And then I came into the tunnel.

The quality of the atmosphere was altered at once. The torch sparked up, for, from vast heights and channels, fresh air filtered down. There was a dry, half-spicy smell that clung there, fragrant, pleasing, terrible, as if, just half an hour before, incense had burned and music played on this road none had traveled, surely, for a hundred years or longer.

Meanwhile, the torch was smiting like a sword on a thousand shades of brilliant color, on gems, on precious metal. Dust had dimmed only a fraction, not enough. Decay had brushed with its rotten fingers not nearly all it should. It was an enchanted sweet, stuck in the throat of time.

The torch showed merely fragments, like bits of some broken mosaic I must fit together, and as I pieced it out, I was glad in my belly I should not see all at one moment, in a solitary glance.

Columns lined the broad concourse, slender carmine stalks with flower heads, lotuses and orchids of gold that met a roof like black looking-glass. Lamps hung there, fringed with webs now; once they had burned.

A marble paving ran beside the road. The walls of the tunnel rose beyond, tawny Eshkorek stone, yet smoothed to ice, and plastered, painted, fashioned into pictures. At first I thought they lived, those figures drawn there, they were that faithful to the life, and the scenes behind them seemed to stretch away into the walls themselves, where they could not go, but somehow did.

They were curious, the frescoes. Men flew through the sky in them, sometimes winged, more often wingless, always soaring, above wide plains and jagged peaks, the bow of the new moon or the red eye of a sinking sun beneath them. Lovers lay clasped in heatless conflagrations, or rode the backs of fish, or dallied with snakes, panthers, and lions. All these picture-people were sorcerers. They could tame the wind or send it, call beasts, call fire, calm ocean. . . . And one more thing I noted in them, other than their powers and their handsomeness—a few were very dark, dark as my father must have been, and as I was; but most were pale, paler than Demizdor’s race even, not blond with eyes of jade or blue corunda, but white as alabaster with eyes of white flame.

White as Uastis, my albino mother.

White as a picked bone.

The construction of the tunnel was such that you could ride it at a gallop, meeting no obstacle. However, mistrusting the perfection of the paving—the roof which might have fallen farther ahead, some nebulous danger I had no name for (and wished to leave unnamed)—I kept the horse to a brisk parade trot. He was a strong, alert beast; we got several miles in this fashion.

Then the torch began to bow and smolder, and a weariness came over me like the weariness of the flame.

Up in the world it was near dawn, I supposed. I wondered if hounds were already stirring on my trail, or if they were yet in confusion at my escape. But, whatever their plans or mine, the need for sleep made me leaden. I was aware that I had been making on this long, without rest, not at the thought of pursuit, but because I did not relish halting here, let alone lying unconscious in this exotic desert.