But yesterday the spirit of the old world was still strong within me, yet how much things were now changing.

The well-strung muscles loosening, the heart beating a slower measure, the busy mind drowsing off to listlessness.

Was I, too, destined to become like these?
Was the red stuff in my veins to be watered down to pallid Martian sap?
Was ambition and hope to desert me, and idleness itself become laborious, while life ran to seed in gilded uselessness?
Little did I guess how unnecessary my fears were, or of the incredible fairy tale of adventure into which fate was going to plunge me.
Still engrossed the next morning by these thoughts, I decided I would go to Hath.

Hath was a man--at least they said so--he might sympathise even though he could not help, and so, dressing finished, I went down towards the innermost palace whence for an hour or two had come sounds of unwonted bustle.

Asking for the way occasionally from sleepy folk lolling about the corridors, waiting as it seemed for their breakfasts to come to them, and embarrassed by the new daylight, I wandered to and fro in the labyrinths of that stony ant-heap until I chanced upon a curtained doorway which admitted to a long chamber, high-roofed, ample in proportions, with colonnades on either side separated from the main aisle by rows of flowery figures and emblematic scroll-work, meaning I knew not what.