Primally

As we stepped out into the awesome half-daylight of this monstrous cylinder-bottom—fifty million years old, and without doubt the most primally ancient structure ever to meet our eyes—we saw that the ramp-traversed sides stretched dizzily up to a height of fully sixty feet.

The discrepancy is striking and cannot be explained by size, as the smallest are the most massive, and if all were primally of like constitution, should be the least compressed.