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The boxes were plastic nobody had ever found anything made of wood in the city and the barrels and drums were of metal or glass or some glasslike substance. They were outwardly intact. The powdery heaps might have been anything organic, or anything containing fluid.
But the blue ripple had scarcely blown over the glasslike surface of the sea where she had sunk, when the buoyancy of young hearts, with the prospect of a good furlough amongst the lobster boxes for a time, seemed to be uppermost amongst the men. The officers, I saw and knew, felt very differently.
On a space planed flat in the rock, rested the dome, like an inverted quarter-mile-wide bowl of glittering glasslike substance, laced inside with spidery supporting struts the half bubble from inside which men guided the mass.
To the left of the town, there was a whole flotilla of small craft, brigs, schooners, and vegetable boats; while farther out at sea, beyond the fortifications, three large ships rode at anchor; and beyond them again, the beautiful group of islands lying about five miles off the town, appeared to float on and were reflected in the calm, glasslike expanse of the Pacific, like emeralds chased in silver, while the ocean itself, towards the horizon, seemed to rise up like a scene in a theatre, or a burnished bright silver wall, growing more and more blue, and hazy and indistinct, as it ascended, until it melted into the cloudless heaven, so that no one could tell where water and sky met.
Dorian heaved a sigh, and Lord Henry strolled across the room and began to stroke the head of a curious Java parrot, a large, grey-plumaged bird with pink crest and tail, that was balancing itself upon a bamboo perch. As his pointed fingers touched it, it dropped the white scurf of crinkled lids over black, glasslike eyes and began to sway backwards and forwards.
When these met above their heads, they formed a curved and tightly-jointed canopy. The four frames were filled with small panes of glasslike mica. Within the canopy the inmates were as well protected from the elements as if they had been under a roof.
The bullets had ricocheted, screaming thinly; there were four coppery smears of jacket-metal on the window, and a little surface spalling. Somebody tried a rifle; the 4000-f.s. bullet had cracked the glasslike pane without penetrating. An oxyacetylene torch had taken an hour to cut the window out; the lab crew, aboard the ship, were still trying to find out just what the stuff was.
Ian did not care, in these blissful days, to think of that. He had come on the day of the storm, the cave, and the rainbow to a fatal place in his very long life. He was upon very still, deep water, glasslike, with only vague threads and tremors to show what might issue in resistless currents. He had been in such a place, in his planetary life, over and over and over again.
All over the still-glowing case it spat its hits, but the glasslike substance resisted it completely, and remained unscathed. Carse swore harshly. He hurled one empty gun at the case, turned with a last salvo of shots at the coolies, and then was up on the pile and leaping for Friday's hands. They caught and gripped his, swung him once twice and hauled him swiftly out.
The glasslike water flowed right against it, its surface reaching up almost to the threshold. They could not speak any more; the noise was too deafening. In a few minutes they were before the gateway. Nightspore turned his back and hid his eyes in his two hands, but even then he was blinded by the light. So passionate were his feelings that his body seemed to enlarge itself.
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