Chapter 9: the Portal of Flame

It was as though we were on a meteor hurtling through space. The split air shrieked and shrilled, a keening barrier against the avalanche of the thunder. The blast bent us far back on thighs held rigid by the magnetic grip.

The pony spread its legs, dropped its head; through the hurricane roaring its screaming pierced thinly, that agonizing, terrible lamentation which is of the horse and the horse alone when the limit of its endurance is reached.

Ventnor crouched lower and lower, eyes shielded behind arms folded over his brows, straining for a glimpse of Ruth; Drake crouched beside him, bracing him, supporting him against the tempest.

Our line of flight became less abrupt, but the speed increased, the wind-pressure became almost insupportable. I twisted, dropped upon my right arm, thrust my head against my shoulder, stared backward. When first I had looked upon the place I had sensed its immensity; now I began to realize how vast it must really be--for already the gateway through which we had come glimmered far away on high, shrunk to a hoop of incandescent brass and dwindling fast.

Nor was it a cavern; I saw the stars, traced with deep relief the familiar Northern constellations. Pit it might be, but whatever terror, whatever ordeals were before us, we would not have to face them buried deep within earth. There was a curious comfort to me in the thought.

Suddenly stars and sky were blotted out.

We had plunged beneath the surface of the radiant sea.

Lying in the position in which I was, I was sensible of a diminution of the cyclonic force; the blast streamed up and over the front of the cube. To me drifted only the wailings of our flight and the whimpering terror of the pony.

I turned my head cautiously. Upon the very edge of the flying blocks squatted Drake and Ventnor, grotesquely frog-like. I crawled toward them--crawled, literally, like a caterpillar; for wherever my body touched the surface of the cubes the attracting force held it, allowed a creeping movement only, surface sliding upon surface--and weirdly enough like a human measuring-worm I looped myself over to them.

As my bare palms clung to the Things I realized with finality that whatever their activation, their life, they WERE metal.

There was no mistaking now the testimony of touch. Metal they were, with a hint upon contact of highly polished platinum, or at the least of a metal as finely grained as it.

Also they had temperature, a curiously pleasant warmth--the surfaces were, I judged, around ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. I looked deep down into the little sparkling points that were, I knew, organs of sight; they were like the points of contact of innumerable intersecting crystal planes. They held strangest paradoxical suggestion of being close to the surface and still infinite distances away.

And they were like--what was it they were like?--it came to me with a distinct shock.

They were like the galaxies of little aureate and sapphire stars in the clear gray heavens of Norhala’s eyes.

I crept beside Drake, struck him with my head.

“Can’t move,” I shouted. “Can’t lift my hands. Stuck fast--like a fly--just as you said.”

“Drag ‘em over your knees,” he cried, bending to me. “It slides ‘em out of the attraction.”

Acting as he had suggested I found to my astonishment I could slip my hands free; I caught his belt, tried to lift myself by it.

“No use, Doc.” The old grin lightened for a moment his tense young face. “You’ll have to keep praying till the power’s turned off. Nothing here you can slide your knees on.”

I nodded, waddling close to his side; then sank back on my haunches to relieve the strain upon my aching leg-muscles.

“Can you see them ahead, Walter--Ruth and the woman?” Ventnor turned his anxious eyes toward me.

I peered into the glimmering murk; shook my head. I could see nothing. It was indeed, as though the clustered cubes sped within a bubble of the now wanly glistening vapors; or rather as though in our passage--as a projectile does in air--we piled before us a thick wave of the mists which streaming along each side, closing in behind, obscured all that lay around.

Yet I had, persistently, the feeling that beyond these shroudings was vast and ordered movement; marchings and counter-marchings of hosts greater even than those Golden Hordes of Genghis which ages agone had washed about the outer bases of the very peaks that hid this place. Came, too, flitting shadowings of huge shapes, unnameable, moving swiftly beside our way; gleamings that thrust themselves through the veils like wheeling javelins of flame.

And always, always, everywhere that constant movement, rhythmic, terrifying--like myriads of feet of creatures of an unseen, stranger world marking time just outside the threshold of our own. Preparing, DRILLING there in some wide vestibule of space between the known and the unknown, alert and menacing--poised for the signal which would send them pouring over it.

Once again I seemed to stand upon the brink of an abyss of incredible revelation, striving helplessly, struggling for realization--and so struggling became aware that our speed was swiftly slackening, the roaring blast dying down, the veils before us thinning.

They cleared away. I saw Drake and Ventnor straighten up; raised myself to my own aching knees.

We were at one end of a vortex, a funneling within the radiant vapors; a funnel whose further end a mile ahead broadened out into a huge circle, its mistily outlined edges impinging upon the towering scarp of the--city. It was as though before us lay, upon its side, a cone of crystalline clear air against whose curved sides some radiant medium heavier than air, lighter than water, pressed.

The top arc of its prostrate base reached a thousand feet or more up the precipitous wall; above it all was hidden in sparkling nebulosities that were like still clouds of greenly glimmering fire-flies. Back from the curving sides of this cone, above it and below it, the pressing luminosities stretched into, it seemed, infinite distances.