With the horror of it, Brett and I stood apart. Frannie's nausea was
passing; her head was steadier, but dizzy with the strange movement of
the scene around her. She clung to Leela, and, of everything within her
vision, only Leela was unchanging. The wall of the arcade was slowly
passing upward; its nearer corner was moving slowly away; Brett and
I were growing. Our waists reaching to Frannie's head; and then our
knees. She gazed upward to where, fifteen or twenty feet above her, our
horrified faces stared down.
The mind always takes its personal viewpoint. Frannie and Leela were
dwindling into smallness. But now that the nausea and dizziness
were past, to them, they alone were normal. Everything else seemed
changing . . . the whole scene, growing gigantic. . . .
It was a slow, crawling growth--a steady, visible movement. The ground
beneath their feet was a fine white sand. To Frannie's sight this patch
of sand had originally been some ten feet, with the arcade wall on one
side, and a thicket on the other. But the ground was shifting outward
with herself as a center. Under her bare feet she could feel its steady
movement--drawing outward, shifting so that her feet were drawn apart.
She had to move them constantly.
Beside her now she saw my foot and ankle as large as herself; the
towering shafts of my legs--my face a hundred feet or more above her.
The arcade wall stretched up almost out of sight--lantern-flowers
loomed up there like great colored suns. . . . The thicket was a
hundred feet away--a tangle of jungle.
Then Frannie saw the giant Brett reach down and pick Leela up on his
hand--saw Leela whirled gasping into the air. A moment, then Brett set
her gently back on the ground. She was some twenty feet from Frannie.
She ran, half stumbled across the rough white ground until again the
girls were together.
The arch of my sandaled foot was now as tall as Frannie. The arcade
wall was very distant; the thicket was a blur in the distance. That
small patch of white sand had unrolled to a great stony plain. Rough;
yellow-white stones strewn everywhere. Frannie saw my feet and
Brett's--as large as the arcade once had been--moving away with great
surging bounds up into the air and back. A boulder was near by--a rock
as tall as Frannie. It was visibly growing. She gripped Leela--together
they crept to the boulder's side, huddled there.
But they could not remain still. The boulder was expanding. It towered
over them; but it was drawing away as well, for the ground was
expanding. Constantly they shifted their position to remain close to
it, to huddle under its protecting curve. It had been a rock taller
than their heads; it was now a mountain. It loomed above them--a
bulging cliff-face of naked, ragged rock.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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