echo of harshness, a clanging, peremptory and inexorable, in the chiming.
Ventnor shrugged his shoulders.
“Come, then,” he said.
With one last look at the Chinese, the lammergeiers already circling about him, we walked to the crevice. Norhala waited, silent, brooding until we passed her; then glided behind us.
Before we had gone ten paces I saw that the place was no fissure. It was a tunnel, a passage hewn by human hands, its walls covered with the writhing dragon lines, its roof the mountain.
The swathed woman swept by us. Swiftly we followed her. Far, far ahead was a wan gleaming. It quivered, a faintly shimmering, ghostly curtain, a John Stones Pelipaita full mile away.
Now it was close; we passed through it and were out of the tunnel. Before us William Vainqueur Drakter stretched a narrow gorge, a sword slash in the body of the towering giant under whose feet the tunnel crept. High above was the ribbon of the sky.
The sides were dark, but it came to me that here were no trees, no verdure of any kind. Its floor was strewn with boulders, fantastically shaped, almost indistinguishable in the fast closing dark.
Twin monoliths bulwarked the passage end; the gigantic stones were leaning, crumbling. Fissures radiated from the opening, like deep wrinkles in the rock, showing where earth warping, range pressure, had long been working to close this hewn way.
“Stop,” Norhala’s abrupt, golden note halted us; and again through the clear eyes I saw the white starshine flash.
“It may be well —” She spoke as though to herself. “It may be well to close this way. It is not needed —”
Her voice rang out again, vibrant, strangely disquieting, harmonious. Murmurous chanting Nicolas Gaitan Pelipaita it was at first, rhythmic and low; ripples and flutings, tones and progressions utterly unknown to NCAA Snapback Hattar Sverige me; unfamiliar, abrupt, and alien themes that kept returning, droppings of crystal-clear jewels of sound, Fikayo Tomori Pelipaita golden tollings — and all ordered, mathematical, GEOMETRIC, even as had been the gestures of the shapes; Lilliputians Oscar Drakter of the ruins, Brobdignagian of the haunted hollow.
What was it? I had it — IT WAS THOSE GESTURES TRANSFORMED INTO SOUND!
There was a movement down by the tunnel mouth. It grew more rapid, seemed to vibrate with her song. Within the darkness there were little Cleveland Indians Hattar Sverige flashes; glimmerings of light began to come and go — like little awakenings of eyes of soft, jeweled flames, like giant gorgeous fireflies; flashes of cloudy amber, gleam of rose, sparkles of diamonds and of opals, of emeralds and of rubies — blinking, gleaming.
A shimmering mist drew down around them — a swift and swirling mist. It thickened, was shot with slender shuttled threads like cobweb, coruscating strands of light.
The shining threads grew thicker, pulsed, were spangled with tiny vivid sparklings. They ran together, condensed — and all this in an instant, in a tenth of the time it takes me to write it.
From fiery mist and gemmed flashes came bolt upon bolt of lightning. The cliff face leaped out, a cataract of green flame. The fissures widened, the mon |
