The palace consisted of an extensive building of white alabaster upon a rose-coloured marble foundation, and with a gilded dome-shaped roof over the main portion of the building, while the adjoining parts were shaped in various ways. The whole represented a mixture of Grecian and Moorish styles; there was a high portal whose columns were of white marble with veins of gold. Entering through the main door we came into a spacious courtyard, filled with works of art, representing antediluvian monstrosities of the various ages of the world. There we saw the Ichthyosaurus, Plesiosaurus, and Megatherium, and similar animals unknown in history; enormous snakes, turtles, and crocodiles, in what is supposed to have been their original size and shape, and besides these there were represented such failures of nature as may have existed in the earliest time of the world’s history--women with fish-tails, human bodies with animal heads, and animal bodies with human heads or limbs, fauns, mermaids, satyrs, centaurs, flying snakes, dragons, etc. Curiously enough, the gnomes claimed that these were the representations of their ancestors, and they paid great respect to them. This courtyard extended all around the palace, surrounding it like a ring. From this court we entered into an entrance hall built of yellow stone, at the door of which were standing two gigantic umbrella-shaped mushrooms of scarlet colour with white filaments, resembling the finest kind of lace. This hall was exquisitely furnished and ornamented with various mushrooms, all of an edible kind, affording at once comfort and food; for while resting upon a lounge or sitting at a table, if one wanted to eat, all he had to do was to eat a piece of the furniture. There was the Agaricus deliciosus, procerus, campestris, prunulus, Boletus edulis, Polyporus confluens, Hydrum repandum and imbriatum, the Clavaria Botrytis, Morchella esculenta, Helvella crispa, Bovista nigrescens, and many others, whose names I have forgotten, and still others which even Professor Cracker has not yet classified. They were serving either as tables, couches, or chairs; and there was not a single toadstool or poisonous fungus among them. There were no chandeliers, lamps, or candlesticks of any kind, for the gnomes lived in a natural manner and needed no artificial lights. Each gnome was himself a light more or less luminous according to the degree of his or her intelligence. But to me, having no light of my own and no power to illuminate anything, it was a source of continual annoyance that I always needed the company of some gnome to keep me enlightened, as otherwise I would have been left in utter darkness and nothingness. Moreover, the light in which a thing appeared to me always depended on the colour of the light of this or that gnome who happened to be in my presence, which caused me to experience a continual change of opinions regarding the qualities of the objects I saw.