but only yaeko knew the startling truth about the pierabout the astonishing reality hidden past the fifteen-hundred-foot-long wooden structure she had returned safely to that fateful day ; about the tremendous ringed planet that dominated the southern sky ; about the thin spires that reached straight to heaven ; about the edge of the world and the great arch over it ; and , most of all , about the imperial beach pier itself : how a seemingly infinite silver-green extension reached from the end of it , stretching across an alien ocean , receding away , away , away until it became a narrow dark line squeezing into a tiny point before disappearing completely in the outlying white haze .