Soon a dim pearly light began to show far below us, a light that puzzled me. In the world above, I knew, it must be dawn, but how this was connected with the growing light below, if it was so connected, baffled me.
And now we reached the end of the shaft down whose sides we had come. It ended abruptly, and below on each side lay a great open space, obscured by drifting clouds of mist. But the stair did not end with the shaft. It dropped straight on down, a free, unsupported spiral of gleaming metal, winding down into the obscuring mists that hid its lower length. It was an eery thing to see, that gigantic twisted stairway, like a great corkscrew, vanishing down into the mists, like some pathway of the gods from heaven to earth. And it could hardly have been hung there by less than gods, I
