derstand now the
immemorial terror in which the tree-folk held it, but he did not yet
grasp in what way it threatened them physically. The inexplicable
dreadfulness of it was a menace to the mind's very existence, but surely
a rooted tree, however terrible to look at, could wield little actual
danger.

As he reasoned, his eyes were seeking restlessly among the branches,
searching for the answer to their dreadfulness. After all, this thing
wore the aspect of an old pattern, and in that pattern there was nothing
dreadful. The tree of life had made up the design upon that well-top in
Illar through whose shadow he had entered here, and nothing in that
bronze grille-work had roused terror. Then why----? What living menace
dwelt invisibly among these branches to twist them into curves of
horror?

A fragment of old verse drifted through his mind as he stared in
perplexity:

What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

And for the first time the true significance of a "fearful symmetry"
broke upon him. Truly a more than human agency must have arched these
subtle curves so delicately into dreadfulness, into such an awful beauty
that the very sight of it made those atavistic terrors he was so sternly
holding down leap in a gibbering terror.

A tremor rippled over the Tree. Smith froze rigid, staring with startled
eyes. No breath of wind had stirred through the clearing, but the Tree
was moving with a slow, serpentine grace, writhing its branches
leisurely in a horrible travesty of voluptuous enjoyment. And upon their
tips the blood-red flowers were spreading like cobra's hoods, swelling
and stretching their petals out and glowing with a hue so eye-piercingly
vivid that it transcended the bounds of color and blazed forth like pure
light.

But it was not toward Smith that they stirred. They were arching out
from the central trunk toward the far side of the clearing. After a
moment Smith tore his eyes away from the indescribably dreadful
flexibility of those branches and looked to see the cause of their
writhing.

A blaze of luminous white had appeared among the trees across the
clearing. The priestess had returned. He watched her pacing slowly
toward the Tree, walking with a precise and delicate grace as liquidly
lovely as the motion of the Tree. Her fabulous hair swung down about her
in a swaying robe that rippled at every step away from the moon-white
beauty of her body. Straight toward the Tree