The ascent was smooth and afforded delightful opportunities to view, at every desirable angle, the surrounding city and its suburbs.
“This is the most exhilarating ride of my life!” triumphantly cried Miss Church-Member as they circled higher and higher so gradually that more than ten miles were traveled ere the objective point was reached one thousand feet from the base.
Here lay the variety gardens, suspended from the rigid side of the tower by a feat of architectural engineering surpassing anything in the natural world.
Around the gardens the boulevards and the trolley lines circled horizontally, and also passed through some of the huge corridors which, on this level, diverge from the interior elevators toward the exterior gardens.
When the trolley car reached this height Miss Church-Member at once fixed her eyes on the ponderous pillars on each side of the converging corridors, for she knew that more than four thousand feet of the tower’s amazing weight rested on these defiant granites.
Mr. World and his pleasing friend meandered amongst the multitude from one to another of the hanging gardens, drinking in all the vain glories that this aerial world afforded. At last, wearied by the endless succession of extraordinary sights, they stole away to a quiet retreat on the outer edge of a garden farthest from the tower’s center. Reclining in hammocks, they conversed of all the greatness of the world.
Looking upward they saw, fifteen hundred feet above them, the next series of hanging gardens; and during the lull in the music near by, they caught the strains falling from the upper orchestras like music from Heaven.
“Will you go with me still higher to taste the sweetness of a more ethereal level?”
Intoxicated with the charms already felt, Miss Church-Member was ready for any height. Upward they went on the venturesome trolley, admiring the phenomenal ride and the scenery it opened to their view in panoramic splendor. Their course wound round and round until they came to the horizontal circle twenty-five hundred feet above the base.
This was a place of more refinement and beauty. The touch of the finer artists was seen in all the arrangement and style of the terraces and hanging gardens, but especially in the rich variety of flowers and plants that added their wealth to the novel combinations.