It was like crushed garnets, each grain stained deep red, faintly sparkling.

On each side were distances, the floor stretching away into them bare of vegetation--stretching on and on into infinitudes of rosy mist, even as did the space above.
Flanking and behind us marched the giant batrachians, fivescore of them at least, black scale and crimson scale lustrous and gleaming in the rosaceous radiance; saucer eyes shining circles of phosphorescence green, purple, red; spurs clicking as they crouched along with a gait at once grotesque and formidable.
Ahead the mist deepened into a ruddier glow; through it a long, dark line began to appear--the mouth I thought of the caverned space through which we were going; it was just before us; over us--we stood bathed in a flood of rubescence! A sea stretched before us--a crimson sea, gleaming like that lost lacquer of royal coral and the Flame Dragon's blood which Fu S'cze set upon the bower he built for his stolen sun maiden--that going toward it she might think it the sun itself rising over the summer seas.
Unmoved by wave or ripple, it was placid as some deep woodland pool when night rushes up over the world.
It seemed molten--or as though some hand great enough to rock earth had distilled here from conflagrations of autumn sunsets their flaming essences.
A fish broke through, large as a shark, blunt-headed, flashing bronze, ridged and mailed as though with serrate plates of armour.

It leaped high, shaking from it a sparkling spray of rubies; dropped and shot up a geyser of fiery gems.
Across my line of vision, moving stately over the sea, floated a half globe, luminous, diaphanous, its iridescence melting into turquoise, thence to amethyst, to orange, to scarlet shot with rose, to vermilion, a translucent green, thence back into the iridescence; behind it four others, and the least of them ten feet in diameter, and the largest no less than thirty.

They drifted past like bubbles blown from froth of rainbows by pipes in mouths of Titans' young.

Then from the base of one arose a tangle of shimmering strands, long, slender whiplashes that played about and sank slowly again beneath the crimson surface.
I gasped--for the fish had been a _ganoid_--that ancient, armoured form that was perhaps the most intelligent of all life on our planet during the Devonian era, but which for age upon age had vanished, save for its fossils held in the embrace of the stone that once was their soft bottom beds; and the half-globes were _Medusae_, jelly-fish--but of a size, luminosity, and colour unheard of.
Now Lakla cupped her mouth with pink palms and sent a clarion note ringing out.