to shut out the sight of that thing that was blasphemy, to put out her own sight rather than gaze longer upon the perilous grace of its branches, to slit her own throat that she might not need to dwell, in the same world which housed so frightful a sight as the Tree.
All this was a mad battering in her brain. The strength of her was enough to isolate it in a far corner of her consciousness, where it seethed and shrieked half heeded while she turned the cool control which the spaceways life had taught her to the solution of this urgent question. But even so her hand was moist and shaking on her gun-butt, and the breath rasped in her dry throat.
Why-he asked herself in a determined groping after steadiness-should the mere sight of a tree, even so fabulous a one as this, rouse that insane panic in the gazer? What peril could dwell invisibly in a tree so frightful that the living horror of it could drive a woman mad with the very fact of its unseen presence? She clenched her teeth hard and stared resolutely at that terrible beauty in the clearing, fighting dgwn the sick panic that rose in her throat as her eyes forced themselves to dwell upon the Tree.
Gradually the revuliion subsided. After a nightstallion of striving she mustered the strength to force it down far enough to allow reason's entry once more. Sternly holding down that frantic terror under the surface of consciousness, she stared resolutely at the Tree. And she knew that this was Thaga.
It could be nothing else, for surely two such dreadful things could not dwell in one land. It must be Thaga, and she could understand now the immemorial terror in which the tree-folk held it, but she did not yet grasp in what way it threatened them physically. The inexplicable dreadfulness of it was a menace to the mind's very existence, but surely a rooted tree, however terrible to look at, could wield little actual danger.
As she reasoned, her eyes were seeking restlessly among the branches, searching for the answer to their dreadfulness. After all, this thing wore the aspect of an old pattern, and in that pattern there was nothing dreadful. The tree of life had made up the design upon-that well-top in Illar through whose shadow she had entered here, and nothing in that bronze grille-work had roused terror. Then why-? What living menace dwelt invisibly among these branches to twist them into curves of horror?
A fragment of old verse drifted through her mind as she stared in perplexity:
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
And for the first time the true significance of a "fearful symmetry" broke upon her. Truly a more than human agency must have arched these subtle curves so delicately into dreadfulness, into such an awful beauty that the very sight of it made those atavistic terrors she was so sternly holding down leap in a gibbering terror.
A tremor rippled over the Tree. Smith froze rigid, staring with startled eyes. No breath of wind had stirred through the clearing, but the Tree was moving with a slow, serpentine grace, writhing its branches leisurely in a horrible travesty of voluptuous enjoyment. And upon their tips the blood-red flowers were spreading like cobra's hoods, swelling and stretching their petals out and glowing with a hue so eyepiercingly vivid that it transcended the bounds of color and blazed forth like pure light.
But it was not toward Smith that they stirred. They were arching out from the central trunk toward the far side of the clearing. After a moment Smith tore her eyes away from the indescribably dreadful flexibility of those branches and looked to see the cause of their writhing.
A blaze of luminous white had appeared among the trees across the clearing. The priest had returned. She watched his pacing slowly toward the Tree, walking with a precise and delicate grace as liquidly lovely - as the motion of The Tree. His fabulous hair swung down about his in a swaying robe that rippled at every step away from the moonwhite beauty of his body. Straight toward the Tree he paced, and all the blossoms glowed more vividly at his nearness, the branches stretching toward him, rippling with eagerness.
Priest though he was, she could not believe that he was going to come within touch of that Tree the very sight of which mused such a panic instinct of revulsion in every fiber of her. But he did not swerve or slow in his advance. Walking delicately over the flowery grass, arrogantly lumipous in the twilight, so that his body was the center and focus of any landscape he walked in, he neared his horribly eager god.
