The light had changed; the high violet had gone from it, and it was shot with yellow gleamings like fugitive sunbeams. We were passing through a wide corridor that seemed to be unending. The yellow light grew stronger.
“That light wasn't exactly the Roentgen variety,” Drake interrupted my absorption in our surroundings. “And I hope to God it's as different as it seemed. If it's not we may be up against a lot of trouble.”
“More trouble than we're in?” I asked, a trifle satirically.
“X-ray burns,” he answered, “and no way to treat them in this place—if we live to want treatment,” he ended grimly.
“I don't think we were subjected to their action long enough—” I began, and was silent.
The corridor had opened without warning into a place for whose immensity I have no images that are adequate. It was a chamber that was vaster than ten score of the Great Halls of Karnac in one; great as that fabled hall in dread Amenti where Osiris sits throned between the Searcher of Hearts and the Eater of Souls, judging the jostling hosts of the newly dead.
Temple it was in its immensity, and its solemn vastness—but unlike any temple ever raised by human toil. In no ruin of earth's youth giants' work now crumbling under the weight of time had I ever sensed a shadow of the strangeness with which this was instinct. No—nor in the shattered fanes that once had held the gods of old Egypt, nor in the pillared shrines of Ancient Greece, nor Imperial Rome, nor mosque, basilica nor cathedral.
All these had been dedicated to gods which, whether created by humanity as science believes, or creators of humanity as their worshippers believed, still held in them that essence we term human.
The spirit, the force, that filled this place had in it nothing, NOTHING of the human.
No place? Yes, there was one—Stonehenge. Within that monolithic circle I had felt a something akin to this, as inhuman; a brooding spirit stony, stark, unyielding—as though not men but a people of stone had raised the great Menhirs.