It was as though we were within a diamond egg
whose graven angles had been turned _inward_.
But the oval was not perfect; at my right a screen cut it--a screen
that gleamed with fugitive, fleeting luminescences--stretching from
the side of our standing place up to the tip of the chamber; slightly
convex and crisscrossed by millions of fine lines like those upon a
spectroscopic plate, but with this difference--that within each line I
sensed the presence of multitudes of finer lines, dwindling into
infinitude, ultramicroscopic, traced by some instrument compared to
whose delicacy our finest tool would be as a crowbar to the needle of
a micrometer.
A foot or two from it stood something like the standee of a compass,
bearing, like it a cradled dial under whose crystal ran concentric
rings of prisoned, lambent vapours, faintly blue. From the edge of the
dial jutted a little shelf of crystal, a keyboard, in which were cut
eight small cups.
Within these cups the handmaiden placed her tapering fingers.
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