The Moon Pool by Abraham Merritt

For hours the black-haired folk had been streaming across the bridges, flowing along the promenade by scores and by hundreds, drifting down toward the gigantic seven-terraced temple whose interior I had never as yet seen, and from whose towering exterior, indeed, I had always been kept far enough away -- unobtrusively, but none the less decisively -- to prevent any real observation. The structure, I had estimated, nevertheless, could not reach less than a thousand feet above its silvery base, and the diameter of its circular foundation was about the same.

I wondered what was bringing the _ladala_ into Lora, and where they were vanishing. All of them were flower-crowned with the luminous, lovely blooms -- old and young, slender, mocking-eyed girls, dwarfed youths, mothers with their babes, gnomed oldsters -- on they poured, silent for the most part and sullen -- a sullenness that held acid bitterness even as their subtle, half-sinister, half-gay malice seemed tempered into little keen-edged flames, oddly, menacingly defiant.