"Now go we down to the chamber that holds the mouth of the terrible road to Muspelheim," Odin said. "Come!"
Thor and I followed out of the great hall and through corridors. We descended dark stone stairs until we reached the deepest level of Valhalla castle. We came to a door carved with runes, and with a great lock upon it. Odin touched the runes in a certain combination, and the door swung slowly inward.
By the light of the torch Thor carried, I saw that we had entered a round stone chamber of considerable size. It was dank and dusty, as though unused for ages. Standing about were dust-covered instruments and mechanisms of copper, quartz and iron, which I guessed were long unused devices of the ancient Aesir science.
In the very center of the big chamber's stone floor yawned a pit fifty feet in diameter, sinking to unguessable depths. Up from that opening beat a fierce green glow of throbbing force, from somewhere far beneath. I heard a dim, remote, roaring sound.
Most strange of all, in the opening of that pit floated a twenty-foot disk of white metal, with a squat, thick standard of metal rising from its center. It poised in the radiation, apparently without support, rocking gently as the fierce green rays from below streamed up through it.
"What in the world is that?" I asked startledly.
"That is the chariot on which you and Thor will ride down the road to deep Muspelheim," Odin explained. "And yon pit in which the disk floats is the road itself."
Odin looked somberly about the dusty room and its looming, enigmatic mechanisms.
"This is the very heart of Asgard, Jarl Keith. Up that pit-road the Aesir came long ago, fleeing from disaster-stricken Muspelheim. Over the opening of this road I caused Valhalla castle to be built. And secretly, from this chamber, Loki came and went to Muspelheim in the perilous researches that caused his exile, using the floating disk which he had devised to come and go easily."
Thor was looking in obvious dislike at the metal disk that was rocking eerily in empty air at the edge of the pit.