Where has our exploration of the enigma of the universe left us, after all these pages? Clearly, we have encountered facts that are profoundly significant. In terms of spatial dimensions, we have probed the cosmos from the Planck length to quasars and the cosmological horizon. In time we have gone from the Planck time to the Dyson age. We have looked at structures ranging from the trio of quarks lost inside a proton, like three viruses in a volume the size of the Sun, through to the filamentary structure of the universe at large. Our story has embraced particles as subtle as the neutrino and as hypothetical as massive and destructive magnetic monopoles. The recession of the galaxies and the cosmic microwave background are relics of its explosive beginning. Using relativity, with its fusion of space and time, we can show how this Big Bang leads to what I term the grandiose fresco, or the golden moment that started the universe as we know it. As it aged from one second to fifteen billion years, the universe first experienced fifteen minutes of frenetic nuclear activity, followed by a lengthy period of lethargy, lasting a hundred million years when relatively little happened.