As one of the hosts of circling shields shifted downward.

Brilliant, ever more brilliant, waxed the fast-thickening mists.
Abruptly, and again as one, the disks began to revolve.

From every concave surface, from the surfaces of the huge circlets below them, flashed out a stream of green fire--green as the fire of green life itself.

Corpuscular, spun of uncounted rushing, dazzling ions the great rays struck across, impinged upon the thousand-foot wheel that crowned the cones; set it whirling.
Over it I saw form a limpid cloud of the brilliant vapors.

Whence came these sparkling nebulosities, these mists of light?
It was as though the clustered, spinning disks reached into the shadowless air, sucked from it some unseen, rhythmic energy and transformed it into this visible, coruscating flood.
For now it was a flood.