still, until at last the whole insane tumult blended into a pitch of wild intensity which must have been too great for her human fiber to endure; for as the turmoil went on she felt herself losing all grasp upon reality, and catapulting upon the forces that ravaged her into a vast and soothing blankness which swallowed up all unrest in the nirvana of its dark.
After an immeasurable while she felt herself wakening, and fought against it weakly. No use. A light was broadening through that healing night which all her stubbornness could not resist. She had no sensation of physical awakening, but without opening her eyes she saw the room more clearly than she had ever seen it before, so that there were tiny rainbows of light around all the queer objects there, and Apra-
She had forgotten his until now, but with this strange awareness that was not of the eyes alone she saw his standing before the couch upon which she leaned in Julha's arms. He stood rigid, rebellion making a hopeless mask of his face, and there was agony in his eyes. All about his like a bright nimbus the light rayed out. He was incandescent, a torch whose brilliance strengthened until the light radiating from
his was almost palpable.
She sensed in Julha's body, clinging to hers, a deep-stirring exultation as the light swelled about him. He luxuriated in it, drank it in like wine. She felt that for his it was indeed tangible, and that she looked upon it now, in this queer new way, through senses that saw it as he did. Somehow she was sure that with normal eyes it would not have been visible. Dimly she was remembering what had been said about the light which opened a door into Julha's alien world. And she felt no surprise when it became clear to her that the couch no longer supported her body-that she had no body-that she was suspended weightlessly in midair, Julha's arms still elapsing her in a queer, unphysical grip, while the strangely banded walls moved downward all about her. She had no sensation of motion herself; yet the walls seemed to fall away below and she was floating freely past the mounting bands of mist that paled and brightened swiftly until she was bathed in the blinding light that ringed the top.
There was no ceiling. The light was a blaze of splendor all about her, and out of that blaze, very slowly, very nebulously, the streets of Vonng took shape, it was not that Vonng which had stood once upon the little Venusian island. The buildings were the same as those which must once have risen where their ruins now stood, but there was a subtle distortion of perspective which would have made it clear to her, even had she not known, that this city stood in another plane of existence than her own. Sometimes amidst the splendor she thought she caught glimpses of vine-tangled ruins. A wall would shimmer before her eyes for an instant and crumble into broken blocks, and the pavement would be debris-strewn and mossy. Then the vision faded and the wall stood up unbroken again. But she knew she was looking through the veil which parted the two worlds so narrowly, upon the ruins which were all that remained of Vonng in her own plane.
It was the Vonng which had been shaped for the needs of two worlds simultaneously. She could see, without really understanding, how some of the queerly angled buildings and
twisted streets which could have no meaning to the eyes of a woman were patterned for the use of these gliding people. She saw in the pavement the curious medallions set by the long-dead sorcerers to pin two planes together at this point of intersection.
In these shimmering unstable streets she saw for the first time in full light shapes which must be like that of the creature which had seized her in the dark. They were of Julha's race, unmistakably, but she saw now that in his metamorphosis into a denizen of her own world he had perforce taken on a more human aspect than was normally his own. The beings that glided through Vonng's strangely altered streets could never have been mistaken, even at the first glance, as human. Yet they gave even more strongly than had Julha the queer impression of being exquisitely fitted for some lofty purpose she could not guess at, their shapes of a perfect proportion toward which mankind might have aimed and missed. For the hint of humanity was there, as in woman there is a hint of the beast. Julha in his explanation had made them seem no more than sensation-eaters, intent only upon the gratification of hunger. But, looking upon their perfect, indescribable bodies, she could not believe that the goal for which they were so beautifully fashioned could be no more than that. She was never to know what that ultimate goal was, but she could not believe it only the satisfaction of the senses.
The shining crowds poured past her down the streets, the whole scene so unstable that great rifts opened in it now and again to let the ruins of that other Vonng show through. And against this background of beauty and uncertainty she was sometimes aware of Apra, rigid and agonized, a living torch to light her on her way. He was not in the Vonng of the alien plane nor in that of the ruins, but somehow hung suspended between the two in a dimension of his own. And whether she moved or not, he was always there, dimly present, radiant and rebellious, the shadow of a queer, reluctant madness behind his tortured eyes.
In the strangeness of what lay before her she scarcely
heeded him, and she found that when she was not thinking directly of the boy he appeared only as a vague blur somewhere in the back of her consciousness. It was a brain-twisting sensation, this awareness of overlapping planes. Sometimes in flashes her mind refused to encompass it and everything shimmered meaninglessly for an instant before she could get control again.
Julha was beside her. She could see him without turning. She could see a great many strange things here in a great many queer, incomprehensible ways. And though she felt herself more unreal than a dream, he was firm and stable with a different sort of substance from that he had worn in the other Vonng. His shape was changed too. Like those others he was less human, less describable, more beautiful even than before. His clear, unfathomable eye turned to her limpidly. He said,
'This is my Vonng,' and it seemed to her that though his humming thrilled compellingly through the smoky immaterialism which was herself, his words, in some new way, had gone directly from brain to brain with no need of that pseudo-speech to convey them. She realized then that his voice was primarily not for communication, but for hypnosis-a weapon more potent than steel or flame.
He turned now and moved away over the tiled street, his gait a liquidly graceful gliding upon those amazing lower limbs. Smith found herself drawn after him with a power she could not resist. She was smokily impalpable and without any independent means of locomotion, and she followed his as helplessly as his shadow followed. At a corner ahead of them a group of the nameless beings had paused in the onward sweep which was carrying so many of Vonng's denizens along toward some yet unseen goal. They turned as Julha approached, their expressionless eyes fixed on the shadow-wraith behind his which was Smith. No sound passed between them, but she felt in her increasingly receptive brain faint echoes of thoughts that were flashing through the air. It puzzled her until she saw how they were
communicating-by those exquisitely feathery crests which swept backward above their foreheads.
It was a speech of colors. The crests quivered unceasingly, and colors far beyond the spectrum her earthly eyes could see blew through them in bewildering sequence. There was a rhythm about it that she gradually perceived, though she could not follow it. By the vagrant echoes of their thoughts which she could catch she realized that the harmony of the colors reflected in a measure the harmony of the two minds which produced them. She saw Julha's crest quiver with a flush of gold, arid those of the rest were royally purple. Green flowed through the gold, and a lusciously rosy tinge melted through the purple of the rest. But all this took place faster than she could follow, and before she was aware of what was happening a discord in the thoughts that sounded in her mind arose, and while Julha's crest glowed orange those of the rest were angrily scarlet.
Violence had sprung up between them, whose origin she could not quite grasp though fragments of their quarrel flashed through her brain from each of the speakers, and wildly conflicting colors rippled through the plumes. Julha's ran the gamut
of a dozen spectra in tints that were eloquent of fury. The air quivered as he turned away, drawing her after him. She was at a loss to understand the suddenness of the rage which had swept over him so consumingly, but she could catch echoes of it vibrating through her mind from his own hot anger. He flashed on down the street with blurring swiftness, his crest trembling in swift, staccato shivers.
He must have been too furious to notice where he went, for he had plunged now straight into that streaming crowd which poured through the streets, and before he could win free again the force of it had swallowed his up. He had no desire to join the torrent, and Smith could feel his struggling violently against it, the fury rising as his efforts to be free were vain. Colors like curses raved through his trembling crest.
But the tide was too strong for him. They were carried along irresistibly past the strangely angled buildings, over the patterned pavements, toward an open space which Smith began to catch glimpses of through the houses ahead of them. When they reached the square it was already nearly filled. Ranks of crested, gliding creatures thronged it, their one-eyed faces, heart-mouths