The Korin raised his riding whip threateningly. "Do as you're ordered!
Mount!"
Trevor saw that a slave had brought a saddled beast to him and was
holding it, not looking either at him or the Korins.
"All right," he said. "I'll go with you."
He mounted and sat waiting, his eyes bright with the hatred that burned
in him, bright as blown coals. They formed a circle around him and the
leader gave a word. They galloped off toward the distant city.
Trevor must have dozed as he rode, for suddenly it was sunset, and they
were approaching the city.
Seeing it as he had before, far off and with nothing to measure it
against but the overtopping titan peaks, it had seemed no more than a
city built of rock. Now he was close to it. Black shadows lay on it,
and on the valley, but half way up the opposite mountain wall the light
still blazed, reflected downward on the shallow sky, so that everything
seemed to float in some curious dimension between night and day, Trevor
stared, shut his eyes, and stared again.
The size was wrong.
He looked quickly at the Korins, with the eerie feeling that he might
have shrunk to child-size as he slept. But they had not changed--at
least, relative to himself. He turned back to the city, trying to force
it into perspective.
It rose up starkly from the level plain. There was no gradual guttering
out into suburbs, no softening down to garden villas or rows of
cottages. It leaped up like a cliff and began, solemn, massive, squat,
and ugly. The buildings were square, set stiffly along a square front.
They were not tall. Most of them were only one story high. And yet
Trevor felt dwarfed by them, as he had never felt dwarfed by the
mightiest of Earth's skyscrapers. It was an unnatural feeling, and one
that made him curiously afraid.
There were no walls or gateways, no roads leading in. One minute the
beasts padded on the grass of the open plain. The next, their claws
were clicking on a stone pave and the buildings closed them in,
hulking, graceless, looking sullen and forlorn in the shadowed light.
There was no sound in them anywhere, no gleaming of lamps in the black
embrasures of cavernous doors. The last furious glare of the hidden sun
seeped down from the high peaks and stained their upper walls, and they
were old--half as old, Trevor thought, as the peaks themselves.
It was the window embrasures, the doors, and the steps that led up
to them that made Trevor understand suddenly what was wrong. And the
latent fear that had been in him sprang to full growth. The city, and
the buildings in it, the steps and the doors and the height of the
windows, were perfectly in proportion, perfectly normal--if the people
who lived there were twenty feet high.