This was no fern, no! It was fern _moss_! The largest of its species I had ever found in tropic jungles had not been more than two inches high, and this was--twenty feet! The scientific fire I had experienced in the tunnel returned uncontrollable.

I parted the fronds, gazed out-- My outlook commanded a vista of miles--and that vista! A _Fata Morgana_ of plantdom! A land of flowered sorcery! Forests of tree-high mosses spangled over with blooms of every conceivable shape and colour; cataracts and clusters, avalanches and nets of blossoms in pastels, in dulled metallics, in gorgeous flamboyant hues; some of them phosphorescent and shining like living jewels; some sparkling as though with dust of opals, of sapphires, of rubies and topazes and emeralds; thickets of convolvuli like the trumpets of the seven archangels of Mara, king of illusion, which are shaped from the bows of splendours arching his highest heaven! And moss veils like banners of a marching host of Titans; pennons and bannerets of the sunset; gonfalons of the Jinn; webs of faery; oriflammes of elfland! Springing up through that polychromatic flood myriads of pedicles--slender and straight as spears, or soaring in spirals, or curving with undulations gracile as the white serpents of Tanit in ancient Carthaginian groves--and all surmounted by a fantasy of spore cases in shapes of minaret and turret, domes and spires and cones, caps of Phrygia and bishops' mitres, shapes grotesque and unnameable--shapes delicate and lovely! They hung high poised, nodding and swaying--like goblins hovering over _Titania's_ court; cacophony of Cathay accenting the _Flower Maiden_ music of "Parsifal"; _bizarrerie_ of the angled, fantastic beings that people the Javan pantheon watching a bacchanal of houris in Mohammed's paradise! Down upon it all poured the amber light; dimmed in the distances by huge, drifting darkenings lurid as the flying mantles of the hurricane.
And through the light, like showers of jewels, myriads of birds, darting, dipping, soaring, and still other myriads of gigantic, shimmering butterflies.
A sound came to us, reaching out like the first faint susurrus of the incoming tide; sighing, sighing, growing stronger--now its mournful whispering quivered all about us, shook us--then passing like a Presence, died away in far distances.
"The Portal!" said Rador.

"Lugur has entered!" He, too, parted the fronds and peered back along our path.

Peering with him we saw the barrier through which we had come stretching verdure-covered walls for miles three or more away.

Like a mole burrow in a garden stretched the trail of the tunnel; here and there we could look down within the rift at its top; far off in it I thought I saw the glint of spears.
"They come!" whispered Rador.