d, familiar now, they caused no
more than a fleeting discomfort. But I think I could never get used to
the outward strangeness!

The room in a moment was expanding. I could feel the platform floor
crawling outward beneath me, so that I had to hitch and change my
position as it pulled. We were seated together, Alan and I on each
side of Glora. My fingers were on her arm. It did not change size, but
it slowly drew away with a space opening between us. Overhead, the
dome-roof, the great jagged hole there, was receding, lifting, moving
upward and away.

Glora pulled us to our feet. "We had better start now. The distance is
so far, so quickly."

We had been sitting within five feet of the stone slab with its little
four-inch-high railing around it. A chair was by the microscope
eyepiece. As we stood swaying I saw that the chair was huge, and its
seat level with my head. The great barrel-cylinder of the microscope
slanted sixty feet upward. The dome-roof was a distant spread three
hundred feet up in the dimness. This gigantic room! It was a vast
arena now.

Alan and I must have hesitated, confused by the expanding scene--a
slow steady movement everywhere. Everything was drawing away from us.
Even as we stood together, the creeping platform floor was separating
us.

A moment passed. Glora was urging vehemently:

"Come! You must not stand!"

We started walking. The railing around the slab was knee-high. The
slab itself was a broad square surface. The fragment of golden quartz
lay in its center. It was now a jagged lump nearly a foot in
diameter!

* * * * *

The platform seemed shifting as we walked; the railing hardly came
closer as we advanced toward it. Then suddenly I realized it was
receding. Thirty feet away? No, now it was more than that--a great,
thick rope, waist-high, with a huge spread of white surface behind it.

"Faster!" urged Glora. We ran, and reached the railing. It was higher
than our heads. We ran under it, and out upon the white slab--a level
surface, larger now than the whole dome-room had been.

Glora, like a fawn ran in advance of us, her draperies flying in the
wind. She turned to look back.

"Faster! Faster--or it will be too hard a climb!"

Ahead lay a golden mound of rock. It was widening; raising its top
steadily higher. Beyond it and over it was a vast dim distance. We
reached the rock, breathless, winded. It was a jagged mound like a
great fifty-foot