It was an immense yellow and black checker-city, the yellow squares being blocks of thick yellow vegetation carefully tended, and the black squares being blocks of cubical black buildings. This strange checker-city of vegetation and buildings stretched from horizon to horizon of the world under them.

Its inhabitants, they saw as they dropped lower, were innumerable bronze-skinned men and women. Many thronged the ways of the building-squares, while as many others worked in the vegetation-squares at the cultivation of the growths there. A few oval ships were in sight over the city, most of them near a block that held the largest blade buildings. Toward this the cruiser’s escorting ships were leading it.

The cruiser came to rest with the oval ships about it on the black plaza surrounding these large central buildings...

He led down to the space-doors, spinning open inner and outer ones, and they stepped out onto the plaza’s seamless black paving...