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—that reigned, serene and untroubled, upon the throne of her mind; something utterly UNCOMPREHENDING, utterly unconscious OF, cosmically blind TO all human emotion; that spread itself like a veil over her own consciousness; that PLATED her thought—that was a strange word—why had it come to me—something that had set its mark upon her like—like—the gigantic claw print on the poppied field, the little print of the dragoned hall.
I caught at my mind, whirling I thought then in the grip of fantasy; strove by taking minute note of her to bring myself back to normal.
Her veils had slipped from her, baring her neck, her arms, the right shoulder. Under the smooth throat a buckle of dull gold held the sheer, diaphanous folds of the pale amber silk which swathed the high and rounded breasts, hiding no goddess curve of them.
A wide and golden girdle clasped the waist, covered the rounded hips and thighs. The long, narrow, and high-arched feet were shod with golden sandals, laced just below the rounded knees with flat turquoise studded bands.