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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Metal Monster, by A. Merritt
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Metal Monster
+
+Author: A. Merritt
+
+Release Date: September, 2002  [Etext #3479]
+Posting Date: October 12, 2009
+Last Updated: March 16, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE METAL MONSTER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judy Boss
+
+
+
+
+
+THE METAL MONSTER
+
+
+By A. Merritt
+
+
+
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+Before the narrative which follows was placed in my hands, I had never
+seen Dr. Walter T. Goodwin, its author.
+
+When the manuscript revealing his adventures among the pre-historic
+ruins of the Nan-Matal in the Carolines (The Moon Pool) had been given
+me by the International Association of Science for editing and revision
+to meet the requirements of a popular presentation, Dr. Goodwin had left
+America. He had explained that he was still too shaken, too depressed,
+to be able to recall experiences that must inevitably carry with them
+freshened memories of those whom he loved so well and from whom, he
+felt, he was separated in all probability forever.
+
+I had understood that he had gone to some remote part of Asia to pursue
+certain botanical studies, and it was therefore with the liveliest
+surprise and interest that I received a summons from the President of
+the Association to meet Dr. Goodwin at a designated place and hour.
+
+Through my close study of the Moon Pool papers I had formed a mental
+image of their writer. I had read, too, those volumes of botanical
+research which have set him high above all other American scientists in
+this field, gleaning from their curious mingling of extremely
+technical observations and minutely accurate but extraordinarily poetic
+descriptions, hints to amplify my picture of him. It gratified me to
+find I had drawn a pretty good one.
+
+The man to whom the President of the Association introduced me was
+sturdy, well-knit, a little under average height. He had a broad but
+rather low forehead that reminded me somewhat of the late electrical
+wizard Steinmetz. Under level black brows shone eyes of clear hazel,
+kindly, shrewd, a little wistful, lightly humorous; the eyes both of a
+doer and a dreamer.
+
+Not more than forty I judged him to be. A close-trimmed, pointed beard
+did not hide the firm chin and the clean-cut mouth. His hair was thick
+and black and oddly sprinkled with white; small streaks and dots of
+gleaming silver that shone with a curiously metallic luster.
+
+His right arm was closely bound to his breast. His manner as he greeted
+me was tinged with shyness. He extended his left hand in greeting, and
+as I clasped the fingers I was struck by their peculiar, pronounced, yet
+pleasant warmth; a sensation, indeed, curiously electric.
+
+The Association's President forced him gently back into his chair.
+
+“Dr. Goodwin,” he said, turning to me, “is not entirely recovered as
+yet from certain consequences of his adventures. He will explain to you
+later what these are. In the meantime, Mr. Merritt, will you read this?”
+
+I took the sheets he handed me, and as I read them felt the gaze of Dr.
+Goodwin full upon me, searching, weighing, estimating. When I raised my
+eyes from the letter I found in his a new expression. The shyness was
+gone; they were filled with complete friendliness. Evidently I had
+passed muster.
+
+“You will accept, sir?” It was the president's gravely courteous tone.
+
+“Accept!” I exclaimed. “Why, of course, I accept. It is not only one of
+the greatest honors, but to me one of the greatest delights to act as a
+collaborator with Dr. Goodwin.”
+
+The president smiled.
+
+“In that case, sir, there is no need for me to remain longer,” he said.
+“Dr. Goodwin has with him his manuscript as far as he has progressed
+with it. I will leave you two alone for your discussion.”
+
+He bowed to us and, picking up his old-fashioned bell-crowned silk hat
+and his quaint, heavy cane of ebony, withdrew. Dr. Goodwin turned to me.
+
+“I will start,” he said, after a little pause, “from when I met Richard
+Drake on the field of blue poppies that are like a great prayer-rug at
+the gray feet of the nameless mountain.”
+
+The sun sank, the shadows fell, the lights of the city sparkled out, for
+hours New York roared about me unheeded while I listened to the tale
+of that utterly weird, stupendous drama of an unknown life, of unknown
+creatures, unknown forces, and of unconquerable human heroism played
+among the hidden gorges of unknown Asia.
+
+It was dawn when I left him for my own home. Nor was it for many
+hours after that I laid his then incomplete manuscript down and sought
+sleep--and found a troubled sleep.
+
+A. MERRITT
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I. VALLEY OF THE BLUE POPPIES
+
+In this great crucible of life we call the world--in the vaster one we
+call the universe--the mysteries lie close packed, uncountable as grains
+of sand on ocean's shores. They thread gigantic, the star-flung spaces;
+they creep, atomic, beneath the microscope's peering eye. They walk
+beside us, unseen and unheard, calling out to us, asking why we are deaf
+to their crying, blind to their wonder.
+
+Sometimes the veils drop from a man's eyes, and he sees--and speaks of
+his vision. Then those who have not seen pass him by with the lifted
+brows of disbelief, or they mock him, or if his vision has been great
+enough they fall upon and destroy him.
+
+For the greater the mystery, the more bitterly is its verity assailed;
+upon what seem the lesser a man may give testimony and at least gain for
+himself a hearing.
+
+There is reason for this. Life is a ferment, and upon and about it,
+shifting and changing, adding to or taking away, beat over legions of
+forces, seen and unseen, known and unknown. And man, an atom in the
+ferment, clings desperately to what to him seems stable; nor greets with
+joy him who hazards that what he grips may be but a broken staff, and,
+so saying, fails to hold forth a sturdier one.
+
+Earth is a ship, plowing her way through uncharted oceans of space
+wherein are strange currents, hidden shoals and reefs, and where blow
+the unknown winds of Cosmos.
+
+If to the voyagers, painfully plotting their course, comes one who cries
+that their charts must be remade, nor can tell WHY they must be--that
+man is not welcome--no!
+
+Therefore it is that men have grown chary of giving testimony upon
+mysteries. Yet knowing each in his own heart the truth of that vision he
+has himself beheld, lo, it is that in whose reality he most believes.
+
+The spot where I had encamped was of a singular beauty; so beautiful
+that it caught the throat and set an ache within the breast--until from
+it a tranquillity distilled that was like healing mist.
+
+Since early March I had been wandering. It was now mid-July. And for the
+first time since my pilgrimage had begun I drank--not of forgetfulness,
+for that could never be--but of anodyne for a sorrow which had held fast
+upon me since my return from the Carolines a year before.
+
+No need to dwell here upon that--it has been written. Nor shall I recite
+the reasons for my restlessness--for these are known to those who have
+read that history of mine. Nor is there cause to set forth at length the
+steps by which I had arrived at this vale of peace.
+
+Sufficient is to tell that in New York one night, reading over what is
+perhaps the most sensational of my books--“The Poppies and Primulas of
+Southern Tibet,” the result of my travels of 1910-1911, I determined to
+return to that quiet, forbidden land. There, if anywhere, might I find
+something akin to forgetting.
+
+There was a certain flower which I long had wished to study in its
+mutations from the singular forms appearing on the southern slopes of
+the Elburz--Persia's mountainous chain that extends from Azerbaijan
+in the west to Khorasan in the east; from thence I would follow its
+modified types in the Hindu-Kush ranges and its migrations along the
+southern scarps of the Trans-Himalayas--the unexplored upheaval, higher
+than the Himalayas themselves, more deeply cut with precipice and gorge,
+which Sven Hedin had touched and named on his journey to Lhasa.
+
+Having accomplished this, I planned to push across the passes to the
+Manasarowar Lakes, where, legend has it, the strange, luminous purple
+lotuses grow.
+
+An ambitious project, undeniably fraught with danger; but it is
+written that desperate diseases require desperate remedies, and until
+inspiration or message how to rejoin those whom I had loved so dearly
+came to me, nothing less, I felt, could dull my heartache.
+
+And, frankly, feeling that no such inspiration or message could come, I
+did not much care as to the end.
+
+In Teheran I had picked up a most unusual servant; yes, more than this,
+a companion and counselor and interpreter as well.
+
+He was a Chinese; his name Chiu-Ming. His first thirty years had been
+spent at the great Lamasery of Palkhor-Choinde at Gyantse, west of
+Lhasa. Why he had gone from there, how he had come to Teheran, I never
+asked. It was most fortunate that he had gone, and that I had found him.
+He recommended himself to me as the best cook within ten thousand miles
+of Pekin.
+
+For almost three months we had journeyed; Chiu-Ming and I and the two
+ponies that carried my impedimenta.
+
+We had traversed mountain roads which had echoed to the marching feet of
+the hosts of Darius, to the hordes of the Satraps. The highways of the
+Achaemenids--yes, and which before them had trembled to the tramplings
+of the myriads of the godlike Dravidian conquerors.
+
+We had slipped over ancient Iranian trails; over paths which the
+warriors of conquering Alexander had traversed; dust of bones of
+Macedons, of Greeks, of Romans, beat about us; ashes of the flaming
+ambitions of the Sassanidae whimpered beneath our feet--the feet of an
+American botanist, a Chinaman, two Tibetan ponies. We had crept through
+clefts whose walls had sent back the howlings of the Ephthalites, the
+White Huns who had sapped the strength of these same proud Sassanids
+until at last both fell before the Turks.
+
+Over the highways and byways of Persia's glory, Persia's shame and
+Persia's death we four--two men, two beasts--had passed. For a fortnight
+we had met no human soul, seen no sign of human habitation.
+
+Game had been plentiful--green things Chiu-Ming might lack for his
+cooking, but meat never. About us was a welter of mighty summits. We
+were, I knew, somewhere within the blending of the Hindu-Kush with the
+Trans-Himalayas.
+
+That morning we had come out of a ragged defile into this valley of
+enchantment, and here, though it had been so early, I had pitched my
+tent, determining to go no farther till the morrow.
+
+It was a Phocean vale; a gigantic cup filled with tranquillity. A spirit
+brooded over it, serene, majestic, immutable--like the untroubled calm
+which rests, the Burmese believe, over every place which has guarded the
+Buddha, sleeping.
+
+At its eastern end towered the colossal scarp of the unnamed peak
+through one of whose gorges we had crept. On his head was a cap of
+silver set with pale emeralds--the snow fields and glaciers that crowned
+him. Far to the west another gray and ochreous giant reared its bulk,
+closing the vale. North and south, the horizon was a chaotic sky land of
+pinnacles, spired and minareted, steepled and turreted and domed, each
+diademed with its green and argent of eternal ice and snow.
+
+And all the valley was carpeted with the blue poppies in wide, unbroken
+fields, luminous as the morning skies of mid-June; they rippled mile
+after mile over the path we had followed, over the still untrodden path
+which we must take. They nodded, they leaned toward each other, they
+seemed to whisper--then to lift their heads and look up like crowding
+swarms of little azure fays, half impudently, wholly trustfully, into
+the faces of the jeweled giants standing guard over them. And when the
+little breeze walked upon them it was as though they bent beneath the
+soft tread and were brushed by the sweeping skirts of unseen, hastening
+Presences.
+
+Like a vast prayer-rug, sapphire and silken, the poppies stretched
+to the gray feet of the mountain. Between their southern edge and
+the clustering summits a row of faded brown, low hills knelt--like
+brown-robed, withered and weary old men, backs bent, faces hidden
+between outstretched arms, palms to the earth and brows touching earth
+within them--in the East's immemorial attitude of worship.
+
+I half expected them to rise--and as I watched a man appeared on one of
+the bowed, rocky shoulders, abruptly, with the ever-startling suddenness
+which in the strange light of these latitudes objects spring into
+vision. As he stood scanning my camp there arose beside him a laden
+pony, and at its head a Tibetan peasant. The first figure waved its
+hand; came striding down the hill.
+
+As he approached I took stock of him. A young giant, three good inches
+over six feet, a vigorous head with unruly clustering black hair; a
+clean-cut, clean-shaven American face.
+
+“I'm Dick Drake,” he said, holding out his hand. “Richard Keen Drake,
+recently with Uncle's engineers in France.”
+
+“My name is Goodwin.” I took his hand, shook it warmly. “Dr. Walter T.
+Goodwin.”
+
+“Goodwin the botanist--? Then I know you!” he exclaimed. “Know all
+about you, that is. My father admired your work greatly. You knew
+him--Professor Alvin Drake.”
+
+I nodded. So he was Alvin Drake's son. Alvin, I knew, had died about a
+year before I had started on this journey. But what was his son doing in
+this wilderness?
+
+“Wondering where I came from?” he answered my unspoken question. “Short
+story. War ended. Felt an irresistible desire for something different.
+Couldn't think of anything more different from Tibet--always wanted to
+go there anyway. Went. Decided to strike over toward Turkestan. And here
+I am.”
