Involuntarily I closed my eyes against the annihilating impact that seemed inevitable.
The Thing on which we rode lifted.
We were soaring at a long angle straight to the top of the barrier; were upon it, and still with that awful speed unchecked were hurtling through the blackness over the shaft of phosphorescence, the ribbon of pale light that I had watched pierce it and knew now was but another span of the cubes that but a little before had fled past us.

Beneath the span, on each side of it, I sensed illimitable void.
We were over; rushing along in darkness.

There began a mighty tumult, a vast crashing and roaring.

The clangor waxed, beat about us with tremendous strokes of sound.
Far away was a dim glowing, as of rising sun through heavy mists of dawn.

The mists faded--miles away gleamed what at first glimpse seemed indeed to be the rising sun; a gigantic orb, whose lower limb just touched, was sharply, horizontally cut by the blackness, as though at its base that blackness was frozen.
The sun?
Reason returned to me; told me this globe could not be that.
What was it then?
Ra-Harmachis, of the Egyptians, stripped of his wings, exiled and growing old in the corridors of the Dead?
Or that mocking luminary, the cold phantom of the God of light and warmth which the old Norsemen believed was set in their frozen hell to torment the damned?
I thrust aside the fantasies, impatiently.