at the top made a sort of floating fairyland--and as John gazed up in
warm enchantment the faint acciaccare sound of violins drifted down in
a rococo harmony that was like nothing he had ever beard before. Then
in a moment the car stepped before wide, high marble steps around
which the night air was fragrant with a host of flowers. At the top of
the steps two great doors swung silently open and amber light flooded
out upon the darkness, silhouetting the figure of an exquisite lady
with black, high-piled hair, who held out her arms toward them.

"Mother," Percy was saying, "this is my friend, John Unger, from
Hades."

Afterward John remembered that first night as a daze of many colours,
of quick sensory impressions, of music soft as a voice in love, and of
the beauty of things, lights and shadows, and motions and faces. There
was a white-haired man who stood drinking a many-hued cordial from a
crystal thimble set on a golden stem. There was a girl with a flowery
face, dressed like Titania with braided sapphires in her hair. There
was a room where the solid, soft gold of the walls yielded to the
pressure of his hand, and a room that was like a platonic conception
of the ultimate prison--ceiling, floor, and all, it was lined with an
unbroken mass of diamonds, diamonds of every size and shape, until,
lit with tail violet lamps in the corners, it dazzled the eyes with a
whiteness that could be compared only with itself, beyond human wish,
or dream.

Through a maze of these rooms the two boys wandered. Sometimes the
floor under their feet would flame in brilliant patterns from lighting
below, patterns of barbaric clashing colours, of pastel delicacy, of
sheer whiteness, or of subtle and intricate mosaic, surely from some
mosque on the Adriatic Sea. Sometimes beneath layers of thick crystal
he would see blue or green water swirling, inhabited by vivid fish and
growths of rainbow foliage. Then they would be treading on furs of
every texture and colour or along corridors of palest ivory, unbroken
as though carved complete from the gigantic tusks of dinosaurs extinct
before the age of man ....

Then a hazily remembered transition, and they were at dinner--where
each plate was of two almost imperceptible layers of solid diamond
between which was curiously worked a filigree of emerald design, a
shaving sliced from green air. Music, plangent and unobtrusive,
drifted down through far corridors--his chair, feathered and curved
i