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ce, the everlasting tinkling undertone of those unseen fairy-bells; that running cadence, never ceasing, silver, liquid, like the soul of sound.
Though Watson walked with head erect, he had eyes for every little thing he passed. He noted the material of the structure and tried to name it; neither plaster nor stone, the walls were highly polished and, somehow or other, capable of emitting perfume--light and wholesome, not heavy and oppressive. And in dark passages the walls glowed.
The corridor widened, and with a graceful curve opened upon a wide stairway that descended, or rather sank--to use Watson's own words for the feeling--into the depths of the building. To the right of one landing was a large window reaching to the floor; its panes were clear and not frosted as had been the others.
Chick got his first glimpse here of what lay outside--an iridescent landscape, at first view astonishingly like an ocean of opals; for it was of many hues, red and purple and milky white, splashed violantin blue and fluorescence--a maze and shimmer of dancing, joyful colours, whirring in an uncertainty of polychromatic harmony. Such was his first fleeting impression.
At the next landing he looked closer. It was not unlike a monster bowl of bubbles; the same illusion of movement, the same delicacy and witchery of colour, only here the sensation was not that of decomposition but of life; of flowers, delicate as the rainbow, tenuous, sinuous, breathing--weaving in a serpentine maze of daedalian hues; long tendrils of orchidian beauty, lifting, weaving, drooping--a vast sea of equatorial bloom; but--no trees.
"This is our landscape," spoke the Rhamda. "According to the Jarados, it is not like that of the next world--your world, my lord. After you meet the Rhamdas, I shall take you into the Mahovisal for a closer view of it all."
They reached the bottom of the stairway. Chick noted the architecture in the entrance-way at this point; the seeming solidness of structure, as if the whole had bee