The Three Silent Ones The arch was closer--and in my awe I forgot for the moment Larry and aught else.

For this was no rainbow, no thing born of light and mist, no Bifrost Bridge of myth--no! It was a flying arch of stone, stained with flares of Tyrian purples, of royal scarlets, of blues dark as the Gulf Stream's ribbon, sapphires soft as midday May skies, splashes of chromes and greens--a palette of giantry, a bridge of wizardry; a hundred, nay, a thousand, times greater than that of Utah which the Navaho call Nonnegozche and worship, as well they may, as a god, and which is itself a rainbow in eternal rock.
It sprang from the ledge and winged its prodigious length in one low arc over the sea's crimson breast, as though in some ancient paroxysm of earth it had been hurled molten, crystallizing into that stupendous span and still flaming with the fires that had moulded it.
Closer we came and closer, while I watched spellbound; now we were at its head, and the litter-bearers swept upon it.

All of five hundred feet wide it was, surface smooth as a city road, sides low walled, curving inward as though in the jetting-out of its making the edges of the plastic rock had curled.
On and on we sped; the high thrusting precipices upon which the bridge's far end rested, frowned close; the enigmatic, dully shining dome loomed ever greater.

Now we had reached that end; were passing over a smooth plaza whose level floor was enclosed, save for a rift in front of us, by the fanged tops of the black cliffs.
From this rift stretched another span, half a mile long, perhaps, widening at its centre into a broad platform, continuing straight to two massive gates set within the face of the second cliff wall like panels, and of the same dull gold as the dome rising high beyond.

And this smaller arch leaped a pit, an abyss, of which the outer precipices were the rim holding back from the pit the red flood.
We were rapidly approaching; now upon the platform; my bearers were striding closely along the side; I leaned far out--a giddiness seized me! I gazed down into depth upon vertiginous depth; an abyss indeed--an abyss dropping to world's base like that in which the Babylonians believed writhed Talaat, the serpent mother of Chaos; a pit that struck down into earth's heart itself.
Now, what was that--distance upon unfathomable distance below?
A stupendous glowing like the green fire of life itself.