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that made the broad valley so splendid. And Mr. Cave perceived that the
buildings, with other peculiarities, had no doors, but that the great
circular windows, which opened freely, gave the creatures egress and
entrance. They would alight upon their tentacles, fold their wings to a
smallness almost rod-like, and hop into the interior. But among them was
a multitude of smaller-winged creatures, like great dragon-flies and
moths and flying beetles, and across the greensward brilliantly-coloured
gigantic ground-beetles crawled lazily to and fro. Moreover, on the
causeways and terraces, large-headed creatures similar to the greater
winged flies, but wingless, were visible, hopping busily upon their
hand-like tangle of tentacles.
Allusion has already been made to the glittering objects upon masts that
stood upon the terrace of the nearer building. It dawned upon Mr. Cave,
after regarding one of these masts very fixedly on one particularly
vivid day, that the glittering object there was a crystal exactly like
that into which he peered. And a still more careful scrutiny convinced
him that each one in a vista of nearly twenty carried a similar object.
Occasionally one of the large flying creatures would flutter up to one,
and, folding its wings and coiling a number of its tentacles about the
mast, would regard the crystal fixedly for a space,--sometimes for as
long as fifteen minutes. And a series of observations, made at the
suggestion of Mr. Wace, convinced both watchers that, so far as this
visionary world was concerned, the crystal into which they peered
actually stood at the summit of the endmost mast on the terrace, and
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