As we passed, there arose upon our left sheer walls of black basalt
blocks, cyclopean, towering fifty feet or more, broken here and there
by the sinking of their deep foundations.
In front of us the mangroves widened out and filled the canal. On
our right the lesser walls of Tau, sombre blocks smoothed and squared
and set with a cold, mathematical nicety that filled me with vague
awe, slipped by. Through breaks I caught glimpses of dark ruins and of
great fallen stones that seemed to crouch and menace us, as we passed.
Somewhere there, hidden, were the seven globes that poured the moon
fire down upon the Moon Pool.
Now we were among the mangroves and, sail down, the three of us pushed
and pulled the boat through their tangled roots and branches. The
noise of our passing split the silence like a profanation, and from
the ancient bastions came murmurs--forbidding, strangely sinister. And
now we were through, floating on a little open space of shadow-filled
water. Before us lifted the gateway of Nan-Tauach, gigantic, broken,
incredibly old; shattered portals through which had passed men and
women of earth's dawn; old with a weight of years that pressed
leadenly upon the eyes that looked upon it, and yet was in some
curious indefinable way--menacingly defiant.
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