The car stopped.  The guards, both crimson and blue, formed a twenty-fold cordon.  Watson could feel the suspended breath of the waiting multitude.  The three men stepped out—­the Geos first, then the Jan Lucar, and Watson last.  Chick caught the Lucar’s eye; it was confident; the man was springing with vigour, jovial in spite of the moment.

They passed between two of the huge pillars, and under the giant arch.  For a few minutes they walked through what seemed, to Chick, a perfect maze of those titanic columns.  And every foot was marked by the lines of crimson and blue, flanking either side.

An immense sea of people rose high into the forest of pillars as far as his eye could reach.  He had never been in such a concourse of humanity.

They passed through an inner arch, a smaller and lower one, into what Chick guessed was the temple proper.  And if Chick had thought the anteroom stupendous, he saw that a new word, one which went beyond all previous experience, was needed to describe what he now saw.

It was almost too immense to be grasped in its entirety.  Gone was the maze of columns; instead, far, far away to the right and to the left, stood single rows of herculean pillars.  There were but seven on a side, separated by great distances; and between them stretched a space so immense, so incredibly vast, that a small city could have been housed within it.  And over it all was not the open sky, but a ceiling of such terrific grandeur that Chick almost halted the procession while he gazed.

For that ceiling was the under side of a cloud, a grey-black, forbidding thundercloud.  And the fourteen pillars, seven on either side, were prodigious waterspouts, monster spirals of the hue of storm, with flaring sweeps at top and bottom that welded roof and floor into one terrific whole.  Sheer from side to side stretched that portentous level cloud; it was a span of an epoch; and on either side it was rooted in those awful columns, seemingly alive, as though ready at any instant to suck up the earth into the infinite.

By downright will-power Watson tore his attention away and directed it upon the other features of that unprecedented interior.  It was lighted, apparently, by great windows behind the fourteen pillars; windows too far to be distinguishable.  And the light revealed, directly ahead something that Chick at first thought to be a cascade of black water.  It leaped out of the rear wall of the temple, and at its crest it was bordered with walls of solid silver, cut across and designed with scrolls of gold and gem work; walls that swooped down and ended with two huge green columns at the base of that fantastic fall.

As they approached a swarm of tiny bronze objects, silver winged, fluttered out through the temple—­tiny birds, smaller than swallows, beautiful and swift-winged, elusive.  They were without number; in a moment the air of the temple was alive with flitting, darting spots of glinting colour.