It had eyes--eyes that were now only shadows darkening within its luminosity like veils falling, and falling, _opening_ windows into the unknowable; deepening into softly glowing blue pools, blue as the Moon Pool itself; then flashing out, and this only when the--face--bore its most human resemblance, into twin stars large almost as the crown of little moons; and with that same baffling suggestion of peep-holes into a world untrodden, alien, perilous to man! "Steady!" came Lakla's voice, her body leaned against mine. I gripped myself, my brain steadied, I looked again. And I saw that of body, at least body as we know it, the Shining One had none--nothing but the throbbing, pulsing core streaked with lightning veins of rainbows; and around this, never still, sheathing it, the swirling, glorious veilings of its hell and heaven born radiance. So the Dweller stood--and gazed. Then up toward us swept a reaching, questing spiral! Under my hand Lakla's shoulder quivered; dead-alive and their master vanished--I danced, flickered, _within_ the rock; felt a swift sense of shrinking, of withdrawal; slice upon slice the carded walls of stone, of silvery waters, of elfin gardens slipped from me as cards are withdrawn from a pack, one by one--slipped, wheeled, flattened, and lengthened out as I passed through them and they passed from me. Gasping, shaken, weak, I stood within the faceted oval chamber; arm still about the handmaiden's white shoulder; Larry's hand still clutching her girdle. The roaring, impalpable gale from the cosmos was retreating to the outposts of space--was still; the intense, streaming, flooding radiance lessened--died. "Now have you beheld," said Lakla, "and well you trod the road. And now shall you hear, even as the Silent Ones have commanded, what the Shining One is--and how it came to be." The steps flashed back; the doorway into the chamber opened. Larry as silent as I--we followed her through it. [1] Reprinted in full in _Nature_, in which those sufficiently interested may peruse it.--W. T. G. CHAPTER XXIX The Shaping of the Shining One We reached what I knew to be Lakla's own boudoir, if I may so call it. Smaller than any of the other chambers of the domed castle in which we had been, its intimacy was revealed not only by its faint fragrance but by its high mirrors of polished silver and various oddly wrought articles of the feminine toilet that lay here and there; things I afterward knew to be the work of the artisans of the _Akka_--and no mean metal workers were they. One of the window slits dropped almost to the floor, and at its base was a wide, comfortably cushioned seat commanding a view of the bridge and of the cavern ledge. To this the handmaiden beckoned us; sank upon it, drew Larry down beside her and motioned me to sit close to him.