Her gaze was fixed upon what at my first glance seemed
to be a raised and patterned circle in the dust-covered
floor. Not more than a foot in width, it shone wanly with
a pale, metallic bluish luster, as though, I thought, it
had been recently polished. Compared with the wall's
tremendous winged figures this floor design was trivial,
ludicrously insignificant. What could there be about it to
stamp that dread upon Ruth's face?

I leaped the crevice; Dick joined me. Now I could see
that the ring was not continuous. Its broken circle was
made of sharply edged cubes about an inch in height,
separated from each other with mathematical exactness by
another inch of space. I counted them--there were nineteen.

Almost touching them with their bases were an equal
number of pyramids, of tetrahedrons, as sharply angled
and of similar length. They lay on their sides with tips
pointing starlike to six spheres clustered like a conventionalized
five petaled primrose in the exact center. Five of
these spheres--the petals--were, I roughly calculated,
about an inch and a half in diameter, the ball they enclosed
larger by almost an inch.

So orderly was their arrangement, so much like a geometrical
design nicely done by some clever child that I
hesitated to disturb it. I bent, and stiffened, the first touch
of dread upon me.