+
+I felt at once a strong liking for this young giant. No doubt,
+subconsciously, I had been feeling the need of companionship with my own
+kind. I even wondered, as I led the way into my little camp, whether he
+would care to join fortunes with me in my journeyings.
+
+His father's work I knew well, and although this stalwart lad was unlike
+what one would have expected Alvin Drake--a trifle dried, precise,
+wholly abstracted with his experiments--to beget, still, I reflected,
+heredity like the Lord sometimes works in mysterious ways its wonders to
+perform.
+
+It was almost with awe that he listened to me instruct Chiu-Ming as to
+just how I wanted supper prepared, and his gaze dwelt fondly upon the
+Chinese busy among his pots and pans.
+
+We talked a little, desultorily, as the meal was prepared--fragments of
+traveler's news and gossip, as is the habit of journeyers who come upon
+each other in the silent places. Ever the speculation grew in his face
+as he made away with Chiu-Ming's artful concoctions.
+
+Drake sighed, drawing out his pipe.
+
+“A cook, a marvel of a cook. Where did you get him?”
+
+Briefly I told him.
+
+Then a silence fell upon us. Suddenly the sun dipped down behind the
+flank of the stone giant guarding the valley's western gate; the whole
+vale swiftly darkened--a flood of crystal-clear shadows poured within
+it. It was the prelude to that miracle of unearthly beauty seen nowhere
+else on this earth--the sunset of Tibet.
+
+We turned expectant eyes to the west. A little, cool breeze raced down
+from the watching steeps like a messenger, whispered to the nodding
+poppies, sighed and was gone. The poppies were still. High overhead a
+homing kite whistled, mellowly.
+
+As if it were a signal there sprang out in the pale azure of the western
+sky row upon row of cirrus cloudlets, rank upon rank of them, thrusting
+their heads into the path of the setting sun. They changed from mottled
+silver into faint rose, deepened to crimson.
+
+“The dragons of the sky drink the blood of the sunset,” said Chiu-Ming.
+
+As though a gigantic globe of crystal had dropped upon the heavens,
+their blue turned swiftly to a clear and glowing amber--then as abruptly
+shifted to a luminous violet A soft green light pulsed through the
+valley.
+
+Under it, like hills ensorcelled, the rocky walls about it seemed to
+flatten. They glowed and all at once pressed forward like gigantic
+slices of palest emerald jade, translucent, illumined, as though by a
+circlet of little suns shining behind them.
+
+The light faded, robes of deepest amethyst dropped around the mountain's
+mighty shoulders. And then from every snow and glacier-crowned peak,
+from minaret and pinnacle and towering turret, leaped forth a confusion
+of soft peacock flames, a host of irised prismatic gleamings, an ordered
+chaos of rainbows.
+
+Great and small, interlacing and shifting, they ringed the valley with
+an incredible glory--as if some god of light itself had touched the
+eternal rocks and bidden radiant souls stand forth.
+
+Through the darkening sky swept a rosy pencil of living light; that
+utterly strange, pure beam whose coming never fails to clutch the throat
+of the beholder with the hand of ecstasy, the ray which the Tibetans
+name the Ting-Pa. For a moment this rosy finger pointed to the east,
+then arched itself, divided slowly into six shining, rosy bands; began
+to creep downward toward the eastern horizon where a nebulous, pulsing
+splendor arose to meet it.
+
+And as we watched I heard a gasp from Drake. And it was echoed by my
+own.
+
+For the six beams were swaying, moving with ever swifter motion from
+side to side in ever-widening sweep, as though the hidden orb from which
+they sprang were swaying like a pendulum.
+
+Faster and faster the six high-flung beams swayed--and then broke--broke
+as though a gigantic, unseen hand had reached up and snapped them!
+
+An instant the severed ends ribboned aimlessly, then bent, turned down
+and darted earthward into the welter of clustered summits at the north
+and swiftly were gone, while down upon the valley fell night.
+
+“Good God!” whispered Drake. “It was as though something reached up,
+broke those rays and drew them down--like threads.”
+
+“I saw it.” I struggled with bewilderment. “I saw it. But I never saw
+anything like it before,” I ended, most inadequately.
+
+“It was PURPOSEFUL,” he whispered. “It was DELIBERATE. As though
+something reached up, juggled with the rays, broke them, and drew them
+down like willow withes.”
+
+“The devils that dwell here!” quavered Chiu-Ming.
+
+“Some magnetic phenomenon.” I was half angry at myself for my own touch
+of panic. “Light can be deflected by passage through a magnetic field.
+Of course that's it. Certainly.”
+
+“I don't know.” Drake's tone was doubtful indeed. “It would take a whale
+of a magnetic field to have done THAT--it's inconceivable.” He harked
+back to his first idea. “It was so--so DAMNED deliberate,” he repeated.
+
+“Devils--” muttered the frightened Chinese.
+
+“What's that?” Drake gripped my arm and pointed to the north. A deeper
+blackness had grown there while we had been talking, a pool of darkness
+against which the mountain summits stood out, blade-sharp edges faintly
+luminous.
+
+A gigantic lance of misty green fire darted from the blackness and
+thrust its point into the heart of the zenith; following it, leaped into
+the sky a host of the sparkling spears of light, and now the blackness
+was like an ebon hand, brandishing a thousand javelins of tinseled
+flame.
+
+“The aurora,” I said.
+
+“It ought to be a good one,” mused Drake, gaze intent upon it. “Did you
+notice the big sun spot?”
+
+I shook my head.
+
+“The biggest I ever saw. Noticed it first at dawn this morning. Some
+little aurora lighter--that spot. I told you--look at that!” he cried.
+
+The green lances had fallen back. The blackness gathered itself
+together--then from it began to pulse billows of radiance, spangled with
+infinite darting swarms of flashing corpuscles like uncounted hosts of
+dancing fireflies.
+
+Higher the waves rolled--phosphorescent green and iridescent violet,
+weird copperous yellows and metallic saffrons and a shimmer of
+glittering ash of rose--then wavered, split and formed into gigantic,
+sparkling, marching curtains of splendor.
+
+A vast circle of light sprang out upon the folds of the flickering,
+rushing curtains. Misty at first, its edges sharpened until they rested
+upon the blazing glory of the northern sky like a pale ring of cold
+flame. And about it the aurora began to churn, to heap itself, to
+revolve.
+
+Toward the ring from every side raced the majestic folds, drew
+themselves together, circled, seethed around it like foam of fire about
+the lip of a cauldron, and poured through the shining circle as though
+it were the mouth of that fabled cavern where old Aeolus sits blowing
+forth and breathing back the winds that sweep the earth.
+
+Yes--into the ring's mouth the aurora flew, cascading in a columned
+stream to earth. Then swiftly, a mist swept over all the heavens, veiled
+that incredible cataract.
+
+“Magnetism?” muttered Drake. “I guess NOT!”
+
+“It struck about where the Ting-Pa was broken and seemed drawn down like
+the rays,” I said.
+
+“Purposeful,” Drake said. “And devilish. It hit on all my nerves like
+a--like a metal claw. Purposeful and deliberate. There was intelligence
+behind that.”
+
+“Intelligence? Drake--what intelligence could break the rays of the
+setting sun and suck down the aurora?”
+
+“I don't know,” he answered.
+
+“Devils,” croaked Chiu-Ming. “The devils that defied Buddha--and have
+grown strong--”
+
+“Like a metal claw!” breathed Drake.
+
+Far to the west a sound came to us; first a whisper, then a wild
+rushing, a prolonged wailing, a crackling. A great light flashed
+through the mist, glowed about us and faded. Again the wailing, the vast
+rushing, the retreating whisper.
+
+Then silence and darkness dropped embraced upon the valley of the blue
+poppies.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. THE SIGIL ON THE ROCKS
+
+Dawn came. Drake had slept well. But I, who had not his youthful
+resiliency, lay for long, awake and uneasy. I had hardly sunk into
+troubled slumber before dawn awakened me.
+
+As we breakfasted, I approached directly that matter which my growing
+liking for him was turning into strong desire.
+
+“Drake,” I asked. “Where are you going?”
+
+“With you,” he laughed. “I'm foot loose and fancy free. And I think you
+ought to have somebody with you to help watch that cook. He might get
+away.”
+
+The idea seemed to appall him.
+
+“Fine!” I exclaimed heartily, and thrust out my hand to him. “I'm
+thinking of striking over the range soon to the Manasarowar Lakes.
+There's a curious flora I'd like to study.”
+
+“Anywhere you say suits me,” he answered.
+
+We clasped hands on our partnership and soon we were on our way to the
+valley's western gate; our united caravans stringing along behind us.
+Mile after mile we trudged through the blue poppies, discussing the
+enigmas of the twilight and of the night.
+
+In the light of day their breath of vague terror was dissipated.
+There was no place for mystery nor dread under this floor of brilliant
+sunshine. The smiling sapphire floor rolled ever on before us.
+
+Whispering little playful breezes flew down the slopes to gossip for a
+moment with the nodding flowers. Flocks of rose finches raced chattering
+overhead to quarrel with the tiny willow warblers, the chi-u-teb-tok,
+holding fief of the drooping, graceful bowers bending down to the little
+laughing stream that for the past hour had chuckled and gurgled like a
+friendly water baby beside us.
+
+I had proven, almost to my own satisfaction, that what we had beheld
+had been a creation of the extraordinary atmospheric attributes of these
+highlands, an atmosphere so unique as to make almost anything of the
+kind possible. But Drake was not convinced.
+
+“I know,” he said. “Of course I understand all that--superimposed layers
+of warmer air that might have bent the ray; vortices in the higher
+levels that might have produced just that effect of the captured aurora.
+I admit it's all possible. I'll even admit it's all probable, but damn
+me, Doc, if I BELIEVE it! I had too clearly the feeling of a CONSCIOUS
+force, a something that KNEW exactly what it was doing--and had a REASON
+for it.”
+
+It was mid-afternoon.
+
+The spell of the valley upon us, we had gone leisurely. The western
+mount was close, the mouth of the gorge through which we must pass,
+now plain before us. It did not seem as though we could reach it before
+dusk, and Drake and I were reconciled to spending another night in the
+peaceful vale. Plodding along, deep in thought, I was startled by his
+exclamation.
+
+He was staring at a point some hundred yards to his right. I followed
+his gaze.
+
+The towering cliffs were a scant half mile away. At some distant time
+there had been an enormous fall of rock. This, disintegrating, had
+formed a gently-curving breast which sloped down to merge with the
+valley's floor. Willow and witch alder, stunted birch and poplar
+had found roothold, clothed it, until only their crowding outposts,
+thrusting forward in a wavering semicircle, held back seemingly by the
+blue hordes, showed where it melted into the meadows.
+
+In the center of this breast, beginning half way up its slopes and
+stretching down into the flowered fields was a colossal imprint.
+
+Gray and brown, it stood out against the green and blue of slope and
+level; a rectangle all of thirty feet wide, two hundred long, the
+heel faintly curved and from its hither end, like claws, four slender
+triangles radiating from it like twenty-four points of a ten-rayed star.
+
+Irresistibly was it like a footprint--but what thing was there whose
+tread could leave such a print as this?
+
+I ran up the slope--Drake already well in advance. I paused at the
+base of the triangles where, were this thing indeed a footprint, the
+spreading claws sprang from the flat of it.
+
+The track was fresh. At its upper edges were clipped bushes and split
+trees, the white wood of the latter showing where they had been sliced
+as though by the stroke of a scimitar.
+
+I stepped out upon the mark. It was as level as though planed; bent down
+and stared in utter disbelief of what my own eyes beheld. For stone
+and earth had been crushed, compressed, into a smooth, microscopically
+grained, adamantine complex, and in this matrix poppies still bearing
+traces of their coloring were imbedded like fossils. A cyclone can and
+does grip straws and thrust them unbroken through an inch board--but
+what force was there which could take the delicate petals of a flower
+and set them like inlay within the surface of a stone?
+
+Into my mind came recollection of the wailings, the crashings in the
+night, of the weird glow that had flashed about us when the mist arose
+to hide the chained aurora.
+
+“It was what we heard,” I said. “The sounds--it was then that this was
+made.”
+
+“The foot of Shin-je!” Chiu-Ming's voice was tremulous. “The lord of
+Hell has trodden here!”
+
+I translated for Drake's benefit.
+
+“Has the lord of Hell but one foot?” asked Dick, politely.
+
+“He bestrides the mountains,” said Chiu-Ming. “On the far side is his
+other footprint. Shin-je it was who strode the mountains and set here
+his foot.”
+
+Again I interpreted.
+
+Drake cast a calculating glance up to the cliff top.
