When you have said these things, at once the disk will unfold. After you say the second formula, where 'silence, silence' and what follows, hiss twice and pop twice, and at once you will see, coming from the disk, stars a handsbreadth wide, very many, filling the whole air.

The sun-disk unfolds — haploōthḗsetai, opens out like something spread flat — and becomes a doorway rather than a face. What pours through it is precise to the point of the uncanny: stars five fingers wide (pentadaktyliaíous), a real measurement, as if the initiate were expected to hold up his hand and gauge them. The rite never loses its bookkeeper's exactness even at the height of vision. The choreography is by now a fixed grammar: formula, hiss, pop, and the marvel answers on cue — twice-hissed, twice-popped, and the air fills with light. This is the middle of the ascent's crescendo, the disk giving way, the stars swarming; and the reader can feel the mechanical calm of the instructions holding steady under the flood, the way a pilot's checklist stays flat-voiced through the storm.