Orrery of Tragedies

Note

This cylindrical chamber houses a whirring contraption bolted to a revolving metal disk that serves as its base. Metal spheres and sickles are attached to the ends of long metal arms that sweep back and forth, clicking loudly and rhythmically like the hands of a giant metronome. The apparatus is inlaid with characters from strange alphabets, and smoky wisps in the shapes of these letters rise from the contraption as it revolves. The whole device hums and crackles with lightning.

Rising from the middle of the mechanism is an eighty-foot-tall copper pole made of eight ten-foot-long lightning rods attached end to end. It extends upward past a ring-shaped gallery that forms the chamber’s upper level, through a hole in the fifty-foot-high domed ceiling.