CHAPTER XILawrence opened his eyes on a brightness that half-blinded him, a glimmer so immense that it seemed to fill all space around him. For a moment it remained diffuse, flickering like a Gargantuan candle flame, soaring to the perimeter of his vision with darting tongues of blue fire.
Then colors coalesced out of the glare, blues and yellows and purples, melting, running together to form a gigantic semi-circle of wildly shouting men and women—Scorpion men and Scorpion women. Tiers upon tiers of them, extending vertically above him for three hundred feet and then falling away in a sweeping downward curve.
He was in the midst of three hundred thousand spectators, with a frightened Ruth Fraser at his side. She was clutching his arm and staring and he could feel her shivering against hi