+
+“Two thousand feet, about,” he mused. “Well, if Shin-je is built in our
+proportions that makes it about right. The length of this thing would
+give him just about a two thousand foot leg. Yes--he could just about
+straddle that hill.”
+
+“You're surely not serious?” I asked in consternation.
+
+“What the hell!” he exclaimed, “am I crazy? This is no foot mark. How
+could it be? Look at the mathematical nicety with which these edges are
+stamped out--as though by a die--
+
+“That's what it reminds me of--a die. It's as if some impossible power
+had been used to press it down. Like--like a giant seal of metal in a
+mountain's hand. A sigil--a seal--”
+
+“But why?” I asked. “What could be the purpose--”
+
+“Better ask where the devil such a force could be gotten together and
+how it came here,” he said. “Look--except for this one place there isn't
+a mark anywhere. All the bushes and the trees, all the poppies and the
+grass are just as they ought to be.
+
+“How did whoever or whatever it was that made this, get here and
+get away without leaving any trace but this? Damned if I don't think
+Chiu-Ming's explanation puts less strain upon the credulity than any I
+could offer.”
+
+I peered about. It was so. Except for the mark, there was no slightest
+sign of the unusual, the abnormal.
+
+But the mark was enough!
+
+“I'm for pushing up a notch or two and getting into the gorge before
+dark,” he was voicing my own thought. “I'm willing to face anything
+human--but I'm not keen to be pressed into a rock like a flower in a
+maiden's book of poems.” Just at twilight we drew out of the valley into
+the pass. We traveled a full mile along it before darkness forced us to
+make camp. The gorge was narrow. The far walls but a hundred feet away;
+but we had no quarrel with them for their neighborliness, no! Their
+solidity, their immutability, breathed confidence back into us.
+
+And after we had found a deep niche capable of holding the entire
+caravan we filed within, ponies and all, I for one perfectly willing
+thus to spend the night, let the air at dawn be what it would. We dined
+within on bread and tea, and then, tired to the bone, sought each his
+place upon the rocky floor. I slept well, waking only once or twice
+by Chiu-Ming's groanings; his dreams evidently were none of the
+pleasantest. If there was an aurora I neither knew nor cared. My slumber
+was dreamless.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. RUTH VENTNOR
+
+The dawn, streaming into the niche, awakened us. A covey of partridges
+venturing too close yielded three to our guns. We breakfasted well, and
+a little later were pushing on down the cleft.
+
+Its descent, though gradual, was continuous, and therefore I was not
+surprised when soon we began to come upon evidences of semi-tropical
+vegetation. Giant rhododendrons and tree ferns gave way to occasional
+clumps of stately kopek and clumps of the hardier bamboos. We added a
+few snow cocks to our larder--although they were out of their habitat,
+flying down into the gorge from their peaks and table-lands for some
+choice tidbit.
+
+All that day we marched on, and when at night we made camp, sleep came
+to us quickly and overmastering. An hour after dawn we were on our way.
+A brief stop we made for lunch; pressed forward.
+
+It was close to two when we caught the first sight of the ruins.
+
+The soaring, verdure-clad walls of the canyon had long been steadily
+marching closer. Above, between their rims the wide ribbon of sky was
+like a fantastically shored river, shimmering, dazzling; every cove
+and headland edged with an opalescent glimmering as of shining pearly
+beaches.
+
+And as though we were sinking in that sky stream's depths its light
+kept lessening, darkening imperceptibly with luminous shadows of ghostly
+beryl, drifting veils of pellucid aquamarine, limpid mists of glaucous
+chrysolite.
+
+Fainter, more crepuscular became the light, yet never losing its
+crystalline quality. Now the high overhead river was but a brook; became
+a thread. Abruptly it vanished.
+
+We passed into a tunnel, fern walled, fern roofed, garlanded with tawny
+orchids, gay with carmine fungus and golden moss. We stepped out into a
+blaze of sunlight.
+
+Before us lay a wide green bowl held in the hands of the clustered
+hills; shallow, circular, as though, while plastic still, the thumb
+of God had run round its rim, shaping it. Around it the peaks crowded,
+craning their lofty heads to peer within.
+
+It was about a mile in its diameter, this hollow, as my gaze then
+measured it. It had three openings--one that lay like a crack in the
+northeast slope; another, the tunnel mouth through which we had come.
+The third lifted itself out of the bowl, creeping up the precipitous
+bare scarp of the western barrier straight to the north, clinging to the
+ochreous rock up and up until it vanished around a far distant shoulder.
+
+It was a wide and bulwarked road, a road that spoke as clearly as though
+it had tongue of human hands which had cut it there in the mountain's
+breast. An ancient road weary beyond belief beneath the tread of
+uncounted years.
+
+From the hollow the blind soul of loneliness groped out to greet us!
+
+Never had I felt such loneliness as that which lapped the lip of the
+verdant bowl. It was tangible--as though it had been poured from some
+reservoir of misery. A pool of despair--
+
+
+Half the width of the valley away the ruins began. Weirdly were they its
+visible expression. They huddled in two bent rows to the bottom. They
+crouched in a wide cluster against the cliffs. From the cluster a
+curving row of them ran along the southern crest of the hollow.
+
+A flight of shattered, cyclopean steps lifted to a ledge and here a
+crumbling fortress stood.
+
+Irresistibly did the ruins seem a colossal hag, flung prone, lying
+listlessly, helplessly, against the barrier's base. The huddled lower
+ranks were the legs, the cluster the body, the upper row an outflung
+arm and above the neck of the stairway the ancient fortress, rounded
+and with two huge ragged apertures in its northern front was an aged,
+bleached and withered head staring, watching.
+
+I looked at Drake--the spell of the bowl was heavy upon him, his face
+drawn. The Chinaman and Tibetan were murmuring, terror written large
+upon them.
+
+“A hell of a joint!” Drake turned to me, a shadow of a grin lightening
+the distress on his face. “But I'd rather chance it than go back. What
+d'you say?”
+
+I nodded, curiosity mastering my oppression. We stepped over the rim,
+rifles on the alert. Close behind us crowded the two servants and the
+ponies.
+
+The vale was shallow, as I have said. We trod the fragments of an olden
+approach to the green tunnel so the descent was not difficult. Here and
+there beside the path upreared huge broken blocks. On them I thought
+I could see faint tracings as of carvings--now a suggestion of gaping,
+arrow-fanged dragon jaws, now the outline of a scaled body, a hint of
+enormous, batlike wings.
+
+Now we had reached the first of the crumbling piles that stretched down
+into the valley's center.
+
+Half fainting, I fell against Drake, clutching to him for support.
+
+A stream of utter hopelessness was racing upon us, swirling and eddying
+around us, reaching to our hearts with ghostly fingers dripping with
+despair. From every shattered heap it seemed to pour, rushing down the
+road upon us like a torrent, engulfing us, submerging, drowning.
+
+Unseen it was--yet tangible as water; it sapped the life from every
+nerve. Weariness filled me, a desire to drop upon the stones, to be
+rolled away. To die. I felt Drake's body quivering even as mine; knew
+that he was drawing upon every reserve of strength.
+
+“Steady,” he muttered. “Steady--”
+
+The Tibetan shrieked and fled, the ponies scrambling after him. Dimly
+I remembered that mine carried precious specimens; a surge of anger
+passed, beating back the anguish. I heard a sob from Chiu-Ming, saw him
+drop.
+
+Drake stopped, drew him to his feet. We placed him between us, thrust
+each an arm through his own. Then, like swimmers, heads bent, we pushed
+on, buffeting that inexplicable invisible flood.
+
+As the path rose, its force lessened, my vitality grew, and the terrible
+desire to yield and be swept away waned. Now we had reached the foot of
+the cyclopean stairs, now we were half up them--and now as we struggled
+out upon the ledge on which the watching fortress stood, the clutching
+stream shoaled swiftly, the shoal became safe, dry land and the cheated,
+unseen maelstrom swirled harmlessly beneath us.
+
+We stood erect, gasping for breath, again like swimmers who have fought
+their utmost and barely, so barely, won.
+
+There was an almost imperceptible movement at the side of the ruined
+portal.
+
+Out darted a girl. A rifle dropped from her hands. Straight she sped
+toward me.
+
+And as she ran I recognized her.
+
+Ruth Ventnor!
+
+The flying figure reached me, threw soft arms around my neck, was
+weeping in relieved gladness on my shoulder.
+
+“Ruth!” I cried. “What on earth are YOU doing here?”
+
+“Walter!” she sobbed. “Walter Goodwin--Oh, thank God! Thank God!”
+
+She drew herself from my arms, catching her breath; laughed shakily.
+
+I took swift stock of her. Save for fear upon her, she was the same Ruth
+I had known three years before; wide, deep blue eyes that were now
+all seriousness, now sparkling wells of mischief; petite, rounded and
+tender; the fairest skin; an impudent little nose; shining clusters of
+intractable curls; all human, sparkling and sweet.
+
+Drake coughed, insinuatingly. I introduced him.
+
+“I--I watched you struggling through that dreadful pit.” She shuddered.
+“I could not see who you were, did not know whether friend or enemy--but
+oh, my heart almost died in pity for you, Walter,” she breathed. “What
+can it be--THERE?”
+
+I shook my head.
+
+“Martin could not see you,” she went on. “He was watching the road that
+leads above. But I ran down--to help.”
+
+“Mart watching?” I asked. “Watching for what?”
+
+“I--” she hesitated oddly. “I think I'd rather tell you before him. It's
+so strange--so incredible.”
+
+She led us through the broken portal and into the fortress. It was more
+gigantic even than I had thought. The floor of the vast chamber we
+had entered was strewn with fragments fallen from the crackling,
+stone-vaulted ceiling. Through the breaks light streamed from the level
+above us.
+
+We picked our way among the debris to a wide crumbling stairway, crept
+up it, Ruth flitting ahead. We came out opposite one of the eye-like
+apertures. Black against it, perched high upon a pile of blocks, I
+recognized the long, lean outline of Ventnor, rifle in hand, gazing
+intently up the ancient road whose windings were plain through the
+opening. He had not heard us.
+
+“Martin,” called Ruth softly.
+
+He turned. A shaft of light from a crevice in the gap's edge struck his
+face, flashing it out from the semidarkness of the corner in which he
+crouched. I looked into the quiet gray eyes, upon the keen face.
+
+“Goodwin!” he shouted, tumbling down from his perch, shaking me by the
+shoulders. “If I had been in the way of praying--you're the man I'd have
+prayed for. How did you get here?”
+
+“Just wandering, Mart,” I answered. “But Lord! I'm sure GLAD to see
+you.”
+
+“Which way did you come?” he asked, keenly. I threw my hand toward the
+south.
+
+“Not through that hollow?” he asked incredulously.
+
+“And some hell of a place to get through,” Drake broke in. “It cost us
+our ponies and all my ammunition.”
+
+“Richard Drake,” I said. “Son of old Alvin--you knew him, Mart.”
+
+“Knew him well,” cried Ventnor, seizing Dick's hand. “Wanted me to go to
+Kamchatka to get some confounded sort of stuff for one of his devilish
+experiments. Is he well?”
+
+“He's dead,” replied Dick soberly.
+
+“Oh!” said Ventnor. “Oh--I'm sorry. He was a great man.”
+
+Briefly I acquainted him with my wanderings, my encounter with Drake.
+
+“That place out there--” he considered us thoughtfully. “Damned if I
+know what it is. Thought maybe it's gas--of a sort. If it hadn't been
+for it we'd have been out of this hole two days ago. I'm pretty sure it
+must be gas. And it must be much less than it was this morning, for then
+we made an attempt to get through again--and couldn't.”
+
+I was hardly listening. Ventnor had certainly advanced a theory of our
+unusual symptoms that had not occurred to me. That hollow might indeed
+be a pocket into which a gas flowed; just as in the mines the deadly
+coal damp collects in pits, flows like a stream along the passages. It
+might be that--some odorless, colorless gas of unknown qualities; and
+yet--
+
+“Did you try respirators?” asked Dick.
+
+“Surely,” said Ventnor. “First off the go. But they weren't of any use.
+The gas, if it is gas, seems to operate as well through the skin as
+through the nose and mouth. We just couldn't make it--and that's all
+there is to it. But if you made it--could we try it now, do you think?”
+ he asked eagerly.
+
+I felt myself go white.
+
+“Not--not for a little while,” I stammered.
+
+He nodded, understandingly.
+
+“I see,” he said. “Well, we'll wait a bit, then.”
+
+“But why are you staying here? Why didn't you make for the road up the
+mountain? What are you watching for, anyway?” asked Drake.
+
+“Go to it, Ruth,” Ventnor grinned. “Tell 'em. After all--it was YOUR
+party you know.”
