It was, indeed, as though the passageway had wearied of our deliberate progress. Had decided to--give us a lift. Rearward it was shutting. I noted with interest how accurately this motion kept pace with our own speed, and how fluidly the walls seemed to run together. Our movement became accelerated. It was as though we floated buoyantly, weightless, upon some swift stream. The sensation was curiously pleasant, languorous--what was that word Ruth had used?--ELEMENTAL--and free. The supporting force seemed to flow equally from walls and floor; to reach down to us from the roof. It was slumberously even, and effortless. I saw that in advance of us the living corridor was opening even as behind us it was closing. All around us the little eye points twinkled and--laughed. There was no danger here--there could be none. Deeper and deeper dropped my mind into the depths of that alien tranquillity. Faster and faster we floated--onward. Abruptly, ahead of us shone a blaze of daylight. We passed into it. The force holding us withdrew its grip; I felt solidity beneath my feet; stood and leaned back against a smooth wall. The corridor had ended and--had shut us out from itself. “Bounced!” exclaimed Drake. And incongruous, flippant, colloquial as was that word, I know none that would better describe my own feelings. We were BOUNCED out upon a turret jutting from the barrier. And before us lay spread the most amazing, the most extraordinary fantastic scene upon which, I think, the vision of man has rested since the advent of time. CHAPTER XX. VAMPIRES OF THE SUN It was a crater; a half mile on high and all of two thousand feet across ran the circular lip of its vast rim. Above it was a circle of white and glaring sky in whose center flamed the sun. And instantly, before my vision could grasp a tithe of that panorama, I knew that this place was the very heart of the City; its vital ganglion; its soul. Around the crater lip were poised thousands of concave disks, vernal green, enormous. They were like a border of gigantic, upthrust shields; and within each, emblazoned like a shield's device, was a blinding flower of flame--the reflected, dilated face of the sun. Below this diadem hung, pendent, clusters of other disks, swarmed like the globular hiving of the constellation Hercules' captured stars. And each of these prisoned the image of our sun. A hundred feet below us was the crater floor. Up from it thrust a mountainous forest of the pallidly radiant cones; bristling; prodigious. Tier upon tier, thicket upon thicket, phalanx upon phalanx they climbed. Up and up, pyramidically, they flung their spiked hosts.