So intense was his enthusiasm, that he urged me to descend at once with him to the many-templed city. But I did not willingly accede; I pointed out that it would be wiser to hasten back to the submarine, inform Captain Gavison of what we had seen, and return here--if we returned at all--in greater numbers than at present. Besides, as I reminded Rawson, the Captain had ordered us back within twenty-four hours; and, if we dallied, some mischance might delay us until too late. Had Rawson but had a dim prevision of the black hours ahead, he would certainly have accepted my suggestions. But, perversely enough, he seemed to be almost without his usual fears just when those fears might have proved most useful. And since of course I could not allow myself to be outdone in bravery by a mere boy, I had to signify a grudging assent to his proposal. I must confess, however, that my motives were not unmixed, for pictures of the iridescent dancing girl kept flitting before my mind and would give me no peace; and I may have had hopes (I will not say that I did) of meeting her again in this city of fountains and palaces. But not a living creature could be seen stirring in the avenues of that strange town as Rawson and I began our slow descent. Once or twice we thought we saw the glimmer of a light or the flash of some moving thing in the far distance, but we could not be sure; and the silence and the immobility gave the general effect of a city of the dead. There was something ghostly about that calm, still atmosphere, something that might have made me turn back in alarm had it not been for the presence of Rawson; but there was also something soothingly peaceful, a charmed quiet that brought to mind the fairy tales I had heard in childhood, and in particular that enchanted palace where the Sleeping Beauty had slumbered for a hundred years. Here, I thought, one might dream away a hundred years or a thousand, and never know that time had passed at all; here, conceivably, the ancient world might lapse into the modern, and the modern into the far future without apparent change.