Enormous reaches stretched before me.
Shimmering up through them, and as though growing in some medium thicker than air, was mass upon mass of verdure--fruiting trees and trees laden with pale blossoms, arbours and bowers of pallid blooms, like that sea fruit of oblivion--grapes of Lethe--that cling to the tide-swept walls of the caverns of the Hebrides.
Through them, beyond them, around and about them, drifted and eddied a horde--great as that with which Tamerlane swept down upon Rome, vast as the myriads which Genghis Khan rolled upon the califs--men and women and children--clothed in tatters, half nude and wholly naked; slant-eyed Chinese, sloe-eyed Malays, islanders black and brown and yellow, fierce-faced warriors of the Solomons with grizzled locks fantastically bedizened; Papuans, feline Javans, Dyaks of hill and shore; hook-nosed Phoenicians, Romans, straight-browed Greeks, and Vikings centuries _beyond_ their lives: scores of the black-haired Murians; white faces of our own Westerners--men and women and children--drifting, eddying--each stamped with that mingled horror and rapture, eyes filled with ecstasy and terror entwined, marked by God and devil in embrace--the seal of the Shining One--the dead-alive; the lost ones! The loot of the Dweller! Soul-sick, I gazed.

They lifted to us visages of dread; they swept down toward us, glaring upward--a bank against which other and still other waves of faces rolled, were checked, paused; until as far as I could see, like billows piled upon an ever-growing barrier, they stretched beneath us--staring--staring! Now there was a movement--far, far away; a concentrating of the lambency; the dead-alive swayed, oscillated, separated--forming a long lane against whose outskirts they crowded with avid, hungry insistence.
First only a luminous cloud, then a whirling pillar of splendours through the lane came--the Shining One.

As it passed, the dead-alive swirled in its wake like leaves behind a whirlwind, eddying, twisting; and as the Dweller raced by them, brushing them with its spirallings and tentacles, they shone forth with unearthly, awesome gleamings--like vessels of alabaster in which wicks flare suddenly.
And when it had passed they closed behind it, staring up at us once more.
The Dweller paused beneath us.
Out of the drifting ruck swam the body of Throckmartin! Throckmartin, my friend, to find whom I had gone to the pallid moon door; my friend whose call I had so laggardly followed.

On his face was the Dweller's dreadful stamp; the lips were bloodless; the eyes were wide, lucent, something like pale, phosphorescence gleaming within them--and soulless.
He stared straight up at me, unwinking, unrecognizing.

Pressing against his side was a woman, young and gentle, and lovely--lovely even through the mask that lay upon her face.