Slowly and cautiously I went my solitary way down the lamplit road and towards the large building I have described.

The road itself seemed like a great Alpine pass, skirting rocky mountains of which the one through whose chasm I had descended formed a link.

Deep below to the left lay a vast valley, which presented to my astonished eye the unmistakeable evidences of art and culture.

There were fields covered with a strange vegetation, similar to none I have seen above the earth; the colour of it not green, but rather of a dull and leaden hue or of a golden red.
There were lakes and rivulets which seemed to have been curved into artificial banks; some of pure water, others that shone like pools of naphtha.

At my right hand, ravines and defiles opened amidst the rocks, with passes between, evidently constructed by art, and bordered by trees resembling, for the most part, gigantic ferns, with exquisite varieties of feathery foliage, and stems like those of the palm-tree.