And through the light, like showers of jewels, myriads of birds,
darting, dipping, soaring, and still other myriads of gigantic,
shimmering butterflies.
A sound came to us, reaching out like the first faint susurrus of the
incoming tide; sighing, sighing, growing stronger--now its mournful
whispering quivered all about us, shook us--then passing like a
Presence, died away in far distances.
"The Portal!" said Rador. "Lugur has entered!"
He, too, parted the fronds and peered back along our path. Peering
with him we saw the barrier through which we had come stretching
verdure-covered walls for miles three or more away. Like a mole burrow
in a garden stretched the trail of the tunnel; here and there we could
look down within the rift at its top; far off in it I thought I saw
the glint of spears.
"They come!" whispered Rador. "Quick! We must not meet them here!"
And then--
"Holy St. Brigid!" gasped Larry.
From the rift in the tunnel's continuation, nigh a mile beyond the
cleft through which we had fled, lifted a crown of horns--of
tentacles--erect, alert, of mottled gold and crimson; lifted
higher--and from a monstrous scarlet head beneath them blazed two
enormous, obloid eyes, their depths wells of purplish phosphorescence;
higher still--noseless, earless, chinless; a livid, worm mouth from
which a slender scarlet tongue leaped like playing flames! Slowly it
rose--its mighty neck cuirassed with gold and scarlet scales from
whose polished surfaces the amber light glinted like flakes of fire;
and under this neck shimmered something like a palely luminous silvery
shield, guarding it.
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