+
+“Mart!” she cried, blushing.
+
+“Well--it wasn't ME they admired,” he laughed.
+
+“Martin!” she cried again, and stamped her foot.
+
+“Shoot,” he said. “I'm busy. I've got to watch.”
+
+“Well”--Ruth's voice was uncertain--“we'd been hunting up in Kashmir.
+Martin wanted to come over somewhere here. So we crossed the passes.
+That was about a month ago. The fourth day out we ran across what looked
+like a road running south.
+
+“We thought we'd take it. It looked sort of old and lost--but it was
+going the way we wanted to go. It took us first into a country of little
+hills; then to the very base of the great range itself; finally into the
+mountains--and then it ran blank.”
+
+“Bing!” interjected Ventnor, looking around for a moment. “Bing--just
+like that. Slap dash against a prodigious fall of rock. We couldn't get
+over it.”
+
+“So we cast about to find another road,” went on Ruth. “All we could
+strike were--just strikes.”
+
+“No fish on the end of 'em,” said Ventnor. “God! But I'm glad to see
+you, Walter Goodwin. Believe me, I am. However--go on, Ruth.”
+
+“At the end of the second week,” she said, “we knew we were lost. We
+were deep in the heart of the range. All around us was a forest of
+enormous, snow-topped peaks. The gorges, the canyons, the valleys that
+we tried led us east and west, north and south.
+
+“It was a maze, and in it we seemed to be going ever deeper. There was
+not the SLIGHTEST sign of human life. It was as though no human beings
+except ourselves had ever been there. Game was plentiful. We had no
+trouble in getting food. And sooner or later, of course, we were bound
+to find our way out. We didn't worry.
+
+“It was five nights ago that we camped at the head of a lovely little
+valley. There was a mound that stood up like a tiny watch-tower, looking
+down it. The trees grew round like tall sentinels.
+
+“We built our fire in that mound; and after we had eaten, Martin slept.
+I sat watching the beauty of the skies and of the shadowy vale. I heard
+no one approach--but something made me leap to my feet, look behind me.
+
+“A man was standing just within the glow of firelight, watching me.”
+
+“A Tibetan?” I asked. She shook her head, trouble in her eyes.
+
+“Not at all.” Ventnor turned his head. “Ruth screamed and awakened me. I
+caught a glimpse of the fellow before he vanished.
+
+“A short purple mantle hung from his shoulders. His chest was covered
+with fine chain mail. His legs were swathed and bound by the thongs of
+his high buskins. He carried a small, round, hide-covered shield and a
+short two-edged sword. His head was helmeted. He belonged, in fact--oh,
+at least twenty centuries back.”
+
+He laughed in plain enjoyment of our amazement.
+
+“Go on, Ruth,” he said, and took up his watch.
+
+“But Martin did not see his face,” she went on. “And oh, but I wish I
+could forget it. It was as white as mine, Walter, and cruel, so cruel;
+the eyes glowed and they looked upon me like a--like a slave dealer.
+They shamed me--I wanted to hide myself.
+
+  “I cried out and Martin awakened. As he moved, the
+man stepped out of the light and was gone. I think he had not seen
+Martin; had believed that I was alone.
+
+“We put out the fire, moved farther into the shadow of the trees. But
+I could not sleep--I sat hour after hour, my pistol in my hand,” she
+patted the automatic in her belt, “my rifle close beside me.
+
+“The hours went by--dreadfully. At last I dozed. When I awakened again
+it was dawn--and--and--” she covered her eyes, then: “TWO men were
+looking down on me. One was he who had stood in the firelight.”
+
+“They were talking,” interrupted Ventnor again, “in archaic Persian.”
+
+“Persian,” I repeated blankly; “archaic Persian?”
+
+“Very much so,” he nodded. “I've a fair knowledge of the modern tongue,
+and a rather unusual command of Arabic. The modern Persian, as you know,
+comes straight through from the speech of Xerxes, of Cyrus, of Darius
+whom Alexander of Macedon conquered. It has been changed mainly by
+taking on a load of Arabic words. Well--there wasn't a trace of the
+Arabic in the tongue they were speaking.
+
+“It sounded odd, of course--but I could understand quite easily. They
+were talking about Ruth. To be explicit, they were discussing her with
+exceeding frankness--”
+
+“Martin!” she cried wrathfully.
+
+“Well, all right,” he went on, half repentantly. “As a matter of fact,
+I had seen the pair steal up. My rifle was under my hand. So I lay there
+quietly, listening.
+
+“You can realize, Walter, that when I caught sight of those two,
+looking as though they had materialized from Darius's ghostly hordes,
+my scientific curiosity was aroused--prodigiously. So in my interest I
+passed over the matter of their speech; not alone because I thought
+Ruth asleep but also because I took into consideration that the mode
+of polite expression changes with the centuries--and these gentlemen
+clearly belonged at least twenty centuries back--the real truth is I was
+consumed with curiosity.
+
+“They had got to a point where they were detailing with what pleasure a
+certain mysterious person whom they seemed to regard with much fear and
+respect would contemplate her. I was wondering how long my desire to
+observe--for to the anthropologist they were most fascinating--could
+hold my hand back from my rifle when Ruth awakened.
+
+“She jumped up like a little fury. Fired a pistol point blank at them.
+Their amazement was--well--ludicrous. I know it seems incredible, but
+they seemed to know nothing of firearms--they certainly acted as though
+they didn't.
+
+“They simply flew into the timber. I took a pistol shot at one but
+missed. Ruth hadn't though; she had winged her man; he left a red trail
+behind him.
+
+“We didn't follow the trail. We made for the opposite direction--and as
+fast as possible.
+
+“Nothing happened that day or night. Next morning, creeping up a slope,
+we caught sight of a suspicious glitter a mile or two away in the
+direction we were going. We sought shelter in a small ravine. In a
+little while, over the hill and half a mile away from us, came about two
+hundred of these fellows, marching along.
+
+“And they were indeed Darius's men. Men of that Persia which had been
+dead for millenniums. There was no mistaking them, with their high,
+covering shields, their great bows, their javelins and armor.
+
+“They passed; we doubled. We built no fires that night--and we ought to
+have turned the pony loose, but we didn't. It carried my instruments,
+and ammunition, and I felt we were going to need the latter.
+
+“The next morning we caught sight of another band--or the same. We
+turned again. We stole through a tree-covered plain; we struck an
+ancient road. It led south, into the peaks again. We followed it. It
+brought us here.
+
+“It isn't, as you observe, the most comfortable of places. We struck
+across the hollow to the crevice--we knew nothing of the entrance
+you came through. The hollow was not pleasant, either. But it was
+penetrable, then.
+
+“We crossed. As we were about to enter the cleft there issued out of it
+a most unusual and disconcerting chorus of sounds--wailings, crashings,
+splinterings.”
+
+I started, shot a look at Dick; absorbed, he was drinking in Ventnor's
+every word.
+
+“So unusual, so--well, disconcerting is the best word I can think of,
+that we were not encouraged to proceed. Also the peculiar unpleasantness
+of the hollow was increasing rapidly.
+
+“We made the best time we could back to the fortress. And when next
+we tried to go through the hollow, to search for another outlet--we
+couldn't. You know why,” he ended abruptly.
+
+“But men in ancient armor. Men like those of Darius.” Dick broke the
+silence that had followed this amazing recital. “It's incredible!”
+
+“Yes,” agreed Ventnor, “isn't it. But there they were. Of course, I
+don't maintain that they WERE relics of Darius's armies. They might have
+been of Xerxes before him--or of Artaxerxes after him. But there they
+certainly were, Drake, living, breathing replicas of exceedingly ancient
+Persians.
+
+“Why, they might have been the wall carvings on the tomb of Khosroes
+come to life. I mention Darius because he fits in with the most
+plausible hypothesis. When Alexander the Great smashed his empire he did
+it rather thoroughly. There wasn't much sympathy for the vanquished
+in those days. And it's entirely conceivable that a city or two in
+Alexander's way might have gathered up a fleeting regiment or so for
+protection and have decided not to wait for him, but to hunt for cover.
+
+“Naturally, they would have gone into the almost inaccessible heart of
+the high ranges. There is nothing impossible in the theory that they
+found shelter at last up here. As long as history runs this has been
+a well-nigh unknown land. Penetrating some mountain-guarded, easily
+defended valley they might have decided to settle down for a time, have
+rebuilt a city, raised a government; laying low, in a sentence, waiting
+for the storm to blow over.
+
+“Why did they stay? Well, they might have found the new life more
+pleasant than the old. And they might have been locked in their valley
+by some accident--landslides, rockfalls sealing up the entrance. There
+are a dozen reasonable possibilities.”
+
+“But those who hunted you weren't locked in,” objected Drake.
+
+“No,” Ventnor grinned ruefully. “No, they certainly weren't. Maybe we
+drifted into their preserves by a way they don't know. Maybe they've
+found another way out. I'm sure I don't know. But I DO know what I saw.”
+
+“The noises, Martin,” I said, for his description of these had been the
+description of those we had heard in the blue valley. “Have you heard
+them since?”
+
+“Yes,” he answered, hesitating oddly.
+
+“And you think those--those soldiers you saw are still hunting for you?”
+
+“Haven't a doubt of it,” he replied more cheerfully. “They didn't look
+like chaps who would give up a hunt easily--at least not a hunt for such
+novel, interesting, and therefore desirable and delectable game as we
+must have appeared to them.”
+
+“Martin,” I said decisively, “where's your pony? We'll try the hollow
+again, at once. There's Ruth--and we'd never be able to hold back such
+numbers as you've described.”
+
+“You feel strong enough to try it?”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. METAL WITH A BRAIN
+
+The eagerness, the relief in his voice betrayed the tension, the anxiety
+which until now he had hidden so well; and hot shame burned me for my
+shrinking, my dread of again passing through that haunted vale.
+
+“I certainly DO.” I was once more master of myself. “Drake--don't you
+agree?”
+
+“Sure,” he replied. “Sure. I'll look after Ruth--er--I mean Miss
+Ventnor.”
+
+The glint of amusement in Ventnor's eyes at this faded abruptly; his
+face grew somber.
+
+“Wait,” he said. “I carried away some--some exhibits from the crevice of
+the noises, Goodwin.”
+
+“What kind of exhibits?” I asked, eagerly.
+
+“Put 'em where they'd be safe,” he continued. “I've an idea they're far
+more curious than our armored men--and of far more importance. At any
+rate, we must take them with us.
+
+“Go with Ruth, you and Drake, and look at them. And bring them back with
+the pony. Then we'll make a start. A few minutes more probably won't
+make much difference--but hurry.”
+
+He turned back to his watch. Ordering Chiu-Ming to stay with him I
+followed Ruth and Drake down the ruined stairway. At the bottom she came
+to me, laid little hands on my shoulders.
+
+“Walter,” she breathed, “I'm frightened. I'm so frightened I'm afraid to
+tell even Mart. He doesn't like them, either, these little things you're
+going to see. He likes them so little that he's afraid to let me know
+how little he does like them.”
+
+“But what are they? What's to fear about them?” asked Drake.
+
+“See what you think!” She led us slowly, almost reluctantly toward the
+rear of the fortress. “They lay in a little heap at the mouth of the
+cleft where we heard the noises. Martin picked them up and dropped them
+in a sack before we ran through the hollow.
+
+“They're grotesque and they're almost CUTE, and they make me feel as
+though they were the tiniest tippy-tip of the claw of some incredibly
+large cat just stealing around the corner, a terrible cat, a cat as big
+as a mountain,” she ended breathlessly.
+
+We climbed through the crumbling masonry into a central, open court.
+Here a clear spring bubbled up in a ruined and choked stone basin; close
+to the ancient well was their pony, contentedly browsing in the thick
+grass that grew around it. From one of its hampers Ruth took a large
+cloth bag.
+
+“To carry them,” she said, and trembled.
+
+We passed through what had once been a great door into another chamber
+larger than that we had just left; and it was in better preservation,
+the ceiling unbroken, the light dim after the blazing sun of the court.
+Near its center she halted us.
+
+Before me ran a two-feet-wide ragged crack, splitting the floor and
+dropping down into black depths. Beyond was an expanse of smooth
+flagging, almost clear of debris.
+
+Drake gave a low whistle. I followed his pointing finger. In the wall
+at the end whirled two enormous dragon shapes, cut in low relief. Their
+gigantic wings, their monstrous coils, covered the nearly unbroken
+surface, and these CHIMERAE were the shapes upon the upthrust blocks of
+the haunted roadway.
+
+In Ruth's gaze I read a nameless fear, a half shuddering fascination.
+
+But she was not looking at the cavern dragons.
