Page:The Diothas, or, A far look ahead (IA diothasorfarlook01macn).pdf/12

 and, turning on a central pivot, offered a means of exit by which we passed to the open air.

We now found ourselves in a colonuade, or, rather, arcade, which I supposed to be on the level of the street. Its width might be about that of our Broadway sidewalk. Here I saw shops, indeed, and numbers of people passing in both directions, but could not see the throng of vehicles indicated by the sounds that reached my ears. I stepped over to the balustrade that bounded the farther side of the arcade, and found that I was by no means on the level of the street, but in a sort of balcony two stories above it. The room I had left but a moment before was fully sixty feet above the sidewalk. New York had truly risen, in the course of ages, upon the ruins of its former self.

I was struck with amazement at the spectacle before. How different this from the Broadway up which I had sauntered but a few hours before!

The buildings, it is true, were not much taller than those to which I had been accustomed; but their effect was indescribably grand and strange. Imagine the present sidewalk covered by an arcade supported on arches and pillars of polished granite. The architecture was of a style to me utterly unknown, but combined in a remarkable degree the characteristics of lightness and solidity. Above the lower arcade rose others, one for each story, each slightly receding within the other, and of correspondingly lighter construction. The material of only the lowest arcade was of stone; that of the upper ones was a metal, incrusted with a peculiar oxide of stone color. So similar was it, indeed, to stone, that it was only by