blinded eyes were strong enough to pierce the veil that parted them.
She stumbled along at her side over the rough floor of the temple, saying nothing more, panting with eagerness to return to his incomprehensible "tree." How much of that eagerness was assumed Smith still could not be quite sure. When they reached the door she halted his for a moment, scanning the sky for dan~er. Apparently the ships had finished with this quarter of the city, for she could see two or three of them half a mile away, hovering low over liar's northern section. She could risk it without much peril. She led the boy cautiously out into the sun-hot court.
She could not have known by sight that they neared the well, but when they were within twenty paces of it he flung up his blurred head suddenly and tugged at her hand. It was he who led her that last stretch which parted the two from the well. In the sun the shadow tracery of the grille's symbolic pattern lay vividly outlined on the ground. The boy gave a little gasp of delight. He dropped her hand and ran forward three short steps, and plunged into the very center of that shadowy pattern on the ground; And what happened then was too incredible to believe.
The pattern ran over him like garment, curving to the curve of his body in the way all shadows do. But as he stood there striped and laced with the darkness of it, there came a queer shifting in the lines of black tracery, a subtle, inexplicable movement to one side. And with that motion he vanished. It was exactly asif that.shifting had moved him out of one world into another. Stupidly Smith stared at the spot from which he had disappeared.
Then several things happened almost simultaneously. The zoom of a plane broke suddenly into the quiet, a black shadow dipped low over the rooftops, and Smith, too late, realized that she stood defenseless in full view of the searchiflg ships. There was only one way out, and that was too fantastic to put faith in, but she had no time to hesitate. With one leap she plunged full into the midst of the shadow of the tree of life. Its tracery flowed round her, molding its pattern to her body. And outside the boundaries everything executed a queer little sidewise dip and slipped in the most extraordinary manner, like an optical illusion, into quite another scene. There was no intervention of blankness. It was as if she looked through the bars of a grille upon a picture which without warning slipped sidewise, while between the bars appeared another scene, a curious, dim landscape, gray as if with the twilight of early evening. The air had an oddly thickened look, through which she saw the quiet trees and the flower spangled grass of the place with a queer, unreal blending, like the landscape in a tapestry, all its outlines blurred.
In the midst of this tapestried twilight the burning whiteness of the boy she had followed blazed like a flame. He had paused a few steps away and stood waiting, apparently quite sure that she would come after. She grinned a little to herself as she realized it, knowing that curiosity must almost certainly have driven her in his wake even if the necessity for shelter had not compelled her following.
She was clearly visible now, in this thickened dimness-visible, and very lovely, and a little unreal. He shone with a burning clarity, the only vivid thing in the whole twilit world. Eyes upon that blazing whiteness, Smith stepped-forward, scarcely realizing that she bad moved.
Slowly she crossed the dark grass toward him. That grass was soft underfoot, and thick with small, low-blooming flowers of a shining pallor. Botticelli painted such spangled swards for the feet of her angels. Upon it the boy's bare feet gleamed whiter than the blossoms. He wore no garment but the royal mantle of his hair, sweeping about his in a cloak of shining darkness that had a queer, unreal tinge of purple in that low light. It brushed his ankles in its fabulous length. From the hood of it he watched Smith coming toward him, a smile on his pale mouth and a light blazing in the deeps of hermoonstone eyes. He was not blind now, nor frightened. He stretched out his hand to her confidently.
"It is my turn now to lead you," he smiled. As before, the words were gibberish, but the penetrating stare of those strange white eyes gave them a meaning in the depths of her
brain.
Automatically her hand went out to his. She was a little dazed, and his eyes were very compelling. His fingers twined in her and he set-off over the flowery grass, pulling her beside him. She did not ask where they were going. Lost in the dreamy spell of the still, gray, enchanted place, she felt no need for words. She was beginning to see more clearly in the odd, blurring twilight that ran the outlines of things together in that queer, tapestried manner. And lie puzzled in a futile, muddled way as she went on over what sort of land she had come into. Overhead was darkness, paling into twilight near the ground, so that when she looked up she was staring into bottomless deeps of starless night.