+
+Her gaze was fixed upon what at my first glance seemed to be a raised
+and patterned circle in the dust-covered floor. Not more than a foot in
+width, it shone wanly with a pale, metallic bluish luster, as though,
+I thought, it had been recently polished. Compared with the wall's
+tremendous winged figures this floor design was trivial, ludicrously
+insignificant. What could there be about it to stamp that dread upon
+Ruth's face?
+
+I leaped the crevice; Dick joined me. Now I could see that the ring was
+not continuous. Its broken circle was made of sharply edged cubes about
+an inch in height, separated from each other with mathematical exactness
+by another inch of space. I counted them--there were nineteen.
+
+Almost touching them with their bases were an equal number of pyramids,
+of tetrahedrons, as sharply angled and of similar length. They lay on
+their sides with tips pointing starlike to six spheres clustered like
+a conventionalized five petaled primrose in the exact center. Five of
+these spheres--the petals--were, I roughly calculated, about an inch and
+a half in diameter, the ball they enclosed larger by almost an inch.
+
+So orderly was their arrangement, so much like a geometrical design
+nicely done by some clever child that I hesitated to disturb it. I bent,
+and stiffened, the first touch of dread upon me.
+
+For within the ring, close to the clustering globes, was a miniature
+replica of the giant track in the poppied valley!
+
+It stood out from the dust with the same hint of crushing force, the
+same die cut sharpness, the same METALLIC suggestion--and pointing
+toward the globes were the claw marks of the four spreading star points.
+
+I reached down and picked up one of the pyramids. It seemed to cling
+to the rock; it was with effort that I wrenched it away. It gave to the
+touch a slight sensation of warmth--how can I describe it?--a warmth
+that was living.
+
+I weighed it in my hand. It was oddly heavy, twice the weight, I should
+say, of platinum. I drew out a glass and examined it. Decidedly the
+pyramid was metallic, but of finest, almost silken texture--and I could
+not place it among any of the known metals. It certainly was none I
+had ever seen; yet it was as certainly metal. It was striated--slender
+filaments radiating from tiny, dully lustrous points within the polished
+surface.
+
+And suddenly I had the weird feeling that each of these points was an
+eye, peering up at me, scrutinizing me. There came a startled cry from
+Dick.
+
+“Look at the ring!”
+
+The ring was in motion!
+
+Faster the cubes moved; faster the circle revolved; the pyramids raised
+themselves, stood bolt upright on their square bases; the six rolling
+spheres touched them, joined the spinning, and with sleight-of-hand
+suddenness the ring drew together; its units coalesced, cubes and
+pyramids and globes threading with a curious suggestion of ferment.
+
+With the same startling abruptness there stood erect, where but a moment
+before they had seethed, a little figure, grotesque; a weirdly humorous,
+a vaguely terrifying foot-high shape, squared and angled and pointed and
+ANIMATE--as though a child should build from nursery blocks a fantastic
+shape which abruptly is filled with throbbing life.
+
+A troll from the kindergarten! A kobold of the toys!
+
+Only for a second it stood, then began swiftly to change, melting
+with quicksilver quickness from one outline into another as square
+and triangle and spheres changed places. Their shiftings were like the
+transformations one sees within a kaleidoscope. And in each vanishing
+form was the suggestion of unfamiliar harmonies, of a subtle, a
+transcendental geometric art as though each swift shaping were a symbol,
+a WORD--
+
+Euclid's problems given volition!
+
+Geometry endowed with consciousness!
+
+It ceased. Then the cubes drew one upon the other until they formed
+a pedestal nine inches high; up this pillar rolled the larger globe,
+balanced itself upon the top; the five spheres followed it, clustered
+like a ring just below it. The other cubes raced up, clicked two by two
+on the outer arc of each of the five balls; at the ends of these twin
+blocks a pyramid took its place, tipping each with a point.
+
+The Lilliputian fantasy was now a pedestal of cubes surmounted by a ring
+of globes from which sprang a star of five arms.
+
+The spheres began to revolve. Faster and faster they spun around the
+base of the crowning globe; the arms became a disc upon which tiny
+brilliant sparks appeared, clustered, vanished only to reappear in
+greater number.
+
+The troll swept toward me. It GLIDED. The finger of panic touched me. I
+sprang aside, and swift as light it followed, seemed to poise itself to
+leap.
+
+“Drop it!” It was Ruth's cry.
+
+But, before I could let fall the pyramid I had forgotten was in my hand,
+the little figure touched me and a paralyzing shock ran through me. My
+fingers clenched, locked. I stood, muscle and nerve bound, unable to
+move.
+
+The little figure paused. Its whirling disc shifted from the horizontal
+plane on which it spun. It was as though it cocked its head to look up
+at me--and again I had the sense of innumerable eyes peering at me. It
+did not seem menacing--its attitude was inquisitive, waiting; almost as
+though it had asked for something and wondered why I did not let it have
+it. The shock still held me rigid, although a tingle in every nerve told
+me of returning force.
+
+The disc tilted back to place, bent toward me again. I heard a shout;
+heard a bullet strike the pigmy that now clearly menaced; heard the
+bullet ricochet without the slightest effect upon it. Dick leaped beside
+me, raised a foot and kicked at the thing. There was a flash of light
+and upon the instant he crashed down as though struck by a giant hand,
+lay sprawling and inert upon the floor.
+
+There was a scream from Ruth; there was softly sibilant rustling all
+about her. I saw her leap the crevice, drop on her knees beside Drake.
+
+There was movement on the flagging where she stood. A score or more of
+faintly shining, bluish shapes were marching there--pyramids and cubes
+and spheres like those forming the shape that stood before me. There was
+a curious sharp tang of ozone in the air, a perceptible tightening as of
+electrical tension.
+
+They swept to the edge of the fissure, swam together, and there, hanging
+half over the gap was a bridge, half spanning it, a weird and fairy arch
+made up of alternate cube and angle. The shape at my feet disintegrated;
+resolved itself into units that raced over to the beckoning span.
+
+At the hither side of the crack they clicked into place, even as had the
+others. Before me now was a bridge complete except for the one arc near
+the middle where an angled gap marred it.
+
+I felt the little object I held pulse within my hand, striving to
+escape. I dropped it. The tiny shape swept to the bridge, ascended
+it--dropped into the gap.
+
+The arch was complete--hanging in one flying span over the depths!
+
+Upon it, over it, as though they had but awaited this completion, rolled
+the six globes. And as they dropped to the farther side the end of the
+bridge nearest me raised itself in air, curved itself like a scorpion's
+tail, drew itself into a closer circled arc, and dropped upon the floor
+beyond.
+
+Again the sibilant rustling--and cubes and pyramids and spheres were
+gone.
+
+Nerves tingling slowly back to life, mazed in absolute bewilderment,
+my gaze sought Drake. He was sitting up, feebly, his head supported by
+Ruth's hands.
+
+“Goodwin!” he whispered. “What--what were they?”
+
+“Metal,” I said--it was the only word to which my whirling mind could
+cling--“metal--”
+
+“Metal!” he echoed. “These things metal? Metal--ALIVE AND THINKING!”
+
+Suddenly he was silent, his face a page on which, visibly, dread
+gathered slowly and ever deeper.
+
+And as I looked at Ruth, white-faced, and at him, I knew that my own was
+as pallid, as terror-stricken as theirs.
+
+“They were such LITTLE THINGS,” muttered Drake. “Such little
+things--bits of metal--little globes and pyramids and cubes--just little
+THINGS.”
+
+“Babes! Only babes!” It was Ruth--“BABES!”
+
+“Bits of metal”--Dick's gaze sought mine, held it--“and they looked for
+each other, they worked with each other--THINKINGLY, CONSCIOUSLY--they
+were deliberate, purposeful--little things--and with the force of a
+score of dynamos--living, THINKING--”
+
+“Don't!” Ruth laid white hands over his eyes. “Don't--don't YOU be
+frightened!”
+
+“Frightened?” he echoed. “I'M not afraid--yes, I AM afraid--”
+
+He arose, stiffly--and stumbled toward me.
+
+Afraid? Drake afraid. Well--so was I. Bitterly, TERRIBLY afraid.
+
+For what we had beheld in the dusk of that dragoned, ruined chamber was
+outside all experience, beyond all knowledge or dream of science. Not
+their shapes--that was nothing. Not even that, being metal, they had
+moved.
+
+But that being metal, they had moved consciously, thoughtfully,
+deliberately.
+
+They were metal things with--MINDS!
+
+That--that was the incredible, the terrifying thing. That--and their
+power.
+
+Thor compressed within Hop-o'-my-thumb--and thinking. The lightnings
+incarnate in metal minacules--and thinking.
+
+The inert, the immobile, given volition, movement,
+cognoscence--thinking.
+
+Metal with a brain!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. THE SMITING THING
+
+Silently we looked at each other, and silently we passed out of the
+courtyard. The dread was heavy upon me. The twilight was stealing upon
+the close-clustered peaks. Another hour, and their amethyst-and-purple
+mantles would drop upon them; snowfields and glaciers sparkle out in
+irised beauty; nightfall.
+
+As I gazed upon them I wondered to what secret place within their
+brooding immensities the little metal mysteries had fled. And to what
+myriads, it might be, of their kind? And these hidden hordes--of what
+shapes were they? Of what powers? Small like these, or--or--
+
+Quick on the screen of my mind flashed two pictures, side by side--the
+little four-rayed print in the great dust of the crumbling ruin and its
+colossal twin on the breast of the poppied valley.
+
+I turned aside, crept through the shattered portal and looked over the
+haunted hollow.
+
+Unbelieving, I rubbed my eyes; then leaped to the very brim of the bowl.
+
+A lark had risen from the roof of one of the shattered heaps and had
+flown caroling up into the shadowy sky.
+
+A flock of the little willow warblers flung themselves across the
+valley, scolding and gossiping; a hare sat upright in the middle of the
+ancient roadway.
+
+The valley itself lay serenely under the ambering light, smiling,
+peaceful--emptied of horror!
+
+I dropped over the side, walked cautiously down the road up which but
+an hour or so before we had struggled so desperately; paced farther and
+farther with an increasing confidence and a growing wonder.
+
+Gone was that soul of loneliness; vanished the whirlpool of despair that
+had striven to drag us down to death.
+
+The bowl was nothing but a quiet, smiling lovely little hollow in the
+hills. I looked back. Even the ruins had lost their sinister shape; were
+time-worn, crumbling piles--nothing more.
+
+I saw Ruth and Drake run out upon the ledge and beckon me; made my way
+back to them, running.
+
+“It's all right,” I shouted. “The place is all right.”
+
+I stumbled up the side; joined them.
+
+“It's empty,” I cried. “Get Martin and Chiu-Ming quick! While the way's
+open--”
+
+A rifle-shot rang out above us; another and another. From the portal
+scampered Chiu-Ming, his robe tucked up about his knees.
+
+“They come!” he gasped. “They come!”
+
+There was a flashing of spears high up the winding mountain path. Down
+it was pouring an avalanche of men. I caught the glint of helmets and
+corselets. Those in the van were mounted, galloping two abreast upon
+sure-footed mountain ponies. Their short swords, lifted high, flickered.
+
+After the horsemen swarmed foot soldiers, a forest of shining points and
+dully gleaming pikes above them. Clearly to us came their battlecries.
+
+Again Ventnor's rifle cracked. One of the foremost riders went down;
+another stumbled over him, fell. The rush was checked for an instant,
+milling upon the road.
+
+“Dick,” I cried, “rush Ruth over to the tunnel mouth. We'll follow. We
+can hold them there. I'll get Martin. Chiu-Ming, after the pony, quick.”
+
+I pushed the two over the rim of the hollow. Side by side the Chinaman
+and I ran back through the gateway. I pointed to the animal and rushed
+back into the fortress.
+
+“Quick, Mart!” I shouted up the shattered stairway. “We can get through
+the hollow. Ruth and Drake are on their way to the break we came
+through. Hurry!”
+
+“All right. Just a minute,” he called.
+
+I heard him empty his magazine with almost machine-gun quickness.
+There was a short pause, and down the broken steps he leaped, gray eyes
+blazing.
+
+“The pony?” He ran beside me toward the portal. “All my ammunition is on
+him.”
+
+“Chiu-Ming's taking care of that,” I gasped.
+
+We darted out of the gateway. A good five hundred yards away were Ruth
+and Drake, running straight to the green tunnel's mouth. Between them
+and us was Chiu-Ming urging on the pony.
+
+As we sped after him I looked back. The horsemen had recovered, were
+now a scant half-mile from where the road swept past the fortress. I saw
+that with their swords the horsemen bore great bows. A little cloud of
+arrows sparkled from them; fell far short.
