She steadied him. "It will seem not so bad in a moment."
One may almost get used to anything. His senses presently were steady. And he knew that all the motion he was seeing was only an optical effect. Nothing was changing save himself and Lea as they dwindled. Amazing scene! The motion of the landscape had accelerated now—soundless expansion of everything within his vision. Only Lea beside him remained seemingly unchanged. To each of us, himself is the center of the Universe. Always throughout all the weird journey, Carter conceived himself his normal six foot height—and all the world around him seemed getting larger.
He had taken a step away from Lea on the unsteady ground. Awed, he stood gazing at the crawling movement of the expanding garden. The trees near at hand already had drawn back; their interlocking branches were strangely high over his head. Beyond a line of huge mossy rocks, forty feet away now when it should have been twenty, he could see the moonlit line of giant hedge. To the left, the moonlight glinted on a great pool of rippling water, with tremendous lily pads and a great line of mossy boulders along the bank—a line which was shifting backward and expanding upward, steadily, as he stared.
Gigantic garden. Why, he could hardly see across it now. A forest of giant trees towered into the sky near its distant lower end.
"George! The sundial!" He felt Lea tugging at him. "We must go—"
"Good Heavens, we've got to climb up there," he gasped. He seized her hand; ran with her. The rocky garden path was broad as a road. The flaring top of the sundial was seven or eight feet above the ground when they got there. Frantically he lifted her up and leaped after her. She pulled at him; tumbled him over the brink. Panting, they lay on the great circular spread of uneven concrete, with the brink down to the moonlit ground beyond its curving edge, close beside them. Beneath him he could feel the concrete turning rougher and shifting outward in all directions. There were sharp jagged points on it now. Then he stared down over the edge. It was an astonishing abyss, sixty feet at least, down to a spread of moonlit rippled lake, which was the lily pool!
He had helped Lea to her feet when abruptly they thought of the sundial pointer. In the center of the circular moonlit spread of concrete the metal pointer stood gleaming, fifty feet away. It was a triangle of metal standing on edge, with its top sloping steeply upward—a slope perhaps thirty feet long now, up to an apex ten feet high. Swiftly they walked toward it. Within a moment, around them was a huge porous plain of jagged rocks gleaming with moonlight. The circular lip of the abyss everywhere was receding. There was only a silvery sheen of darkness beyond it now. Overhead, far up, a single gigantic tree branch still was visible, blurred in the moonlight.
Then they reached the sundial pointer. Its apex towered twenty feet high now; the lower end of its upper sloping edge already was a foot or two above the ragged, porous ground. Carter, standing at the end of the pointer which in another moment was waist high, gazed up a six-foot wide slope of metal which rose steeply into the moonlight. Ten feet or so up the slope there was a depression like a little gully gouged out of the metallic rock.
"That is the place," Lea said.