I gasped--for the fish had been a _ganoid_--that ancient, armoured form that was perhaps the most intelligent of all life on our planet during the Devonian era, but which for age upon age had vanished, save for its fossils held in the embrace of the stone that once was their soft bottom beds;and the half-globes were _Medusae_, jelly-fish--but of a size, luminosity, and colour unheard of.
Now Lakla cupped her mouth with pink palms and sent a clarion note ringing out.The ledge on which we stood con-tinued a few hundred feet before us, falling abruptly, though from no great height to the Crimson Sea; at right and left it extended in a long semicircle.Turning to the right whence she had sent her call, I saw rising a mile or more away, veiled lightly by the haze, a rainbow, a gigantic prismatic arch, flattened, I thought, by some quality of the strange atmosphere.It sprang from the ruddy strand, leaped the crimson tide, and dropped three miles away upon a precip-itous, jagged upthrust of rock frowning black from the lac-quered depths.
And surmounting a higher ledge beyond this upthrust a huge dome of dull gold, Cyclopean, striking eyes and mind with something unhumanly alien, baffling; sending the mind groping, as though across the deserts of space, from some far-flung star, should fall upon us linked sounds, coherent certainly, meaningful surely, vaguely familiar--yet never to be translated into any symbol or thought of our own particular planet.
The sea of crimson lacquer, with its floating moons of luminous colour--this bow of prismed stone leaping to the weird isle crowned by the anomalous, aureate excrescence --the half human batrachians-the elfland through which we had passed, with all its hidden wonders and terrors--I felt the foundations of my cherished knowledge shaking.
Was this all a dream? Was this body of mine lying some-where, fighting a fevered death, and all these but images floating through the breaking chambers of my brain? My knees shook; involuntarily I groaned.
Lakla turned, looked at me anxiously, slipped a soft arm behind me, held me till the vertigo passed.
"Patience," she said."The bearers come.Soon you shall rest."I looked; down toward us from the bow's end were leap-ing swiftly another score of the frog-men.Some bore lit-ters, high, handled, not unlike palanquins--"Asgard!" Olaf stood beside me, eyes burning, pointing to the arch."Bifrost Bridge, sharp as sword edge, over which souls go to Valhalla.And SHE--she is a Valkyr--a sword maiden, _Ja!_"I gripped the Norseman's hand.It was hot, and a pang of remorse shot through me.If this place had so shaken me, how must it have shaken Olaf? It was with relief that Iwatched him, at Lakla's gentle command, drop into one of the litters and lie back, eyes closed, as two of the monsters raised its yoke to their scaled shoulders.Nor was it without further relief that I myself lay back on the soft velvety cushions of another.
The cavalcade began to move.Lakla had ordered O'Keefe placed beside her, and she sat, knees crossed Orient fashion, leaning over the pale head on her lap, the white, tapering fingers straying fondly through his hair.
Presently I saw her reach up, slowly unwind the coronal of her tresses, shake them loose, and let them fall like a veil over her and him.
Her head bent low; I heard a soft sobbing--I turned away my gaze, lorn enough in my own heart, God knew!
