(…)

Now the Cathedral. Tremendous, magnificent. You emerge from the biosphere airlock and you see it – the Cathedral – in front of and above you: a jagged shadow upon a background of stars.

A winding track leads down the slope of the crater from the airlock to the main portal and you descend upon a path hacked out of the cold rock, with a mandatory safety line fastened to your belt by the machine at the external gates. Curiosity usually gets the better of a person as he goes down and so he switches on the powerful reflector on his spacesuit. But the white finger of light can only touch individual, disparate fragments of the construction, shifting from one to another in a bright cuticle which slides across the surface of the Cathedral: here and there, here and there. Going down it‘s hard to keep the light fixed on one and the same point, so a person stops, and stares, and runs the warm finger over the rocky creation.

(…)

Some people just sit down on the slope and fall into a kind of catatonic enchantment: only the alarms on their spacesuits wake them. Small wonder. It‘s not a building, it‘s a sculpture.

(...)