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Updated: June 1, 2025
A fainter sighing, like an echo of the other, mourned about us. "Yolara is gone," she said, "the Portal is closed. Now must we hasten for the Three have commanded that you, Goodwin, and Larry and I tread that strange road of which I have spoken, and which Olaf may not take lest his heart break and we must return ere he and Rador cross the bridge." Her hand sought Larry's.
Now we were half-way to the crest; the shell barely crawled and from beneath it came a faint hissing; it quivered, and I knew that its base was no longer held above the glassy surface but rested on it. "One last chance!" exclaimed Rador. He pressed upon the control lever and wrenched it from its socket.
And as we drove closer to its source I saw that it did indeed pass through a leafy screen hanging over the passage end. This Rador drew aside cautiously, beckoned us and we stepped through. It appeared to be a tunnel cut through soft green mould. Its base was a flat strip of pathway a yard wide from which the walls curved out in perfect cylindrical form, smoothed and evened with utmost nicety.
We passed the pillared entrance; went through a long bowered corridor and stopped before a door that seemed to be sliced from a monolith of pale jade high, narrow, set in a wall of opal. Rador stamped twice and the same supernally sweet, silver bell tones of yesterday, I must call it, although in that place of eternal day the term is meaningless bade us enter. The door slipped aside.
"Now, that was well spoken for such a man of wisdom as Rador tells me you are," she laughed; and a little pang shot through me. Could not a lover of science present a compliment without it always seeming to be as unusual as plucking a damask rose from a cabinet of fossils? Mustering my philosophy, I smiled back at her.
He dropped it upon the dart and at once, before my eyes, in less than ten seconds, the fruit had rotted away! "That's what would have happened to Rador but for you, friend!" he said. Come now between this and the prelude to the latter half of the drama whose history this narrative is only scattering and necessarily fragmentary observations.
I pointed to where the little missile lay, still quivering, on the ground. He gripped my hand. "That, some day I will repay!" he said. I looked again at the thing. At its end was a tiny cone covered with a glistening, gelatinous substance. Rador pulled from a tree beside us a fruit somewhat like an apple. "Look!" he said.
The green dwarf leaped toward it, thrust us within, pushed us ahead of him up a steep rocky fissure well-nigh, indeed, a chimney. Up and up this we scrambled until my lungs were bursting and I thought I could climb no more. The crevice ended; we crawled out and sank, even Rador, upon a little leaf-carpeted clearing circled by lacy tree ferns.
Another moment he stared and dropped upon one knee and bowed his head before them as would a worshipper before the shrine of his saint. And I am not ashamed to tell it I joined him; and with us knelt Lakla and Olaf and Rador. The mist of fiery opal swirled up about the Three; hid them.
"Larry!" I said. "Larry!" she repeated it excellently. "And you?" "Goodwin," said Rador. I bowed quite as though I were being introduced to some charming young lady met in that old life now seemingly aeons removed. "Yes Goodwin." she said. "Oft and oft I came. Sometimes I thought you saw me. And he did he not dream of me sometime ?" she asked wistfully. "He did." I said, "and watched for you."
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