It vanished. In its place hung poised the cube that bore the enigmatic woman and Ruth. Then they were gone and we stood where but an instant before they had been.
We were high above an ocean of living light—a sea of incandescent splendors that stretched mile upon uncounted mile away and whose incredible waves streamed thousands of feet in air, flew in gigantic banners, in tremendous streamers, in coruscating clouds of varicolored flame—as though torn by the talons of a mighty wind.
My dazzled sight cleared, glare and blaze and searing incandescence took form, became ordered. Within the sea of light I glimpsed shapes cyclopean, unnameable.
They moved slowly, with an awesome deliberateness. They shone darkly within the flame-woven depths. From them came the volleys of the lightnings.
Score upon score of them there were—huge and enigmatic. Their flaming levins threaded the shimmering veils, patterned them, as though they were the flying robes of the very spirit of fire.
And the tumult was as ten thousand Thors, smiting with hammers against the enemies of Odin. As a forge upon whose shouting anvils was being shaped a new world.
A new world? A metal world!
The thought spun through my mazed brain, was gone—and not until long after did I remember it. For suddenly all that clamor died; the lightnings ceased; all the flitting radiances paled and the sea of flaming splendors grew thin as moving mists. The storming shapes dulled with them, seemed to darken into the murk.
Through the fast-waning light and far, far away—miles it seemed on high and many, many miles in length—a broad band of fluorescent amethyst shone. From it dropped curtains, shimmering, nebulous as the marching folds of the aurora; they poured, cascaded, from the amethystine band.
Huge and purple-black against their opalescence bulked what at first I thought a mountain, so like was it to one of those fantastic buttes of our desert Southwest when their castellated tops are silhouetted against the setting sun; knew instantly that this was but subconscious striving to translate into terms of reality the incredible.