Through the streets, fragrant with the aromatic scent of the bordering trees, we followed him on foot to a place about a quarter of a mile from the royal palaces, where we came to a courtyard into which, as it seemed, the populace weren't allowed access. It was a vast enclosure, with walls nowhere less than fifty yards from the group of buildings in the middle of it, and each of these was a good deal bigger than any single structure we had yet seen. In the main building, too, there was a marked difference in the design of the interior, its halls--and it had many--being built one within another like kernels of a nut. Some chambers through which we passed, though panelled and paved with the magnificent marble we had grown familiar with in our own guest-house, were manifestly laboratories, containing scientific apparatus of a pattern entirely new to us; and in one passage near the centre of the building we came upon a superb life-sized statue of the Pallas Athene, a deity I don't remember, curiously enough in a city given over to mental culture, to have seen portrayed elsewhere. Kalliboas whispered to us here that we must preserve unbroken silence until we emerged again from these inner chambers. For myself, I found this injunction none too easy to obey: I could have cried out time and again with amazement over what we saw. In the first place I couldn't for the life of me fathom how these enclosed halls were lighted and ventilated, yet they were both. Sweet air, and a queer diffused rosy illumination pervaded them all, though I felt no draught that could have accounted for the clean atmosphere nor saw any lamp that could have furnished the light.