But then I waited--hope striving to break through the nightmare hands that gripped my heart. Their wide eyes never left me. There was another movement about them, others pushed past them; they drifted back, swaying, eddying--and still staring were lost in the awful throng. Vainly I strained my gaze to find them again, to force some sign of recognition, some awakening of the clean life we know. But they were gone. Try as I would I could not see them--nor Stanton and the northern woman named Thora who had been the first of that tragic party to be taken by the Dweller. "Throckmartin!" I cried again, despairingly. My tears blinded me. I felt Lakla's light touch. "Steady," she commanded, pitifully. "Steady, Goodwin. You cannot help them--now! Steady and--watch!" Below us the Shining One had paused--spiralling, swirling, vibrant with all its transcendent, devilish beauty; had paused and was contemplating us. Now I could see clearly that nucleus, that core shot through with flashing veins of radiance, that ever-shifting shape of glory through the shroudings of shimmering, misty plumes, throbbing lacy opalescences, vaporous spirallings of prismatic phantom fires. Steady over it hung the seven little moons of amethyst, of saffron, of emerald and azure and silver, of rose of life and moon white. 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.