“He was seated in what was relatively a blaze of incandescent blue.  This, and the darkness about him gave him an effect of floating in a blue-black void.  He seemed a small, self-luminous cloud at first, brooding on his sombre throne; his brain case must have measured many yards in diameter.  For some reason that I cannot fathom a number of blue search-lights radiated from behind the throne on which he sat, and immediately encircling him was a halo.  About him, and little and indistinct in this glow, a number of body-servants sustained and supported him, and overshadowed and standing in a huge semicircle beneath him were his intellectual subordinates, his remembrancers and computators and searchers and servants, and all the distinguished insects of the court of the moon.  Still lower stood ushers and messengers, and then all down the countless steps of the throne were guards, and at the base, enormous, various, indistinct, vanishing at last into an absolute black, a vast swaying multitude of the minor dignitaries of the moon.  Their feet made a perpetual scraping whisper on the rocky floor, as their limbs moved with a rustling murmur.

“As I entered the penultimate hall the music rose and expanded into an imperial magnificence of sound, and the shrieks of the news-bearers died away....

“I entered the last and greatest hall....

“My procession opened out like a fan.  My ushers and guards went right and left, and the three litters bearing myself and Phi-oo and Tsi-puff marched across a shiny darkness of floor to the foot of the giant stairs.  Then began a vast throbbing hum, that mingled with the music.  The two Selenites dismounted, but I was bidden remain seated—­I imagine as a special honour.  The music ceased, but not that humming, and by a simultaneous movement of ten thousand respectful heads my attention was directed to the enhaloed supreme intelligence that hovered above me.

“At first as I peered into the radiating glow this quintessential brain looked very much like an opaque, featureless bladder with dim, undulating ghosts of convolutions writhing visibly within.  Then beneath its enormity and just above the edge of the throne one saw with a start minute elfin eyes peering out of the glow.  No face, but eyes, as if they peered through holes.  At first I could see no more than these two staring little eyes, and then below I distinguished the little dwarfed body and its insect-jointed limbs shrivelled and white.  The eyes stared down at me with a strange intensity, and the lower part of the swollen globe was wrinkled.  Ineffectual-looking little hand-tentacles steadied this shape on the throne....

“It was great.  It was pitiful.  One forgot the hall and the crowd.