A thousand feet away it checked its movement, seemed to draw itself together. Then like the roar of a falling world that whole side facing us slid down to the valley's floor. CHAPTER XXIX. THE PASSING OF NORHALA Hundreds of feet through must have been the fallen mass--within it who knows what chambers filled with mysteries? Yes, thousands of feet thick it must have been, for the debris of it splintered and lashed to the very edge of the ledge on which we crouched; heaped it with the dimming fragments of the bodies that had formed it. We looked into a thousand vaults, a thousand spaces. There came another avalanche roaring--before us opened the crater of the cones. Through the torn gap I saw them, clustering undisturbed about the base of that one slender, coroneted and star pointing spire, rising serene and unshaken from a hell of lightnings. But the shields that had rimmed the crater were gone. Ventnor snatched the glasses from my hand, leveled and held them long to his eyes. He thrust them back to me. “Look!” Through the lenses the great hall leaped into full view apparently only a few yards away. It was a cauldron of chameleon flame. It seethed with the Hordes battling over the remaining walls and floor. But around the crystal base of the cones was an open zone into which none broke. In that wide ring, girdling the shimmering fantasy like a circled sanctuary, were but three forms. One was the wondrous Disk of jeweled fires I have called the Metal Emperor; the second was the sullen fired cruciform of the Keeper. The third was Norhala! She stood at the side of that weird master of hers--or was it after all the servant? Between them and the Keeper's planes gleamed the gigantic T-shaped tablet of countless rods which controlled the activities of the cones; that had controlled the shifting of the vanished shields; that manipulated too, perhaps, the energies of whatever similar but smaller cornute ganglia were scattered throughout the City and one of which we had beheld when the Emperor's guards had blasted Ventnor. Close was Norhala in the lenses--so close that almost, it seemed, I could reach out and touch her. The flaming hair streamed and billowed above her glorious head like a banner of molten floss of coppery gold; her face was a mask of wrath and despair; her great eyes blazed upon the Keeper; her exquisite body was bare, stripped of every shred of silken covering. From streaming tresses to white feet an oval of pulsing, golden light nimbused her. Maiden Isis, virgin Astarte she stood there, held in the grip of the Disk--like a goddess betrayed and hopeless yet thirsting for vengeance. For all their stillness, their immobility, it came to me that Emperor and Keeper were at grapple, locked in death grip; the realization was as definite as though, like Ruth, I thought with Norhala's mind, saw with her eyes.