"It was different, then."
Alston plunged boldly into the shadow, the girl following reluctantly.
Inside, the air was warm, humid, stifling, full of the fetid odors of a hothouse. Silence stunned the ears. Even the restless stirring sounds of the vines faltered and died away. There was complete absence of sound as different from ordinary stillness as death is from life. Something tangible was gone from the very air. Withdrawn. Breathless, waiting hush, lifeless as a shroud, pervaded the somber interior.
There was light of an eery sort, a flickering play of shadows shot with pearly ghosts, lambent as moonflames, which hung in thick layers like drifting smoke or moved in shifting planes like faintly glowing draperies.
Slowly their eyes became accustomed to the dimness and they perceived the dimensions of the place. It was a vast circular space, like some tremendous hall that might have been a temple, above soared vague immensities of a vaulted dome, and the paved floor was strewn with the rubble of titanic collapse. Before them, in terraced crescents, like a giant's staircase crumbling into ruin, the flooring fell away into a central depression.
Here were rank on rank of noxious, ugly tree-growths, jutting from displaced paving blocks—each plant a gnarly, jointed trunk crowned with clusters of motionless tentacles. Ranged about the terraces, they parodied the attitudes of worshippers within some unholy temple. Each massive wall was thickly tapestried in matted hangings of the ophidian vines, but here their unceasing undulations were stilled, frozen into rigid immobility.
Hovering about the central depression was a zone of denser shadow, obscuring and distorting vision. What light existed in this core of darkness was troubled, uncertain. The spot attracted Alston's interest, but he could see nothing clearly.
In the deathlike hush, their footsteps made no whisper of sound and the man and girl descended the broken terraces among moving planes of light and shadow to the rim of darkness. Down the ruinous steps, their progress was sluggish as if they drifted bodiless in some exasperating dream fabric.
There came a flurry of disturbance in the shadowy zone, a wan, uneasy flickering glow, as if light flares struggled through thick, resisting slabs of murky crystal. Steadily it grew, quickening, mounting, flaming into raw emerald brilliance. Taller it soared, spreading, dispersing the murk, beating back the fanes of darkness, revealing the temple in all its monstrous size, its splendor, and its crumbling ruin. Revealing—
The Pit!