but here their unceasing undulations were stilled, frozen into rigid immobility.

Hovering about the central depression was a zone of denser shadow, obscuring and distorting vision. What light existed in this core of darkness was troubled, uncertain. The spot attracted Alston's interest, but he could see nothing clearly.

In the deathlike hush, their footsteps made no whisper of sound and the man and girl descended the broken terraces among moving planes of light and shadow to the rim of darkness. Down the ruinous steps, their progress was sluggish as if they drifted bodiless in some exasperating dream fabric.

There came a flurry of disturbance in the shadowy zone, a wan, uneasy flickering glow, as if light flares struggled through thick, resisting slabs of murky crystal. Steadily it grew, quickening, mounting, flaming into raw emerald brilliance. Taller it soared, spreading, dispersing the murk, beating back the fanes of darkness, revealing the temple in all its monstrous size, its splendor, and its crumbling ruin. Revealing--The Pit!

At the heart of the place, sunk into the pave, was a deep round pit, brimming with fiery liquescence. It swam with light, with color and movement, boiling like a wizard's cauldron. The disturbed surface heaved and frothed, churned, rose and fell in slow rhythmic pulsing. Above it hovered myriad tongues of darting argent flame. From it light foamed upward, showers of luminous bubbles rose and danced and shattered in clouds of radiance as diffuse as a mist of pearls.

Here was the source of that strange energy, that throbbing force which vibrated through the ground and air outside, for as the substance of the pit rose and fell in its rhythmic cycle, so did the sound and vibration swell and diminish, so did the light flare and fade.

From a curb of carved and figured stone a sculptured ramp swept up and out and down in graceful arch onto an island of black rock set within the pit. Harshly outlined, its detailed fretwork sharp and clear, the island rose solidly from the pool of glittering light.

But on the island was sheer madness. From a pedestal block of faceted stone thrust upward two mighty curved horns of fluted jade resembling the frames of an ancient lyre. Thirty feet in the air they soared, and pendant between them was a sparkling veil, gossamer as the finest spider-silk, dusted with incandescent moonfire. Meshed in this sheer fabric, prisoned like a silvery moth caught upon a great 

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