For wonderful it was. At first Croft had thought it paved, in part at least, with glass of a faultless grade. But as he passed by Naia's side toward the center of the half room, half court in which flowers and shrubs and even small trees grew in beds between the pavement, he saw it was in reality some sort of transparent, colorless crystal, cut and set into an intricate design.
Yet that the Palosians made glass he soon found proof. Casting his eyes aloft, he saw the metal framework of an enclosing roof arching the court above his head. Plainly it was thrown across the width of the court to support shutters made of glass of several colors, some of them in place, others removed or laid back to leave the court open to the air.
The court itself was two stories high, and from either end rose a staircase of some substance like a lemon-yellow onyx, save that it seemed devoid of any mottling of veins. These stairs mounted to the upper gallery, supported above the central grand apartment on a series of pure white pillars, between which gleamed the exquisite forms of sculptured figures and groups.
There was also a group done in some stone of a translucent white, at the foot of each great stair. One, Croft noted, depicted a man and a woman locked in each other's arms. The other showed a winged figure, binding up the broken pinion of a bird. "Love" and "Mercy" he thought. If this were a sample of the ideal of this people, they must be a nation worth while.
So much he saw, and then Naia seated herself on a chair of a wine-red wood, set beside a hedge of some unknown vegetation which enclosed a splendid central space of the crystal floor.
Bazka had disappeared, but now came the sound of voices, and the servants appeared, emerging from a passage beneath one of the stairs. There were several members of both sexes in the group, and, like Bazka himself, one and all wore no more than a purple apron about the thighs. Croft was to learn in the end that the Palosians wore clothing more as a protection against the elements than for any desire to conceal the form; and with that fact he was to find them a highly moral people none the less.
Now, though their apparel, or lack of it, was something of a shock to his sense of conventions, as the men and women of the blue tribe advanced to greet their mistress in her chair, and listen to those directions she gave, he found himself wondering if they were slaves. Indeed he so regarded them until he knew more of the planet to which he had come. Then he knew slavery no longer existed among the Tamarizians, and that the blue men and women were the children of former slaves captured in wars, but now freed, given the rights of citizenship and paid by those whom they served.
In the end Naia turned to one of the women and ordered her to go to a cloth merchant and bid him attend her at once, with fabrics from which to choose her gown. That done, she dismissed each to his or her task, rose, and moved down the court. Croft followed as she went, mounted one of the yellow stairs, and came out on the upper balcony, down which she passed over an inlaid floor, beside walls frescoed with what he took to be scenes of Palosian history and social life.
She paused at a door fashioned from the wine-red wood, set it open, and entered an apartment plainly her own. Its walls were faced with the same yellow stone used in the stairs. Purple draperies broke the color here and there. Purple curtains hung beside two windows which she set open, turning the casings on hinges, to let in the air. In the center of the floor, which was covered with woven rugs and the skins of various beasts, was a circular metal basin holding water in a shallow pool. On one side was a pedestal of gold supporting a pure white miniature of a winged male figure, poised on toes as if about to take flight.