unbelievers.

Closer it drew and now there came to me sweet, insistent
tinklings--like pizzicati on violins of glass; crystal clear; diamonds
melting into sounds!

Now the Thing was close to the end of the white path; close up to the
barrier of darkness still between the ship and the sparkling head of
the moon stream. Now it beat up against that barrier as a bird against
the bars of its cage. It whirled with shimmering plumes, with swirls
of lacy light, with spirals of living vapour. It held within it odd,
unfamiliar gleams as of shifting mother-of-pearl. Coruscations and
glittering atoms drifted through it as though it drew them from the
rays that bathed it.

Nearer and nearer it came, borne on the sparkling waves, and ever
thinner shrank the protecting wall of shadow between it and us. Within
the mistiness was a core, a nucleus of intenser light--veined,
opaline, effulgent, intensely alive. And above it, tangled in the
plumes and spirals that throbbed and whirled were seven glowing
lights.

Through all the incessant but strangely ordered movement of
the--_thing_--these lights held firm and steady. They were seven--like
seven little moons. One was of a pearly pink, one of a delicate
nacreous blue, one of lambent saffron, one of the emerald you see in
the shallow waters of tropic isles; a deathly white; a ghostly
amethyst; and one of the silver that is seen only when the flying fish
leap beneath the moon.