+
+“Don't look back,” grunted Ventnor. “Stretch yourself, Walter. There's a
+surprise coming. Hope to God I judged the time right.”
+
+We turned off the ruined way; raced over the sward.
+
+“If it looks as though--we can't make it,” he panted, “YOU beat it after
+the rest. I'll try to hold 'em until you get into the tunnel. Never do
+for 'em to get Ruth.”
+
+“Right.” My own breathing was growing labored, “WE'LL hold them. Drake
+can take care of Ruth.”
+
+“Good boy,” he said. “I wouldn't have asked you. It probably means
+death.”
+
+“Very well,” I gasped, irritated. “But why borrow trouble?”
+
+He reached out, touched me.
+
+“You're right, Walter,” he grinned. “It does--seem--like carrying
+coals--to Newcastle.”
+
+There was a thunderous booming behind us; a shattering crash. A cloud of
+smoke and dust hung over the northern end of the ruined fortress.
+
+It lifted swiftly, and I saw that the whole side of the structure had
+fallen, littering the road with its fragments. Scattered prone among
+these were men and horses; others staggered, screaming. On the farther
+side of this stony dike our pursuers were held like rushing waters
+behind a sudden fallen tree.
+
+“Timed to a second!” cried Ventnor. “Hold 'em for a while. Fuses and
+dynamite. Blew out the whole side, right on 'em, by the Lord!”
+
+On we fled. Chiu-Ming was now well in advance; Ruth and Dick less than
+half a mile from the opening of the green tunnel. I saw Drake stop,
+raise his rifle, empty it before him, and, holding Ruth by the hand,
+race back toward us.
+
+Even as he turned, the vine-screened entrance through which we had come,
+through which we had thought lay safety, streamed other armored men. We
+were outflanked.
+
+“To the fissure!” shouted Ventnor. Drake heard, for he changed
+his course to the crevice at whose mouth Ruth had said the--Little
+Things--had lain.
+
+After him streaked Chiu-Ming, urging on the pony. Shouting out of the
+tunnel, down over the lip of the bowl, leaped the soldiers. We dropped
+upon our knees, sent shot after shot into them. They fell back,
+hesitated. We sprang up, sped on.
+
+All too short was the check, but once more we held them--and again.
+
+Now Ruth and Dick were a scant fifty yards from the crevice. I saw him
+stop, push her from him toward it. She shook her head.
+
+Now Chiu-Ming was with them. Ruth sprang to the pony, lifted from its
+back a rifle. Then into the mass of their pursuers Drake and she poured
+a fusillade. They huddled, wavered, broke for cover.
+
+“A chance!” gasped Ventnor.
+
+Behind us was a wolflike yelping. The first pack had re-formed; had
+crossed the barricade the dynamite had made; was rushing upon us.
+
+I ran as I had never known I could. Over us whined the bullets from
+the covering guns. Close were we now to the mouth of the fissure. If
+we could but reach it. Close, close were our pursuers, too--the arrows
+closer.
+
+“No use!” said Ventnor. “We can't make it. Meet 'em from the front.
+Drop--and shoot.”
+
+We threw ourselves down, facing them. There came a triumphant shouting.
+And in that strange sharpening of the senses that always goes hand
+in hand with deadly peril, that is indeed nature's summoning of every
+reserve to meet that peril, my eyes took them in with photographic
+nicety--the linked mail, lacquered blue and scarlet, of the horsemen;
+brown, padded armor of the footmen; their bows and javelins and short
+bronze swords, their pikes and shields; and under their round helmets
+their cruel, bearded faces--white as our own where the black beards did
+not cover them; their fierce and mocking eyes.
+
+The springs of ancient Persia's long dead power, these. Men of Xerxes's
+ruthless, world-conquering hordes; the lustful, ravening wolves of
+Darius whom Alexander scattered--in this world of ours twenty centuries
+beyond their time!
+
+Swiftly, accurately, even as I scanned them, we had been drilling into
+them. They advanced deliberately, heedless of their fallen. Their arrows
+had ceased to fly. I wondered why, for now we were well within their
+range. Had they orders to take us alive--at whatever cost to themselves?
+
+“I've got only about ten cartridges left, Martin,” I told him.
+
+“We've saved Ruth anyway,” he said. “Drake ought to be able to hold that
+hole in the wall. He's got lots of ammunition on the pony. But they've
+got us.”
+
+Another wild shouting; down swept the pack.
+
+We leaped to our feet, sent our last bullets into them; stood ready,
+rifles clubbed to meet the rush. I heard Ruth scream--
+
+What was the matter with the armored men? Why had they halted? What was
+it at which they were glaring over our heads? And why had the rifle fire
+of Ruth and Drake ceased so abruptly?
+
+Simultaneously we turned.
+
+Within the black background of the fissure stood a shape, an apparition,
+a woman--beautiful, awesome, incredible!
+
+She was tall, standing there swathed from chin to feet in clinging veils
+of pale amber, she seemed taller even than tall Drake. Yet it was not
+her height that sent through me the thrill of awe, of half incredulous
+terror which, relaxing my grip, let my smoking rifle drop to earth; nor
+was it that about her proud head a cloud of shining tresses swirled
+and pennoned like a misty banner of woven copper flames--no, nor that
+through her veils her body gleamed faint radiance.
+
+It was her eyes--her great, wide eyes whose clear depths were like
+pools of living star fires. They shone from her white face--not
+phosphorescent, not merely lucent and light reflecting, but as though
+they themselves were SOURCES of the cold white flames of far stars--and
+as calm as those stars themselves.
+
+And in that face, although as yet I could distinguish nothing but the
+eyes, I sensed something unearthly.
+
+“God!” whispered Ventnor. “What IS she?”
+
+The woman stepped from the crevice. Not fifty feet from her were Ruth
+and Drake and Chiu-Ming, their rigid attitudes revealing the same shock
+of awe that had momentarily paralyzed me.
+
+She looked at them, beckoned them. I saw the two walk toward her,
+Chiu-Ming hang back. The great eyes fell upon Ventnor and myself. She
+raised a hand, motioned us to approach.
+
+I turned. There stood the host that had poured down the mountain road,
+horsemen, spearsmen, pikemen--a full thousand of them. At my right were
+the scattered company that had come from the tunnel entrance, threescore
+or more.
+
+There seemed a spell upon them. They stood in silence, like automatons,
+only their fiercely staring eyes showing that they were alive.
+
+“Quick,” breathed Ventnor.
+
+We ran toward her who had checked death even while its jaws were closing
+upon us.
+
+Before we had gone half-way, as though our flight had broken whatever
+bonds had bound them, a clamor arose from the host; a wild shouting,
+a clanging of swords on shields. I shot a glance behind. They were in
+motion, advancing slowly, hesitatingly as yet--but I knew that soon that
+hesitation would pass; that they would sweep down upon us, engulf us.
+
+“To the crevice,” I shouted to Drake. He paid no heed to me, nor did
+Ruth--their gaze fastened upon the swathed woman.
+
+Ventnor's hand shot out, gripped my shoulder, halted me. She had thrown
+up her head. The cloudy METALLIC hair billowed as though wind had blown
+it.
+
+From the lifted throat came a low, a vibrant cry; harmonious, weirdly
+disquieting, golden and sweet--and laden with the eery, minor wailings
+of the blue valley's night, the dragoned chamber.
+
+Before the cry had ceased there poured with incredible swiftness out of
+the crevice score upon score of the metal things. The fissures vomited
+them!
+
+Globes and cubes and pyramids--not small like those of the ruins, but
+shapes all of four feet high, dully lustrous, and deep within that
+luster the myriads of tiny points of light like unwinking, staring eyes.
+
+They swirled, eddied and formed a barricade between us and the armored
+men.
+
+Down upon them poured a shower of arrows from the soldiers. I heard the
+shouts of their captains; they rushed. They had courage--those men--yes!
+
+Again came the woman's cry--golden, peremptory.
+
+Sphere and block and pyramid ran together, seemed to seethe. I had
+again that sense of a quicksilver melting. Up from them thrust a thick
+rectangular column. Eight feet in width and twenty feet high, it shaped
+itself. Out from its left side, from right side, sprang arms--fearful
+arms that grew and grew as globe and cube and angle raced up the
+column's side and clicked into place each upon, each after, the other.
+With magical quickness the arms lengthened.
+
+Before us stood a monstrous shape; a geometric prodigy. A shining angled
+pillar that, though rigid, immobile, seemed to crouch, be instinct with
+living force striving to be unleashed.
+
+Two great globes surmounted it--like the heads of some two-faced Janus
+of an alien world.
+
+At the left and right the knobbed arms, now fully fifty feet in
+length, writhed, twisted, straightened; flexing themselves in grotesque
+imitation of a boxer. And at the end of each of the six arms the spheres
+were clustered thick, studded with the pyramids--again in gigantic,
+awful, parody of the spiked gloves of those ancient gladiators who
+fought for imperial Nero.
+
+For an instant it stood here, preening, testing itself like an
+athlete--a chimera, amorphous yet weirdly symmetric--under the darkening
+sky, in the green of the hollow, the armored hosts frozen before it--
+
+And then--it struck!
+
+Out flashed two of the arms, with a glancing motion, with appalling
+force. They sliced into the close-packed forward ranks of the armored
+men; cut out of them two great gaps.
+
+Sickened, I saw fragments of man and horse fly. Another arm javelined
+from its place like a flying snake, clicked at the end of another,
+became a hundred-foot chain which swirled like a flail through the
+huddling mass. Down upon a knot of the soldiers with a straight-forward
+blow drove a third arm, driving through them like a giant punch.
+
+All that host which had driven us from the ruins threw down sword,
+spear, and pike; fled shrieking. The horsemen spurred their mounts,
+riding heedless over the footmen who fled with them.
+
+The Smiting Thing seemed to watch them go with--AMUSEMENT!
+
+Before they could cover a hundred yards it had disintegrated. I heard
+the little wailing sounds--then behind the fleeing men, close behind
+them, rose the angled pillar; into place sprang the flexing arms, and
+again it took its toll of them.
+
+They scattered, running singly, by twos, in little groups, for the sides
+of the valley. They were like rats scampering in panic over the bottom
+of a great green bowl. And like a monstrous cat the shape played with
+them--yes, PLAYED.
+
+It melted once more--took new form. Where had been pillar and flailing
+arms was now a tripod thirty feet high, its legs alternate globe and
+cube and upon its apex a wide and spinning ring of sparkling spheres.
+Out from the middle of this ring stretched a tentacle--writhing,
+undulating like a serpent of steel, four score yards at least in length.
+
+At its end cube, globe and pyramid had mingled to form a huge trident.
+With the three long prongs of this trident the thing struck, swiftly,
+with fearful precision--JOYOUSLY--tining those who fled, forking them,
+tossing them from its points high in air.
+
+It was, I think, that last touch of sheer horror, the playfulness of the
+Smiting Thing, that sent my dry tongue to the roof of my terror-parched
+mouth, and held open with monstrous fascination eyes that struggled to
+close.
+
+Ever the armored men fled from it, and ever was it swifter than they,
+teetering at their heels on its tripod legs.
+
+From half its length the darting snake streamed red rain.
+
+I heard a sigh from Ruth; wrested my gaze from the hollow; turned. She
+lay fainting in Drake's arms.
+
+Beside the two the swathed woman stood, looking out upon that slaughter,
+calm and still, shrouded with an unearthly tranquillity--viewing it, it
+came to me, with eyes impersonal, cold, indifferent as the untroubled
+stars which look down upon hurricane and earthquake in this world of
+ours.
+
+There was a rushing of many feet at our left; a wail from Chiu-Ming.
+Were they maddened by fear, driven by despair, determined to slay before
+they themselves were slain? I do not know. But those who still lived of
+the men from the tunnel mouth were charging us.
+
+They clustered close, their shields held before them. They had no bows,
+these men. They moved swiftly down upon us in silence--swords and pikes
+gleaming.
+
+The Smiting Thing rocked toward us, the metal tentacle straining out
+like a rigid, racing serpent, flying to cut between its weird mistress
+and those who menaced her.
+
+I heard Chiu-Ming scream; saw him throw up his hands, cover his
+eyes--run straight upon the pikes!
+
+“Chiu-Ming!” I shouted. “Chiu-Ming! This way!”
+
+I ran toward him. Before I had gone five paces Ventnor flashed by me,
+revolver spitting. I saw a spear thrown. It struck the Chinaman squarely
+in the breast. He tottered--fell upon his knees.
+
+Even as he dropped, the giant flail swept down upon the soldiers. It
+swept through them like a scythe through ripe grain. It threw them,
+broken and torn, far toward the valley's sloping sides. It left only
+fragments that bore no semblance to men.