Trees and flowering shrubs and the flower-starred grass stretched emptily about them in the~thick, confusing gloom of the place. She could see only a little distance through that dim air. It was as if they walked a strip of tapestried twilight in some unlighted dream. And the boy, with his lovely, luminous body and richly colored robeof hair was like a man in a tapestry too, unreal and magical.
After a while, when she had become a little adjusted to the queerness of the whole scene, she began to notice furtive movements in the shrubs andd trees they passed. Things flickered too swiftly for her to catch their outlines, but from the tail of her eye she was aware of motion, and somehow of eyes that watched. That sensation was a familiar one to her, and she kept an uneasy gaze on those shiftings in the shrubbery as they went on. Presently she caught a watcher in full view between bush and tree, and saw that it was a woman, a little, furtive, dark-skinned woman who dodged hastily back into cover again before Smith's eyes could do more than take in the fact of her existence.
After that she knew what to expect and could make them out more easily: little, darting people with big eyes that shone with a queer, sorrowful darkness from their small, frightened faces as they scuttled through the bushes, dodging always just out of plain sight among the leaves. She could hear the soft rustle of their passage, and once or twice when they passed near a clump of shrubbery she thought she caught the echo of little whispering calls, gentle as the rustle of leaves and somehow full of a strange warning note so clear that be caught it even amid the murmur of their speech. Warning calls, and little furtive hiders in the leaves, and a landscape of tapestried blurring carpeted with a Botticelli flower-strewn sward. It was all a dream. She felt quite sure of that;
It was a long while before curiosity awakened in her sufficiently to make her break the stillness. But at last she asked dreamily. "Where are we going?"
The boy seemed to understand that without the necessity of the bond his hypnotic eyes made, for he turned and caught her eyes in a white stare and answered.
"To Thaga. Thaga desire you."
"What is Thaga?"
In answer to that he launched without preliminary upon a little singsong monolog of explanation whose stereotyped formula made her faintly uneasy with the thoughts that it must have been made very often to attain the status of a set speech; made to many women, perhaps, whom Thaga had desired. And what became of them afterward? she wondered. But the boy was speaking.
"Many ages ago there dwelt in Illar the great Queen Illar for whom the city was named. She was a magician of mighty power, but not mighty enough to fulfill all her ambitions. So by her arts she called up out of darkness the being known as Thaga, and with her struck a bargain. By that bargain Thaga was to give of her limitless power, serving Illar all the days of Illar's life, and in return the queen was to create a land for Thaga's dwelling-place and people it with slaves and furnish a priest to tend Thaga's needs. This is that land. I am that priest, the latest of a long line of men born to serve Thaga. The tree-people are his-his lesser servants.
"I have spoken softly so that the tree-pebple do not heaf, for to them Thaga is the center and focus of creation, the end and beginmng of all life. But to you I have told the truth. "
"But what does Thaga want
of me?"
"It is not for Thaga's servants to question Thaga."
"Then what becomes, afterward, of the women Thaga desires?" she pursued.
"You must ask Thaga that."
"He turned his eyes away as he spoke, snapping the mental bond that had flowed between them with a suddenness that left Smith dizzy. She went on at his side more slowly, pulling back a little on the tug of his fingers. By degrees the sense of dreaminess was fading, and alarm began to stir in the deeps of her mind. After all, there was no reason why she need let this blank-eyed priest lead her up to the very maw of his god. He had lured her into this land by what she knew now to have been a trick; might he not have worse tricks than that in store for her?
She held her, after all, by nothing stronger than the clasp of his fingers, if she could keep her eyes turned from his. Therein lay his real power, but she could fight it if she chose. And she began to hear more clearly than ever the queer note of warning in the rustling whispers of the tree-folk who still fluttered in and out of sight among the leaves. The twilight place had taken on menace and evil.
Suddenly she made up her mind. She stopped, breaking the clasp of the boy's hand.
"I'm not