Again the Rhamda spoke.  “Wait!” said he.  “Wait!”

They were barely moving now.  Watson watched and wondered.  The three streams of light ran up and up, as though they would pierce the heavens; the eye could not follow their ends.  All in utter silence, nothing but those beams of glorified light, their reality a hint of power, of life and wisdom—­of the certainty of things.  Plainly it had a tremendous significance in the minds of the Geos and the Lucar.

Then came the climax.  Slowly, but somehow inexorably, like the laws of life itself, and somewhere at a prodigious height above the earth, the three outer ends of the red and the green and the blue spread out and flared back upon themselves and one another, until their combined brilliance bridged a great rainbow across the sky.  Blending into all the colours of the prism, the bow became—­ for a moment—­pregnant with an overpowering beauty, symbolical, portentous of something stupendous about to come out of the unknown to the Thomahlians.  And next—­

The bow began to move, to swirl, and to change in shape and colour.  The three great rivers of light billowed and expanded and rounded into a new form.  Then they burst—­into a vast, three-leafed clover—­blue and red and green!

And Watson caught the startled words of the Geos: 

“The Sign of the Jarados!”

XXXVIII

THE VOICE FROM THE VOID

Even while that inexplicable heavenly pageant still burned against the heavens, something else took place, a thing of much greater importance to Chick.  And, it happened right before his eyes.

In the front of the car was a dial, slightly raised above the level of the various controlling instruments.  And all of a sudden this dial, a small affair about six inches across, broke into light and life.

First, there was a white blaze that covered the whole disc; then the whiteness abruptly gave way to a flood of colour, which resolved itself into a perfect miniature of the tri-coloured cloverleaf in the sky ahead.  Chick saw, however that the positions of the red and green were just the obverse of what glowed in the distance; and then he heard the voice, strong and distinct, speaking with a slight metallic twang as from a microphone hidden in that little, blazing, coloured leaf: 

“Listen, ye who have ears to listen!”

It was said in the Thomahlian tongue.  The Geos breathed: 

“The voice of the Prophet Jarados!”

But the next moment the unseen speaker began in another language—­ clear, silver, musical—­in English, and in a voice that Chick recognised!

“Chick!  You have done well, my boy.  Your courage and your intuition may lead us out.  Follow the prophecy to the letter, Chick; it must come to pass, exactly as it is written!  Don’t fail to read it, there on the walls of the Temple of the Bell, when you encounter the Bar Senestro on the Day of the Prophet!