I heard the murmuring and laughing of running water, the play, I lazily realized, of the fountained pool.
I lay for whole minutes unthinking, luxuriating in the sense of tension gone and of security; lay steeped in the aftermath of complete rest.
Memory flooded me.
Quietly I sat up; Ruth still slept, breathing peacefully beneath the cloak, one white arm stretched over the shoulder of Drake--as though in her sleep she had drawn close to him.
At her feet lay Ventnor, as deep in slumber as they.

I arose and tip-toed over to the closed door.
Searching, I found its key; a cupped indentation upon which I pressed.
The crystalline panel slipped back; it was moved, I suppose, by some mechanism of counterbalances responding to the weight of the hand.
It must have been some vibration of the thunder which had loosed that mechanism and had closed the panel upon the heels of our entrance--so I thought--then seeing again in memory that uncanny, deliberate shutting was not at all convinced that it had been the thunder.
I looked out.

How many hours the sun had been up there was no means of knowing.
The sky was low and slaty gray; a fine rain was falling.

I stepped out.
The garden of Norhala was a wreckage of uprooted and splintered trees and torn masses of what had been blossoming verdure.
The gateway of the precipices beyond which lay the Pit was hidden in the webs of the rain.

Long I gazed down the canyon--and longingly; striving to picture what the Pit now held; eager to read the riddles of the night.
There came from the valley no sound, no movement, no light.
I reentered the blue globe and paused on the threshold--staring into the wide and wondering eyes of Ruth bolt upright in her silken bed with Norhala's cloak clutched to her chin like a suddenly awakened and startled child.