第76章

"Yes--Goodwin." she said."Oft and oft I came.Some-times I thought you saw me.And HE--did he not dream of me sometime--?" she asked wistfully.

"He did." I said, "and watched for you." Then amaze-ment grew vocal."But how came you?" I asked.

"By a strange road," she whispered, "to see that all was well with HIM--and to look into his heart; for I feared Yolara and her beauty.But I saw that she was not in his heart." Ablush burned over her, turning even the little bare breast rosy."It is a strange road," she went on hurriedly."Many times have I followed it and watched the Shining One bear back its prey to the blue pool; seen the woman HE seeks"--she made a quick gesture toward Olaf--"and a babe cast from her arms in the last pang of her mother love; seen another woman throw herself into the Shining One's em-brace to save a man she loved; and I could not help!" Her voice grew deep, thrilled."The friend, it comes to me, who drew you here, Goodwin!"She was silent, walking as one who sees visions and listens to voices unheard by others, Rador made a warning gesture;I crowded back my questions, glanced about me.We were passing over a smooth strand, hard packed as some beach of long-thrust-back ocean.It was like crushed garnets, each grain stained deep red, faintly sparkling.On each side were distances, the floor stretching away into them bare of vege-tation--stretching on and on into infinitudes of rosy mist, even as did the space above.

Flanking and behind us marched the giant batrachians, fivescore of them at least, black scale and crimson scale lus-trous and gleaming in the rosaceous radiance; saucer eyes shining circles of phosphorescence green, purple, red; spurs clicking as they crouched along with a gait at once gro-tesque and formidable.

Ahead the mist deepened into a ruddier glow; through it a long, dark line began to appear--the mouth I thought of the caverned space through which we were going; it was just before us; over us--we stood bathed in a flood of rubes-cence!

A sea stretched before us--a crimson sea, gleaming like that lost lacquer of royal coral and the Flame Dragon's blood which Fu S'cze set upon the bower he built for his stolen sun maiden--that going toward it she might think it the sun itself rising over the summer seas.Unmoved by wave or ripple, it was placid as some deep woodland pool when night rushes up over the world.

It seemed molten--or as though some hand great enough to rock earth had distilled here from conflagrations of au-tumn sunsets their flaming essences.

A fish broke through, large as a shark, blunt-headed, flash-ing bronze, ridged and mailed as though with serrate plates of armour.It leaped high, shaking from it a sparkling spray of rubies; dropped and shot up a geyser of fiery gems.

Across my line of vision, moving stately over the sea, floated a half globe, luminous, diaphanous, its iridescence melting into turquoise, thence to amethyst, to orange, to scarlet shot with rose, to vermilion, a translucent green, thence back into the iridescence; behind it four others, and the least of them ten feet in diameter, and the largest no less than thirty.They drifted past like bubbles blown from froth of rainbows by pipes in mouths of Titans' young.Then from the base of one arose a tangle of shimmering strands, long, slender whiplashes that played about and sank slowly again beneath the crimson surface.