+
+Ventnor was at Chiu-Ming's head; I dropped beside him. There was a
+crimson froth upon his lips.
+
+“I thought that Shin-Je was about to slay us,” he whispered. “Fear
+blinded me.”
+
+His head dropped; his body quivered, lay still.
+
+We arose, looked about us dazedly. At the side of the crevice stood the
+woman, her gaze resting upon Drake, his arms about Ruth, her head hidden
+on his breast.
+
+The valley was empty--save for the huddled heaps that dotted it.
+
+High up on the mountain path a score of figures crept, all that were
+left of those who but a little before had streamed down to take us
+captive or to slay. High up in the darkening heavens the lammergeiers,
+the winged scavengers of the Himalayas, were gathering.
+
+The woman lifted her hand, beckoned us once more. Slowly we walked
+toward her, stood before her. The great clear eyes searched us--but no
+more intently than our own wondering eyes did her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. NORHALA OF THE LIGHTNINGS
+
+We looked upon a vision of loveliness such, I think, as none has beheld
+since Trojan Helen was a maid. At first all I could note were the eyes,
+clear as rain-washed April skies, crystal clear as some secret spring
+sacred to crescented Diana. Their wide gray irises were flecked with
+golden amber and sapphire--flecks that shone like clusters of little
+aureate and azure stars.
+
+Then with a strange thrill of wonder I saw that these tiny
+constellations were not in the irises alone; that they clustered even
+within the pupils--deep within them, like far-flung stars in the depths
+of velvety, midnight heavens.
+
+Whence had come those cold fires that had flared from them, I
+wondered--more menacing, far more menacing, in their cold tranquillity
+than the hot flames of wrath? These eyes were not perilous--no. Calm
+they were and still--yet in them a shadow of interest flickered; a ghost
+of friendliness smiled.
+
+Above them were level, delicately penciled brows of bronze. The lips
+were coral crimson and--asleep. Sweet were those lips as ever master
+painter, dreaming his dream of the very soul of woman's sweetness,
+saw in vision and limned upon his canvas--and asleep, nor wistful for
+awakening.
+
+A proud, straight nose; a broad low brow, and over it the masses of the
+tendriling tresses--tawny, lustrous topaz, cloudy, METALLIC. Like spun
+silk of ruddy copper; and misty as the wisps of cloud that Soul'tze,
+Goddess of Sleep, sets in the skies of dawn to catch the wandering
+dreams of lovers.
+
+Down from the wondrous face melted the rounded column of her throat
+to merge into exquisite curves of shoulders and breasts, half revealed
+beneath the swathing veils.
+
+But upon that face, within her eyes, kissing her red lips and clothing
+her breasts, was something unearthly.
+
+Something that came straight out of the still mysteries of the
+star-filled spaces; out of the ordered, the untroubled, the illimitable
+void.
+
+A passionless spirit that watched over the human passion in the scarlet
+mouth, in every slumbering, sculptured line of her--guarding her against
+its awakening.
+
+Twilight calm dropping down from the sun sleep to still the restless
+mountain tarn. Ishtar dreamlessly asleep within Nirvana.
+
+Something not of this world we know--and yet of it as the winds of the
+Cosmos are to the summer breeze, the ocean to the wave, the lightnings
+to the glowworm.
+
+“She isn't--human,” I heard Ventnor whispering at my ear. “Look at her
+eyes; look at the skin of her--”
+
+Her skin was white as milk of pearls; gossamer fine, silken and creamy;
+translucent as though a soft brilliancy dwelt within it. Beside it
+Ruth's fair skin was like some sun-and-wind-roughened country lass's to
+Titania's.
+
+She studied us as though she were seeing for the first time beings of
+her own kind. She spoke--and her voice was elfin distant, chimingly
+sweet like hidden little golden bells; filled with that tranquil, far
+off spirit that was part of her--as though indeed a tiny golden chime
+should ring out from the silences, speak for them, find tongues for
+them. The words were hesitating, halting as though the lips that uttered
+them found speech strange--as strange as the clear eyes found our
+images.
+
+And the words were Persian--purest, most ancient Persian.
+
+“I am Norhala,” the golden voice chimed forth, whispered down into
+silence. “I am Norhala.”
+
+She shook her head impatiently. A hand stole forth from beneath her
+veils, slender, long-fingered with nails like rosy pearls; above the
+wrist was coiled a golden dragon with wicked little crimson eyes. The
+slender white hand touched Ruth's head, turned it until the strange,
+flecked orbs looked directly into the misty ones of blue.
+
+Long they gazed--and deep. Then she who had named herself Norhala thrust
+out a finger, touched the tear that hung upon Ruth's curled lashes,
+regarded it wonderingly.
+
+Something of recognition, of memory, seemed to awaken within her.
+
+“You are--troubled?” she asked with that halting effort.
+
+Ruth shook her head.
+
+“THEY--do not trouble you?”
+
+She pointed to the huddled heaps strewing the hollow. And then I saw
+whence the light which had streamed from her great eyes came. For the
+little azure and golden stars paled, trembled, then flashed out like
+galaxies of tiny, clustered silver suns.
+
+From that weird radiance Ruth shrank, affrighted.
+
+“No--no,” she gasped. “I weep for--HIM.”
+
+She pointed where Chiu-Ming lay, a brown blotch at the edge of the
+shattered men.
+
+“For--him?” There was puzzlement in the faint voice. “For--that? But
+why?”
+
+She looked at Chiu-Ming--and I knew that to her the sight of the
+crumpled form carried no recognition of the human, nothing of kin to
+her. There was a faint wonder in her eyes, no longer light-filled, when
+at last she turned back to us. Long she considered us.
+
+“Now,” she broke the silence, “now something stirs within me that it
+seems has long been sleeping. It bids me take you with me. Come!”
+
+Abruptly she turned from us, glided to the crevice. We looked at each
+other, seeking council, decision.
+
+“Chiu-Ming,” Drake spoke. “We can't leave him like that. At least let's
+cover him from the vultures.”
+
+“Come.” The woman had reached the mouth of the fissure.
+
+“I'm afraid! Oh, Martin--I'm afraid.” Ruth reached little trembling
+hands to her tall brother.
+
+“Come!” Norhala called again. There was an echo of harshness, a
+clanging, peremptory and inexorable, in the chiming.
+
+Ventnor shrugged his shoulders.
+
+“Come, then,” he said.
+
+With one last look at the Chinese, the lammergeiers already circling
+about him, we walked to the crevice. Norhala waited, silent, brooding
+until we passed her; then glided behind us.
+
+Before we had gone ten paces I saw that the place was no fissure. It
+was a tunnel, a passage hewn by human hands, its walls covered with the
+writhing dragon lines, its roof the mountain.
+
+The swathed woman swept by us. Swiftly we followed her. Far, far ahead
+was a wan gleaming. It quivered, a faintly shimmering, ghostly curtain,
+a full mile away.
+
+Now it was close; we passed through it and were out of the tunnel.
+Before us stretched a narrow gorge, a sword slash in the body of the
+towering giant under whose feet the tunnel crept. High above was the
+ribbon of the sky.
+
+The sides were dark, but it came to me that here were no trees, no
+verdure of any kind. Its floor was strewn with boulders, fantastically
+shaped, almost indistinguishable in the fast closing dark.
+
+Twin monoliths bulwarked the passage end; the gigantic stones were
+leaning, crumbling. Fissures radiated from the opening, like deep
+wrinkles in the rock, showing where earth warping, range pressure, had
+long been working to close this hewn way.
+
+“Stop,” Norhala's abrupt, golden note halted us; and again through the
+clear eyes I saw the white starshine flash.
+
+“It may be well--” She spoke as though to herself. “It may be well to
+close this way. It is not needed--”
+
+Her voice rang out again, vibrant, strangely disquieting, harmonious.
+Murmurous chanting it was at first, rhythmic and low; ripples and
+flutings, tones and progressions utterly unknown to me; unfamiliar,
+abrupt, and alien themes that kept returning, droppings of crystal-clear
+jewels of sound, golden tollings--and all ordered, mathematical,
+GEOMETRIC, even as had been the gestures of the shapes; Lilliputians of
+the ruins, Brobdignagian of the haunted hollow.
+
+What was it? I had it--IT WAS THOSE GESTURES TRANSFORMED INTO SOUND!
+
+There was a movement down by the tunnel mouth. It grew more rapid,
+seemed to vibrate with her song. Within the darkness there were
+little flashes; glimmerings of light began to come and go--like
+little awakenings of eyes of soft, jeweled flames, like giant gorgeous
+fireflies; flashes of cloudy amber, gleam of rose, sparkles of diamonds
+and of opals, of emeralds and of rubies--blinking, gleaming.
+
+A shimmering mist drew down around them--a swift and swirling mist.
+It thickened, was shot with slender shuttled threads like cobweb,
+coruscating strands of light.
+
+The shining threads grew thicker, pulsed, were spangled with tiny vivid
+sparklings. They ran together, condensed--and all this in an instant, in
+a tenth of the time it takes me to write it.
+
+From fiery mist and gemmed flashes came bolt upon bolt of lightning. The
+cliff face leaped out, a cataract of green flame. The fissures widened,
+the monoliths trembled, fell.
+
+In the wake of that dazzling brilliancy came utter blackness. I opened
+my blinded eyes; slowly the flecks of green fire cleared. A faint
+lambency still clung to the cliff. By it I saw that the tunnel's mouth
+had vanished, had been sealed--where it had gaped were only tons of
+shattered rock.
+
+Came a rushing past us as of great bodies; something grazed my hand,
+something whose touch was like that of warm metal--but metal throbbing
+with life. They rushed by--and whispered down into silence.
+
+“Come!” Norhala flitted ahead of us, a faintly luminous shape in the
+darkness. Swiftly we followed. I found Ruth beside me; felt her hand
+grip my wrist.
+
+“Walter,” she whispered, “Walter--she isn't human!”
+
+“Nonsense,” I muttered. “Nonsense, Ruth. What do you think she is--a
+goddess, a spirit of the Himalayas? She's as human as you or I.”
+
+“No.” Even in the darkness I could sense the stubborn shake of her curly
+head. “Not all human. Or how could she have commanded those things? Or
+have summoned the lightnings that blasted the tunnel's mouth? And her
+skin and hair--they're too WONDERFUL, Walter.
+
+“Why, she makes me look--look coarse. And the light that hovers about
+her--why, it is by that light we are making our way. And when she
+touched me--I--I glowed--all through.
+
+“Human, yes--but there is something else in her--something stronger than
+humanness, something that--makes it sleep!” she added astonishingly.
+
+The ground was level as a dancing floor. We followed the enigmatic
+glow--emanation, it seemed to me--from Norhala which was as a light
+for us to follow within the darkness. The high ribbon of sky had
+vanished--seemed to be overcast, for I could see no stars.
+
+Within the darkness I began again to sense faint movement; soft stirring
+all about us. I had the feeling that on each side and behind us moved an
+invisible host.
+
+“There's something moving all about us--going with us,” Ruth echoed my
+thought.
+
+“It's the wind,” I said, and paused--for there was no wind.
+
+From the blackness before us came a succession of curious, muffled
+clickings, like a smothered mitrailleuse. The luminescence that clothed
+Norhala brightened, deepening the darkness.
+
+“Cross!”
+
+She pointed into the void ahead; then, as we started forward, thrust
+out a hand to Ruth, held her back. Drake and Ventnor drew close to them,
+questioningly, anxious. But I stepped forward, out of the dim gleaming.
+
+Before me were two cubes; one I judged in that uncertain light to be
+six feet high, the other half its bulk. From them a shaft of pale-blue
+phosphorescence pierced the murk. They stood, the smaller pressed
+against the side of the larger, for all the world like a pair of immense
+nursery blocks, placed like steps by some giant child.
+
+As my eyes swept over them, I saw that the shining shaft was an unbroken
+span of cubes; not multi-arched like the Lilliputian bridge of the
+dragon chamber, but flat and running out over an abyss that gaped at
+my very feet. All of a hundred feet they stretched; a slender, lustrous
+girder crossing unguessed depths of gloom. From far, far below came the
+faint whisper of rushing waters.
+
+I faltered. For these were the blocks that had formed the body of the
+monster of the hollow, its flailing arms. The thing that had played so
+murderously with the armored men.
+
+And now had shaped itself into this anchored, quiescent bridge.
+
+“Do not fear.” It was the woman speaking, softly, as one would reassure
+a child. “Ascend. Cross. They obey me.”
+
+I stepped firmly upon the first block, climbed to the second. The
+span stretched, sharp edged, smooth, only a slender, shimmering line
+revealing where each great cube held fast to the other.