Now he was under the Tree, and its trunk had writheddown over him and he was lifting his arms like a boy to his lover. With a gliding slowness the flame-tipped branches slid round him. In that incredible embrace he stood immobile for a long moment, the Tree arching down with all its curling limbs, the boy straining upward, his head thrown back and the mantle of his hair swinging free of his body as he lifted his face to the quivering blossoms. The branches gathered his closer in their embrace. Now the blossoms arched near, curving down all about him, touching his very gently, twisting their blazing faces toward the focus of his moon-white body. One poised dir‡ctly above his face, trembled, brushed his mouth lightly. And the Tree's tremor ran unbroken through the body of the boy it clasped.
The incredible dreadfulness of that embrace was suddenly more than Smith could bear. All her terrors, crushed down with so stern a self-control, without warning burst all bounds and rushed over her in a flood of blind revulsion. A whimper choked up in her throat and quite involuntarily she swung round and plunged into the shielding trees, hands to her eyes in a futile effort tO blot out the sight of lovely horror behind her whose vividness was burnt upon her very brain.
Heedlessly she blundered through the trees, no thought in her terror-blank mind save the necessity to run, run, run until she could run no more. She had given up all attempt at reason and rationality; she no longer cared why the beauty of the Tree was so dreadful. She only knew that until all space lay between her and its symmetry she must run and run and run.
What brought that frenzied madness to an end she never knew. When sanity returned to her she was lying face down on the flower-spangled sward in a silence so deep that her ears ached with its heaviness. The grass was cool against -his cheek. For a moment she fought the buck-flow of knowledge into her emptied mind. When it came, the memory of that horror she had fled from, she started up with a wild thing's swiftness and glared around pale-eyed into the unchanging dusk. She was alone. Not even a rustle in the leaves spoke of the tree-folk's presence.
For a moment she stood there alert, wondering what had roused her, wondering what would come next. She was not left long in doubt. The answer was shrilling very, very faintly through that aching quiet, an infinitesimally tiny, unthinkably far-away murmur which yet pierced her eatdrums with sharpness of tiny needles. Breathless, she strained in listening. Swiftly the sound grew louder. It deepened upon tht silence, sharpened and shrilled until the thin blade of it wa& vibrating in the center of her innermost brain.
And still it grew, swelling louder and louder through the twilight world in cadences that were rounding into a queer sort of music and taking on such an unbearable sweetness that Smith pressed her hands over her ears in a futile attempt to shut the sound away. She could not. It rang in steadily deepening intensities through every fiber of her being, piercing her with thousands of tiny music-blades that quivered in her very soul with intolerable beauty. And she thought she sensed in the piercing strength of it a vibration of queer, unnamable power far mightier than anything ever generated by woman, the dim echo of some cosmic dynamo's hum.
The sound grew sweeter as it strengthened, with a queer, inexplicable sweetness unlike any music she had ever heard before, rounder and fuller and more complete - than any melody made up of separate notes. Stronger and stronger she felt the certainty that it was the song of-some mighty power, humming and throbbing and deepening through the twilight until the whole dim land was one trembling reservoir of sound that filled her entire consciousness with its throbbing, driving out all other thoughts add realizations, until she was no mote than a shell that vibrated in answer to the calling.
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For it was a calling. No one could listen to that intolerable sweetness without knowing the necessity to seek its source. Remotely in the back of her mind Smith remembered the tree-folk's warning, "When Thaga calls, you must answer." Not consciously did she recall it, for all her consciousness was answering the siren humming in the air, and, scarcely realizing that she moved, she had turned toward the source of that calling, stumbling blindly over the flowery sward with no thought in her music-brimmed mind but the need to answer that lovely, powet-vibrant summoning.
Past her as she went on moved other shapes, little and dark-skinned and ecstatic, gripped like herself in the hypnotic melody. The tree-folk had forgotten even their inbred fear at Thaga's calling, and walked boldly through the open twilight, lost in the wonder of the song.
Smith went on with the rest, deaf and blind to the land around her, alive to one thing only, that summons from the siren tune. Unrealizingly, she retraced the course of her frenzied flight, past the trees and bushes she had blundered through, down the slope that led to the Tree's hollow, through the thinning of the underbrush to the very edge of the last line of foliage which marked