We enter the enclosure. Though the high walls close out almost all light, there is lush grass growing in the interval of ground around the circular tower. It stirs faintly as we come, though I feel no breeze. The tower is made of something the color of brass and the consistency of marble. It is not quite a cylinder, the circumference at the top, modestly adorned with egg-shaped knobs, seems slightly smaller than it is at the base. There are two narrow windows high above, one facing the gap in the wall, the other looking off toward the city. Otherwise, the tower has no features at all, no joins, only the door, which opens right at ground level. The road’s end is its threshold. There is a lintel of black stone with two thick golden lines across it, and thin raised pilasters, the diameter of a forearm, descending from it down the length of the tall doors. There are two doors, narrow and massive, shining mustard-gold, with heavy diamond-shaped and circular bosses in their panels and upright rail handles.

Makemin seizes the handles and flings the doors back. They swing out toward us in complete silence, onto darkness inside. A billow of tepid air drifts over me, the smell of dust and varnish, and a barely-perceptible sour odor underneath.

We step into palpable silence, dense shadow, and stop. The light from the door barely reaches past our shoulders. We peer together into the dark. After a moment or two, I begin to make out faint reflections high in the air, from some high, curving surfaces. They shine gold. My vision is growing rapidly accustomed to the dark. I begin to see tall, gigantic shapes standing in rows to either side, and a wide openness ahead of us. My vision is not growing rapidly accustomed to the dark—light is very gradually collecting high ahead of us, a shimmer, like a haze of light thrown off by gold coins.

We’re gazing into a chamber of some depth, not especially large, with pillars running along either side of the open space before us, facing a sort of altar or screen opposite us.

A phantom luminosity gathers along the tops of the pillars. Delicate, long-petalled lily-like flowers of milky glass descend in corsage rows and all evenly grow radiant as they come down, filling the upper air with frosty light. The pillars are mineral trees, their branches lunging up into an abyss of darkness overhead, and grey globes dimly floured with pale blue-white light are visible there. A vaster tree stands facing the door, its base surrounded by a low brass wall with panels of white stone. There is a raised apse behind the tree, its rounded surface lined with a rich scarlet tapestry covered with small golden spots. As the light continues to grow, I see the flowers are strung together on weblike golden vines. Thrushchurl gasps and sighs in transports of astonishment moving out into the room, head thrown back. Then he notices something, and I see him tentatively approach an object between the pillars. Between each of the pillars, coffins of gleaming rosewood are standing on simply-carved wooden trestles. The coffins have no lids, and it is plain even from here that human bodies lie naked in them.