The elder man made signs to me to walk up the steps, and enter the large building beside us, which I did, the others following. The steps led up to a spacious hall, from which long corridors branched out in various directions. One of the men inquired by gesture-language if I wished for food. As I was by this time exceedingly hungry, I replied, in the same way, that I was quite ready for my breakfast. Whereupon they brought me to a room which opened into one of the corridors, where, on turning a handle in the wall, a sliding panel opened, and a table on rollers passed through. Various kinds of meats and drinks were on the table, and of these they invited me to partake. I made a hearty meal. I noticed, in particular, respecting some of the dishes, that they greatly resembled in taste various kinds of flesh-meat, very delicately cooked, but they were totally different in appearance from anything of the sort ever served up on earth. I observed also that my three keepers did everything in their power to induce me to give the names, in my language, of every object in sight. The girl had a sort of small memorandum book, in which, with a fine pencil, she constantly wrote, in what seemed a system of shorthand, the words and sentences I uttered; and she and the two men repeated them articulately several times. They gave me the idea that they were much more anxious to learn my language than to teach me theirs. In fact, I afterwards learned that this was part of the instructions they had received respecting me. As soon as I had finished my breakfast they took me into a large room, which opened into another corridor, and was hung round with all sorts of charts. Among these I saw, to my intense astonishment, a large circular map, about sixteen feet in diameter, on which, depicted with singular accuracy, were the well-known outlines of the continents and larger islands of the eastern hemisphere of the earth. The immense white masses at the poles, the blue colour of the southern and Indian oceans, the yellow tinge of the Great Sahara and Asiatic deserts were especially prominent objects. The process by which this wonderful map was made was afterwards fully explained to me. It was what they called a sun-picture taken by the help of an enormous telescope in one of the national mountain observatories, of which I learned much more afterwards.