Doc, you and Olaf take the left wall; the professor and I will take the right." He loosened one of his automatics with a suggestive movement.
"After you, Professor," he bowed, politely, to the Russian.

We parted and set forth.
The chamber widened out from the portal in what seemed to be the arc of an immense circle.

The shining walls held a perceptible curve, and from this curvature I estimated that the roof was fully three hundred feet above us.
The floor was of smooth, mosaic-fitted blocks of a faintly yellow tinge.

They were not light-emitting like the blocks that formed the walls.

The radiance from these latter, I noted, had the peculiar quality of _thickening_ a few yards from its source, and it was this that produced the effect of misty, veiled distances.