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.
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