Suddenly we saw a clay road sloping down sharply beneath us, and found ourselves gazing out over a valley more dazzling than we had ever before known or imagined. Through its center flowed the great river, with gentle loops and twinings; above us, as before, reached the dark-green sky illumined with the golden suns; and an innumerable multitude of palely tinted columns, like the tree trunks of some colossal forest, shot upward to that sky as though to support it. But what were truly remarkable were the buildings that adorned the plain. On both sides of the river they stretched, far to the distance and out of sight, palaces of white marble and of black marble, of jade and of alabaster, some with an elegant symmetry of Greek columns, some with a solidity of masonry that seemed half Egyptian, some with an almost Oriental profusion of spires and turrets, of porticoes and balconies and arches and domes. But all alike were reared in perfect taste, and with perfect regard to the style of their neighbors; all alike faced on wide avenues, flowery lanes or lawny and statue-dotted parks; all appeared but parts of a single design which, when seen from above, was like some consummate tapestry patterned by a master artist. As Rawson and I stood staring at this matchless scene, I suddenly recalled the steeples and towers of that city we had seen beneath us in the submarine. A strange similarity in the outlines of the buildings impressed itself upon me--then in a flash it came to me that the two cities were one and the same! And at that instant I shuddered, amazed and horrified at the abrupt solution of the mystery ... It was as the Captain had suggested; we were indeed beneath the ocean, thousands of feet beneath the ocean, in some cavern inexplicably spared from the waters and haunted by the ghosts and relics of some ancient and vanished race! CHAPTER VI The Temple of the Stars Far from echoing the agitation I felt, Rawson seemed actually pleased at the turn of events. It piqued his imagination to think that we should be so far beneath the sea; and he conjured up all manner of alluring possibilities that testified more to his youth than to his common sense. He suggested that we were the discoverers of a great and magnificent empire which we should explore, conquer and then annex to the United States; and he formed his plans regardless of the probability that we should never see the United States again, and almost as though there were regular transportation facilities to the upper world. The sheer scientific difficulties--the apparent impossibility that a cavern free from water could exist beneath the ocean, the even more striking impossibility that human beings could inhabit such a cavern--seemed to make little impression upon the illogical mind of Rawson; and he was convinced that only by the rarest good fortune had we been entombed in these fantastic and dream-like depths.