Ruth's light body swinging between brother and lover, we moved forward into the mists; we crept cautiously through their dead silences.
Passed out and fell back into them from a searing chaos of light, chaotic tumult.
From the slackened grip of Ventnor and Drake the body of Ruth dropped while we three stood blinded, deafened, fighting for recovery.

Ruth twisted, rolled toward the brink; Ventnor threw himself upon her, held her fast.
Dragging her, crawling on our knees, we crept forward; we stopped when the thinning of the mists permitted us to see through them yet still interposed a curtaining which, though tenuous, dimmed the intolerable brilliancy that filled the Pit, muffled its din to a degree we could bear.
I peered through them--and nerve and muscle were locked in the grip of a paralyzing awe.

I felt then as one would feel set close to warring regiments of stars, made witness to the death-throes of a universe, or swept through space and held above the whirling coils of Andromeda's nebula to watch its birth agonies of nascent suns.
These are no figures of speech, no hyperboles--speck as our whole planet would be in Andromeda's vast loom, pinprick as was the Pit to the cyclone craters of our own sun, within the cliff-cupped walls of the valley was a tangible, struggling living force akin to that which dwells within the nebula and the star; a cosmic spirit transcending all dimensions and thrusting its confines out into the infinite; a sentient emanation of the infinite itself.
Nor was its voice less unearthly.

It used the shell of the earth valley for its trumpetings, its clangors--but as one hears in the murmurings of the fluted conch the great voice of ocean, its whispering and its roarings, so here in the clamorous shell of the Pit echoed the tremendous voices of that illimitable sea which laps the shores of the countless suns.
I looked upon a mighty whirlpool miles and miles wide.

It whirled with surges whose racing crests were smiting incandescences; it was threaded with a spindrift of lightnings; it was trodden by dervish mists of molten flame thrust through with forests of lances of living light.