That great pile seemed to loom higher and higher as we drew near it. Brilliant, winking lights along its sides outlined it against the gloom of night, a huge, erect cylinder of smooth stone, its flat top all of a thousand feet in width, and nearly a half-mile above the ground. Obscured as the immense edifice was by the darkness, yet the vague glimpses I got of its sky-flung walls staggered me. And we were being marched directly toward it. A quarter-mile from the building, the flat street we followed ended, changed to a wide, smooth ramp that led up toward the giant edifice in a slight upward slant. We went up that ramp, the guards still on either side, till we stood under the very shadow of the gigantic, perpendicular walls, and now I saw that the ramp led up to and through a wide, high-arched entrance cut in the building's side, much like the entrance of the cylindrical building where I had been prisoned. We passed up and through that arched entrance, and were in a long tunnel, similarly arched, and cut through solid, seamless stone. It was a hundred feet in length, and as we passed on down its length it came to me that this must be the thickness of the great building's sides. The idea was too prodigious for speculation, even, and I shook it off, peering ahead toward the tunnel's end, where a ruddy light flooding down from above marked that end. A few moments, and we had reached the tunnel's mouth, and emerged from it into the vast cylinder's interior. I swept one startled glance around that interior, then felt myself staggering, reeling, falling. The immensity of the place was soul-shaking, bearing down on me with a weight that seemed physical, crushing my thoughts down into nothing but dazed awe and terror. I had imagined the building's interior to be divided, partitioned into apartments, but instead, the whole interior was one titanic room, shaped by the outside walls and roof, its sides looming up, dimly and vaguely, into a hazy darkness that hid their upper parts from view. Along the sides were many of the light-emitting bulbs, but these merely burned red holes in the dimness that surrounded the building's interior, rather than illuminated it. Starting at the wall, and extending twenty feet out toward the center of the room, the floor was of black stone, a flat, continuous ring of smooth material that circled the whole room. Inside of this ring was the real floor, a single, huge disk of burnished metal, smooth as ice and as seamless, over nine hundred feet in diameter. And except for ourselves, who stood on the black ring near the entrance, there was nothing whatever on black circle or burnished floor, no people, tables, altar, nothing but the immense expanse of smooth metal and the comparatively thin black circle that surrounded it.