They poised themselves like a diadem--calm, serene, immobile--and down from them into the Dweller, piercing plumes and swirls and spirals, ran countless tiny strands, radiations, finer than the finest spun thread of spider's web, gleaming filaments through which seemed to run--_power_--from the seven globes; like--yes, that was it--miniatures of the seven torrents of moon flame that poured through the septichromatic, high crystals in the Moon Pool's chamber roof.
Swam out of the coruscating haze the--face! Both of man and of woman it was--like some ancient, androgynous deity of Etruscan fanes long dust, and yet neither woman nor man; human and unhuman, seraphic and sinister, benign and malefic--and still no more of these four than is flame, which is beautiful whether it warms or devours, or wind whether it feathers the trees or shatters them, or the wave which is wondrous whether it caresses or kills.
Subtly, undefinably it was of our world and of one not ours.

Its lineaments flowed from another sphere, took fleeting familiar form--and as swiftly withdrew whence they had come; something amorphous, unearthly--as of unknown unheeding, unseen gods rushing through the depths of star-hung space; and still of our own earth, with the very soul of earth peering out from it, caught within it--and in some--unholy--way debased.
It had eyes--eyes that were now only shadows darkening within its luminosity like veils falling, and falling, _opening_ windows into the unknowable; deepening into softly glowing blue pools, blue as the Moon Pool itself; then flashing out, and this only when the--face--bore its most human resemblance, into twin stars large almost as the crown of little moons; and with that same baffling suggestion of peep-holes into a world untrodden, alien, perilous to man! "Steady!" came Lakla's voice, her body leaned against mine.
I gripped myself, my brain steadied, I looked again.

And I saw that of body, at least body as we know it, the Shining One had none--nothing but the throbbing, pulsing core streaked with lightning veins of rainbows; and around this, never still, sheathing it, the swirling, glorious veilings of its hell and heaven born radiance.
So the Dweller stood--and gazed.
Then up toward us swept a reaching, questing spiral! Under my hand Lakla's shoulder quivered; dead-alive and their master vanished--I danced, flickered, _within_ the rock; felt a swift sense of shrinking, of withdrawal; slice upon slice the carded walls of stone, of silvery waters, of elfin gardens slipped from me as cards are withdrawn from a pack, one by one--slipped, wheeled, flattened, and lengthened out as I passed through them and they passed from me.
Gasping, shaken, weak, I stood within the faceted oval chamber; arm still about the handmaiden's white shoulder; Larry's hand still clutching her girdle.
The roaring, impalpable gale from the cosmos was retreating to the outposts of space--was still; the intense, streaming, flooding radiance lessened--died.
"Now have you beheld," said Lakla, "and well you trod the road.

And now shall you hear, even as the Silent Ones have commanded, what the Shining One is--and how it came to be." The steps flashed back; the doorway into the chamber opened.
Larry as silent as I--we followed her through it.
[1] Reprinted in full in _Nature_, in which those sufficiently interested may peruse it .-- W.

T.G..