Larry felt it and I saw him look at me askance.

If Olaf, sitting in the bow, felt it, too, he gave no sign; his blue eyes, with again the glint of ice within them, watched the channel before us.
As we passed, there arose upon our left sheer walls of black basalt blocks, cyclopean, towering fifty feet or more, broken here and there by the sinking of their deep foundations.
In front of us the mangroves widened out and filled the canal.

On our right the lesser walls of Tau, sombre blocks smoothed and squared and set with a cold, mathematical nicety that filled me with vague awe, slipped by.

Through breaks I caught glimpses of dark ruins and of great fallen stones that seemed to crouch and menace us, as we passed.
Somewhere there, hidden, were the seven globes that poured the moon fire down upon the Moon Pool.
Now we were among the mangroves and, sail down, the three of us pushed and pulled the boat through their tangled roots and branches.

The noise of our passing split the silence like a profanation, and from the ancient bastions came murmurs--forbidding, strangely sinister.