g, and its weight caused the solid rock
to quiver like a leaf. Watching it, we felt as ants might feel at the
advent of the crack of doom, for its mere height and girth and size
overwhelmed us. We could not even speak. The last words I heard were
from the mouth of Oro who screamed out:

"Behold the balance of the World, you miserable, doubting men, and
behold me change its path--turning it as the steersman turns a ship!"

Then he made certain signs to Yva, who in obedience to them approached
the porthole or search-light to which she did something that I could not
distinguish. The effect was to make the beam of light much stronger
and sharper, also to shift it on to the point or foot of the spinning
mountain and, by an aiming of the lens from time to time, to keep it
there.

This went on for a while, since the dreadful thing did not travel fast
notwithstanding the frightful speed of its revolutions. I should doubt
indeed if it advanced more quickly than a man could walk; at any rate
so it seemed to us. But we had no means of judging its real rate of
progress whereof we knew as little as we did of the course it followed
in the bowels of the earth. Perhaps that was spiral, from the world's
deep heart upwards, and this was the highest point it reached. Or
perhaps it remained stationary, but still spinning, for scores or
hundreds of years in some central powerhouse of its own, whence, in
obedience to unknown laws, from time to time it made these terrific
journeys.

No one knows, unless perhaps Oro did, in which case he kept the
information to himself, and no one will ever know. At any rate there it
was, travelling towards us on its giant butt, the peg of the top as it
were, which, hidden in a cloud of friction-born sparks that enveloped it
like the cup of a curving flower of fire, whirled round and round at
an infinite speed. It was on this flaming flower that the search-light
played steadily, doubtless that Oro might mark and measure its monstrous
progress.

"He is going to try to send the thing down the right-hand path," I
shouted into Bickley's ear.

"Can't be done! Nothing can shift a travelling weight of tens of
millions of tons one inch," Bickley roared back, trying to look
confident.

Clearly, however, Yva thought that it could be done, for of a sudden she
cast down her shield and, throwing herself upon her knees, stretched out
her hands in supplication to her father. I understood, as did we all,
that she wa