I saw Drake and Ventnor straighten up; raised myself to my own aching knees.
We were at one end of a vortex, a funneling within the radiant vapors; a funnel whose further end a mile ahead broadened out into a huge circle, its mistily outlined edges impinging upon the towering scarp of the--city.

It was as though before us lay, upon its side, a cone of crystalline clear air against whose curved sides some radiant medium heavier than air, lighter than water, pressed.
The top arc of its prostrate base reached a thousand feet or more up the precipitous wall; above it all was hidden in sparkling nebulosities that were like still clouds of greenly glimmering fire-flies.

Back from the curving sides of this cone, above it and below it, the pressing luminosities stretched into, it seemed, infinite distances.
Through them, suddenly, thousands of bright beams began to dart, to dance, weaving and interweaving, shooting hither and yon--like myriads of great searchlights in a phosphorescent sea fog, like countless lances of the aurora thrusting through its own iridescent veils! And in the play of these beams was something appallingly ordered, appallingly rhythmic.
It was--how can I describe it ?--PURPOSEFUL; purposeful as the geometric shiftings of the Little Things of the ruins, of the summoning song of Norhala, of the Protean changes of the Smiting Shape and the Following Thing; and like all of these it was as laden with that baffling certainty of hidden meanings, of messages that the brain recognized as such yet knew it never could read.
The rays seemed to spring upward from the earth.

Now they were like countless lances of light borne by marching armies of Titans; now they crossed and angled and flew as though they were clouds of javelins hurled by battling swarms of the Genii of Light.

And now they stood upright while through them, thrusting them aside, bending them, passed vast, vague shapes like mountains forming and dissolving; like darkening monsters of some world of light pushing through thick forests of slender, high-reaching trees of cold flame; shifting shadows of monstrous chimerae slipping through jungles of bamboo with trunks of diamond fire; phantasmal leviathans swimming through brakes of giant reeds of radiance rising from the sparking ooze of a sea of star shine.
Whence came the force, the mechanism that produced this cone of clarity, this NOT searchlight, but unlight in the midst of light?
Not from behind, that was certain--for turning I saw that behind us the mist was as thick.