Gasping, legs aching, we lay prone, relaxed, drawing back strength and
breath. Rador was first to rise. Thrice he bent low as in homage,
then--
"Give thanks to the Silent Ones--for their power has been over us!" he
exclaimed.
Dimly I wondered what he meant. Something about the fern leaf at
which I had been staring aroused me. I leaped to my feet and ran to
its base. This was no fern, no! It was fern _moss_! The largest of its
species I had ever found in tropic jungles had not been more than two
inches high, and this was--twenty feet! The scientific fire I had
experienced in the tunnel returned uncontrollable. I parted the
fronds, gazed out--
My outlook commanded a vista of miles--and that vista! A _Fata
Morgana_ of plantdom! A land of flowered sorcery!
Forests of tree-high mosses spangled over with blooms of every
conceivable shape and colour; cataracts and clusters, avalanches and
nets of blossoms in pastels, in dulled metallics, in gorgeous
flamboyant hues; some of them phosphorescent and shining like living
jewels; some sparkling as though with dust of opals, of sapphires, of
rubies and topazes and emeralds; thickets of convolvuli like the
trumpets of the seven archangels of Mara, king of illusion, which are
shaped from the bows of splendours arching his highest heaven!
And moss veils like banners of a marching host of Titans; pennons and
bannerets of the sunset; gonfalons of the Jinn; webs of faery;
oriflammes of elfland!
Springing up through that polychromatic flood myriads of
pedicles--slender and straight as spears, or soaring in spirals, or
curving with undulations gracile as the white serpents of Tanit in
ancient Carthaginian groves--and all surmounted by a fantasy of spore
cases in shapes of minaret and turret, domes and spires and cones,
caps of Phrygia and bishops' mitres, shapes grotesque and
unnameable--shapes delicate and lovely!
They hung high poised, nodding and swaying--like goblins hovering over
_Titania's_ court; cacophony of Cathay accenting the _Flower Maiden_
music of "Parsifal"; _bizarrerie_ of the angled, fantastic beings that
people the Javan pantheon watching a bacchanal of houris in Mohammed's
paradise!
Down upon it all poured the amber light; dimmed in the distances by
huge, drifting darkenings lurid as the flying mantles of the
hurricane.
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