the
only sound was his own breathing, the heavy thud of his own heart.
Somehow he felt sure that he was coming nearer to his goal. The hush
seemed to confirm it. He loosened the force-gun at his thigh.

In that changeless twilight the ground was sloping down once more into a
broader hollow. He descended slowly, every sense alert for danger, not
knowing if Thag was beast or human or elemental, visible or invisible.
The trees were beginning to thin. He knew that he had almost reached his
goal.

He paused at the edge of the last line of trees. A clearing spread out
before him at the bottom of the hollow, quiet in the dim, translucent
air. He could focus directly upon no outlines anywhere, for the
tapestried blurring of the place. But when he saw what stood in the very
center of the clearing he stopped dead-still, like one turned to stone,
and a shock of utter cold went chilling through him. Yet he could not
have said why.

For in the clearing's center stood the Tree of Life. He had met the
symbol too often in patterns and designs not to recognize it, but here
that fabulous thing was living, growing, actually springing up from a
rooted firmness in the spangled grass as any tree might spring. Yet it
could not be real. Its thin brown trunk, of no recognizable substance,
smooth and gleaming, mounted in the traditional spiral; its twelve
fantastically curving branches arched delicately outward from the
central stem. It was bare of leaves. No foliage masked the serpentine
brown spiral of the trunk. But at the tip of each symbolic branch
flowered a blossom of bloody rose so vivid he could scarcely focus his
dazzled eyes upon them.

This tree alone of all objects in the dim land was sharply distinct to
the eye--terribly distinct, remorselessly clear. No words can describe
the amazing menace that dwelt among its branches. Smith's flesh crept as
he stared, yet he could not for all his staring make out why peril was
so eloquent there. To all appearances here stood only a fabulous symbol
miraculously come to life; yet danger breathed out from it so strongly
that Smith felt the hair lifting on his neck as he stared.

* * * * *

It was no ordinary danger. A nameless, choking, paralyzed panic was
swelling in his throat as he gazed upon the perilous beauty of the Tree.
Somehow the arches and curves of its branches seemed to limn a pattern
so dreadful that his heart beat faster as he gazed upon it. But