"Aye," no more than a whisper from the lips of the body in the chair.
"What do you see?" Croft demanded.
"A strange sight, indeed. My own form, as in a reflecting water-pool, seated with downcast head, as wrapped in sleep."
"'Tis well," Croft spoke in answer and direction. "Await my company, Zud." He threw himself prone upon the couch and freed his own astral shell from Jasor's body by the effort of his will. An instant later he floated midway between the floor and ceiling at Zud's side. Below them, sat and reclined each body. There stood the table, still bearing food for the material body midway between couch and chair. Croft turned to his companion. And now all communication was on the astral plane, without sound, yet by a none less evident diffusion of conscious vibration.
"Thou seest?" he queried with a smile.
"Aye," the answer came to him from Zud's wraith—that strange replica of his earthly form, implacable, invisible to any save Croft's and his own eyes, which hung there between the floor of the apartment and the burnished roof, weaving to and fro, in each intangible current of the air, swaying and billowing, like a wind-stirred effigy in smoke. "Aye, lord, I see, and am filled with amazement."
"Thou seest but the first step as yet," Croft told him. "Come!"
There was an open embrasure in the pyramid wall. Through it Croft willed himself, and seizing the thin arm of the weird form beside him, dragged it along. They shot out and up through a sun-filled air—out and up and up. The pyramid lay beneath them, the snow-white temple of Zitu glinting in dazzling fashion on its top. East, west, north and south Zitra lay spread to their sight, with its houses, its palaces and hovels, the ringing circumference of its mighty walls. Its harbor studded with sails was all asparkle in the sunlight, and beyond that the bosom of the central ocean rose and fell slowly like the breast of a woman asleep.
"Lord! Lord!" Croft sensed that the high priest gasped again in his emotions at least.