But sun or no sun, light streamed from this orb, light in multicolored, lanced rays, banishing the blackness through which we had been flying.
Closer we came and closer; lighter it grew about us, and by the growing light I saw that still beside us ran the abyss.

And even louder, more thunderous, became the clamor.
At the foot of the radiant disk I glimpsed a luminous pool.

Into it, out of the depths, protruded a tremendous rectangular tongue, gleaming like gray steel.
On the tongue an inky shape appeared; it lifted itself from the abyss, rushed upon the disk and took form.
Like a gigantic spider it was, squat and horned.

For an instant it was silhouetted against the smiling sphere, poised itself--and vanished through it.
Now, not far ahead, silhouetted as had been the spider shape, blackened into sight a cube and on it Ruth and Norhala.

It seemed to hover, to wait.
"It's a door," Drake's shout beat thinly in my ears against the hurricane of sound.
What I thought had been an orb was indeed a gateway, a portal; and it was gigantic.
The light streamed through it, the flaming colors, the lightning glare, the drifting shadows were all beyond it.