
peoples. Yet this conviction came not because of the light that had
hovered about her, nor of her summonings of the lightnings; nor even
of her control of those--things--which had smitten the armored men and
spanned for us the abyss.

All of that I was certain lay in the domain of the explicable, could be
resolved into normality once the basic facts were gained.

Suddenly, I knew. Side by side with what we term the human there dwelt
within this woman an actual consciousness foreign to earth, passionless,
at least as we know passion, ordered, mathematical--an emanation of the
eternal law which guides the circling stars.

This it was that had moved in the gestures which had evoked the
lightnings. This it was that had spoken in the song which were those
gestures transformed into sound. This it was that something greater than
my consciousness knew and accepted.

Something which shared, no--