Into these shafts, as we moved past them, I glanced down, and saw that far beneath they opened into brilliant-lit rooms and halls, some of great size. I understood, then, how they had come to be used, how the Andromedans, their vast hordes cramped upon the surface of their worlds, had removed all buildings from the surface and had sunk them deep in the ground itself, subterranean buildings that could be entered or left by the ascending and descending shafts, and that gave them all the surface of their worlds free for their ships and to move about on. In and out of the great buildings sunken in the ground beneath us were moving constant streams of Andromedans, up and down the shafts; and now we saw that before us lay a pair of such shafts much greater in size than all others we had seen, and the center of a great rush of traffic of the gaseous beings about us. It was toward these greater shafts that our Andromedan companions were leading us, the figures before us giving way as we approached. A moment more and we stood at the edge of the descending shaft, the Andromedans beside us motioning toward it and moving over its edge, sinking smoothly downward. Hesitatingly I followed, stepped from the edge into the empty air of the shaft; but the next moment my fear left me, for instead of plunging down a dead weight, I and my companions who had followed me were sinking downward as gently as though gripped and upheld by unseen hands. Down we floated, through the great shaft bright-lit by the belted suns above, down until we were sinking down out of the shaft itself into a vast, white-lit hall that stretched away for a great distance in all directions from us, and down from the center of whose ceiling, where the two great shafts opened from above, we were sinking. * * * * * Smoothly we sank downward from the great hall's ceiling to its floor, landing upon a great disk inset in that floor beneath the descending shaft and glowing with dark purple light, the glowing force that combatted gravitation enough in the shaft above it to allow us to float gently down. For the moment, though, I paid not so much attention to it as to the strange, vast hall in which we now stood. Colossal in size and circular of shape, the mighty, white-lit room was as large or larger even than the great Council Hall of the Federated Suns, in our own universe, though it was far different in appearance. There were in it no ranks of seats, the smooth floor being divided by crossing black lines into thousands of squares of equal size, and in each of those squares there rested, motionless, one of the gaseous Andromedans, thousands upon thousands of them, like massed columns of thick green vapor, being grouped in the great room about us.