mass! Yet did it quiver under the finger-tip caress in rhythmic
vibrations that became whisperings and rustlings and mutterings of
sound--but of sound so different; so elusively thin that it was
shimmeringly sibilant; so mellow that it was maddening sweet,
piping like an elfin horn, which last was just what Bassett decided
would be like a peal from some bell of the gods reaching earthward
from across space.

He looked at Balatta with swift questioning; but the voice of the
Red One he had evoked had flung her face downward and moaning among
the bones. He returned to contemplation of the prodigy. Hollow it
was, and of no metal known on earth, was his conclusion. It was
right-named by the ones of old-time as the Star-Born. Only from
the stars could it have come, and no thing of chance was it. It
was a creation of artifice and mind. Such perfection of form, such
hollowness that it certainly possessed, could not be the result of
mere fortuitousness. A child of intelligences, remote and
unguessable, working corporally in metals, it indubitably was. He
stared at it in amaze, his brain a racing wild-fire of hypotheses
to account for this far-journeyer who had adventured the night of
space, threaded the stars, and now rose before him and above him,
exhumed by patient anthropophagi, pitted and lacquered by its fiery
bath in two atmospheres.

But was the colour a lacquer of heat upon some familiar metal? Or
was it an intrinsic quality of the metal itself? He thrust in the
blue-point of his pocket-knife to test the constitution of the
stuff. Instantly the entire sphere burst into a mighty whispering,
sharp with protest, almost twanging goldenly, if a whisper could
possibly be considered to twang, rising higher, sinking deeper, the