“The Great Intention, sir? What can you mean?”
He glared at her; snarled his reply: “Greater than you have gone to the chair of perpetual voltage for the impertinence of asking that. None knows my Great Intention save myself. It is ‘closed up and sealed until the time of the end.’ But woe betide the red soul in Gehenna that does not work toward its fulfillment!”
So threatening was his manner that the girl-shade shrank away; as soon as she dared, returned her attention to the topographical features of the world infernal.
Back whence they had come, over incalculable miles of couchant dwellings, Apollyon Palace and its gardens glittered in the rays of the artificial sun. On either side, taxing to the eye as the illusive distances of a boundless desert, detail merged into mirage-like suggestion of detail, until nothing more could be imagined—quite nothing more except infinitude of space.
As they sped through the high-tempered air, shafts of fire-flecked smoke reached up as if to devour them. Directly below, for sections which might have been miles or tens of miles each, huddled a series of convex structures with the round chimneys of pottery kilns. Massed here and there were what looked to be warehouses and factories.
The tension of the royal mood relaxed in a free gesture. “Object to my furnaces smoking? I have to burn some fire and brimstone to satisfy the preconceived mortal idea of damnation. The old-timers would think less of me if I didn’t. At that, I’m sparing of it. Am bagging the gases for future needs. You look surprised. Do earthlings really believe that the idea of poison gas was made in Germany? Why, my child, I’ve looked forward for ages to the destructiveness of the fumes thrown off by burning fiends incarnate—the real thing, you know, made in Hell!”
Irritation again nettled his voice at the look on the face bent low to gaze through the rising heat-hazes.
“You work as hard as a Cook’s tourist at sight-seeing. Don’t make the mistake of supposing you can get more than an illustrative idea of Greater Gehenna in a day, a week or a year. Just a cursory glance this morning. To the East stretch our fire-proof picture storage warehouses, where we stow millions a minute of the life-films of important earthlings. Below is the Devil’s Own Play-House. Make a guess at its capacity.”
Dolores, however, made no guess. Her interest had centered in a small, incredibly luminous lake that attracted even as it hurt the eye.
“What is yonder pool and the great gleaming ball that floats above, like the soap-bubble of a god?”