It was a building of great size.  The corridors were long and high, all with the wide-coved ceiling, and of colours that melted from one shade to another as they turned, not corners, but curves.  Apparently each colour had its own suggestive reason.  Such rooms as Chick could look into were uniformly large, beautiful, and distinctly lighted.

The guard moved in silent rhythm; the chief sound was that made by Watson’s leather-heeled shoes, drowning out, for once, the everlasting tinkling undertone of those unseen fairy-bells; that running cadence, never ceasing, silver, liquid, like the soul of sound.

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.

“This is our landscape,” spoke the Rhamda.  “According to the Jarados, it is not like that of the next world—­your world, my lord.  After you meet the Rhamdas, I shall take you into the Mahovisal for a closer view of it all.”

They reached the bottom of the stairway.  Chick noted the architecture in the entrance-way at this point; the seeming solidness of structure, as if the whole had been chiselled, not built.  The vestibule was really a hall, domed and high, large enough to shelter a hundred.  Like the corridor outside Chick’s room, it was lined with a row each of red and blue uniformed guards.

Invariably the one belonged to the blond, lithe, quick-feeling type, the others heavy, sturdy, formidable.  The extremities of the two lines converged on an oval-topped doorway, very large, having above it a design conventionalised from the three-leafed clover.  One leaf was scarlet, one blue, the other green.