+
+I walked at first slowly, then with ever-increasing confidence, for up
+from the surface streamed a guiding, a holding force, that was like a
+host of little invisible hands, steadying me, keeping firm my feet. I
+looked down; the myriads of enigmatic eyes were staring, staring up
+at me from deep within. They fascinated me; I felt my pace slowing; a
+vertigo seized me. Resolutely I dragged my gaze up and ahead; marched
+on.
+
+From the depths came more clearly the sound of the waters. Now there
+were but a few feet more of the bridge before me. I reached its end,
+dropped my feet over, felt them touch a smaller cube, and descended.
+
+Over the span came Ventnor. He was leading his laden pony. He had
+bandaged its eyes so that it could not look upon the narrow way it was
+treading. And close behind, a hand resting reassuringly upon its flank,
+strode Drake, swinging along carelessly. The little beast ambled along
+serenely, sure-footed as all its mountain kind, and docile to darkness
+and guidance.
+
+Then, an arm about Ruth, floated Norhala. Now she was beside us; dropped
+her arm from Ruth; glided past us. On for a hundred yards or more we
+went, and then she drew us a little toward the unseen canyon wall.
+
+She stood before us, shielding us. One golden call she sent.
+
+I looked back into the darkness. Something like an enormous, dimly
+shimmering rod was raising itself. Higher it rose and higher. Now it
+stood, upright, a slender towering pillar, a gigantic slim figure whose
+tip pointed a full hundred feet in the air.
+
+Then slowly it inclined itself toward us; drew closer, closer to
+the ground; touched and lay there for an instant inert. Abruptly it
+vanished.
+
+But well I knew what I had seen. The span over which we had passed had
+raised itself even as had the baby bridge of the fortress; had lifted
+itself across the chasm and dropping itself upon the hither verge had
+disintegrated into its units; was following us.
+
+A bridge of metal that could build itself--and break itself. A thinking,
+conscious metal bridge! A metal bridge with volition--with mind--that
+was following us.
+
+There sighed from behind a soft, sustained wailing; rapidly it neared
+us. A wanly glimmering shape drew by; halted. It was like a rigid
+serpent cut from a gigantic square bar of cold blue steel.
+
+Its head was a pyramid, a tetrahedron; its length vanished in the
+further darkness. The head raised itself, the blocks that formed its
+neck separating into open wedges like a Brobdignagian replica of those
+jointed, fantastic, little painted reptiles the Japanese toy-makers cut
+from wood.
+
+It seemed to regard us--mockingly. The pointed head dropped--past us
+streamed the body. Upon it other pyramids clustered--like the spikes
+that guarded the back of the nightmare Brontosaurus. Its end came
+swiftly into sight--its tail another pyramid twin to its head.
+
+It FLIRTED by--gaily; vanished.
+
+I had thought the span must disintegrate to follow--and it did not
+need to! It could move as a COMPOSITE as well as in UNITS. Move
+intelligently, consciously--as the Smiting Thing had moved.
+
+“Come!” Norhala's command checked my thoughts; we fell in behind her.
+Looking up I caught the friendly sparkle of a star; knew the cleft was
+widening.
+
+The star points grew thicker. We stepped out into a valley small as
+that hollow from which we had fled; ringed like it with heaven-touching
+summits. I could see clearly. The place was suffused with a soft
+radiance as though into it the far, bright stars were pouring all their
+rays, filling it as a cup with their pale flames.
+
+It was luminous as the Alaskan valleys when on white arctic nights they
+are lighted, the Athabascans believe, by the gleaming spears of hunting
+gods. The walls of the valley seemed to be drawn back into infinite
+distances.
+
+The shimmering mists that had nimbused Norhala had vanished--or merging
+into the wan gleaming had become one with it.
+
+I stared straight at her, striving to clarify in my own clouded thought
+what it was that I had sensed as inhuman--never of OUR world or its
+peoples. Yet this conviction came not because of the light that had
+hovered about her, nor of her summonings of the lightnings; nor even
+of her control of those--things--which had smitten the armored men and
+spanned for us the abyss.
+
+All of that I was certain lay in the domain of the explicable, could be
+resolved into normality once the basic facts were gained.
+
+Suddenly, I knew. Side by side with what we term the human there dwelt
+within this woman an actual consciousness foreign to earth, passionless,
+at least as we know passion, ordered, mathematical--an emanation of the
+eternal law which guides the circling stars.
+
+This it was that had moved in the gestures which had evoked the
+lightnings. This it was that had spoken in the song which were those
+gestures transformed into sound. This it was that something greater than
+my consciousness knew and accepted.
+
+Something which shared, no--that reigned, serene and untroubled, upon
+the throne of her mind; something utterly UNCOMPREHENDING, utterly
+unconscious OF, cosmically blind TO all human emotion; that spread
+itself like a veil over her own consciousness; that PLATED her
+thought--that was a strange word--why had it come to me--something that
+had set its mark upon her like--like--the gigantic claw print on the
+poppied field, the little print of the dragoned hall.
+
+I caught at my mind, whirling I thought then in the grip of fantasy;
+strove by taking minute note of her to bring myself back to normal.
+
+Her veils had slipped from her, baring her neck, her arms, the right
+shoulder. Under the smooth throat a buckle of dull gold held the sheer,
+diaphanous folds of the pale amber silk which swathed the high and
+rounded breasts, hiding no goddess curve of them.
+
+A wide and golden girdle clasped the waist, covered the rounded hips
+and thighs. The long, narrow, and high-arched feet were shod with golden
+sandals, laced just below the rounded knees with flat turquoise studded
+bands.
+
+And shining through the amber folds, as glowing above them, the miracle
+of her body.
+
+The dream of master sculptor given life. A goddess of earth's youth
+reborn in Himalayan wilds.
+
+She raised her eyes; broke the long silence.
+
+“Now being with you,” she said dreamily, “there waken within me old
+thoughts, old wisdom, old questioning--all that I had forgotten and
+thought forgotten forever--”
+
+The golden voice died--she who had spoken was gone from us, like the
+fading out of a phantom; like the breaking of a film.
+
+A flicker shot over the skies, another and another. A brilliant ray of
+intense green like that of a distant searchlight swept to the zenith,
+hung for a moment and withdrew. Up came pouring the lances and the
+streamers of the aurora; faster and faster, banners and slender shining
+spears of green and iridescent blues and smoky, glistening reds.
+
+The valley sprang into full view.
+
+I felt Ventnor's grip upon my wrist. I followed his pointing finger.
+Into the valley from the right ran a black spur of rock, half a mile
+from us, fifty feet high.
+
+Upon its crest stood--Norhala!
+
+Her arms were lifted to the sparkling sky; her braids were loosened--and
+as the fires of the aurora rose and fell, raced and were still, the
+silken cloud of her tresses swirled and eddied with them. Little clouds
+of coruscations danced gaily like fireflies about and through it.
+
+And all her bared body was outlined in living light, glowed and throbbed
+with light--light filled her like a vessel, she bathed in it. She thrust
+arms through the streaming, flaming locks; held them out from her,
+prisoned. She swayed slowly, rhythmically; like a faint, golden chiming
+came the echo of her song.
+
+Abruptly around her, half circling her on the black spur, gleamed
+myriads of gem fires. Flares and flames of pale emerald, steady glowing
+of flame rubies, glints and lambencies of deepest sapphire, of wan
+sapphire, flickering opalescences, irised glitterings. A moment they
+gleamed. Then from them came bolt upon bolt of lightning--lightning that
+darted upon the lovely shape swaying there; lightnings that fell upon
+her, broke and dashed, cascading, from her radiant body.
+
+The lightnings bathed her--she bathed in them.
+
+The skies were covered by a swift mist. The aurora was veiled.
+
+The valley filled with a palely shimmering radiance which dropped like
+veils upon it, hiding all within it. Hiding within fold upon luminous
+fold--Norhala!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. THE SHAPES IN THE MIST
+
+Mutely we faced each other, white and wan in the ghostly light.
+
+The valley was very still; as silent as though sound had been withdrawn
+from it. The shimmering radiance suffusing it had thickened perceptibly;
+hovered over the valley floor faintly sparkling mists; hid it.
+
+Like a shroud was that silence. Beneath it my mind struggled, its
+unease, its forebodings growing ever stronger. Silently we repacked the
+saddlebags; girthed the pony; silently we waited for Norhala's return.
+
+Idly I had noted that the place on which we stood must be raised
+above the level of the vale. Up toward us the gathering mists had been
+steadily rising; still was their wavering crest a half score feet below
+us.
+
+Abruptly out of their dim nebulosity a faintly phosphorescent square
+broke. It lifted, slowly; then swept, a dully lustrous six-foot cube,
+up the slope and came to rest almost at our feet. It dwelt there;
+contemplated us from its myriads of deep-set, sparkling striations.
+
+In its wake swam, one by one, six others--their tops raising from
+the vapors like the first, watchfully; like shimmering backs of
+sea monsters; like turrets of fantastic angled submarines from
+phosphorescent seas. One by one they skimmed swiftly over the ledge; and
+one by one they nestled, edge to edge and alternately, against the cube
+which had gone before.
+
+In a crescent, they stretched before us. Back from them, a pace, ten
+paces, twenty, we retreated.
+
+They lay immobile--staring at us.
+
+Cleaving the mists, silk of copper hair streaming wide, unearthly eyes
+lambent, floated up behind them--Norhala. For an instant she was hidden
+behind their bulk; suddenly was upon them; drifted over them like some
+spirit of light; stood before us.
+
+Her veils were again about her; golden girdle, sandals of gold and
+turquoise in their places. Pearl white her body gleamed; no mark of
+lightning marred it.
+
+She walked toward us, turned and faced the watching cubes. She uttered
+no sound, but as at a signal the central cube slid forward, halted
+before her. She rested a hand upon its edge.
+
+“Ride with me,” she said to Ruth.
+
+“Norhala.” Ventnor took a step forward. “Norhala, we must go with her.
+And this”--he pointed to the pony--“must go with us.”
+
+“I meant--you--to come,” the faraway voice chimed, “but I had not
+thought of--that.”
+
+A moment she considered; then turned to the six waiting cubes. Again as
+at a command four of the things moved, swirled in toward each other
+with a weird precision, with a monstrous martial mimicry; joined; stood
+before us, a platform twelve feet square, six high.
+
+“Mount,” sighed Norhala.
+
+Ventnor looked helplessly at the sheer front facing him.
+
+“Mount.” There was half-wondering impatience in her command. “See!”
+
+She caught Ruth by the waist and with the same bewildering swiftness
+with which she had vanished from us when the aurora beckoned she stood,
+holding the girl, upon the top of the single cube. It was as though the
+two had been lifted, had been levitated with an incredible rapidity.
+
+“Mount,” she murmured again, looking down upon us.
+
+Slowly Ventnor began to bandage the pony's eyes. I placed my hand upon
+the edge of the quadruple; sprang. A myriad unseen hands caught me,
+raised me, set me instantaneously on the upward surface.
+
+“Lift the pony to me,” I called to Ventnor.
+
+“Lift it?” he echoed, incredulously.
+
+Drake's grin cut like a sunray through the nightmare dread that shrouded
+my mind.
+
+“Catch,” he called; placed one hand beneath the beast's belly, the other
+under its throat; his shoulders heaved--and up shot the pony, laden as
+it was, landed softly upon four wide-stretched legs beside me. The faces
+of the two gaped up, ludicrous in their amazement.
+
+“Follow,” cried Norhala.
+
+Ventnor leaped wildly for the top, Drake beside him; in the flash of a
+humming-bird's wing they were gripping me, swearing feebly. The unseen
+hold angled; struck upward; clutched from ankle to thigh; held us
+fast--men and beast.
+
+Away swept the block that bore Ruth and Norhala; I saw Ruth crouching,
+head bent, her arms around the knees of the woman. They slipped into the
+mists; vanished.
+
+And after them, like a log in a racing current, we, too, dipped beneath
+the faintly luminous vapors.
+
+The cubes moved with an entire absence of vibration; so smoothly and
+skimmingly, indeed, that had it not been for the sudden wind that had
+risen when first we had stirred, and that now beat steadily upon our
+faces, and the cloudy walls streaming by, I would have thought ourselves
+at rest.
+
+I saw the blurred form of Ventnor drift toward the forward edge. He
+walked as though wading. I essayed to follow him; my feet I could not
+lift; I could advance only by gliding them as though skating.
+
+Also the force, whatever it was, that held me seemed to pass me on from
+unseen clutch to clutch; it was as though up to my hips I moved through
+a closely woven yet fluid mass of cobwebs. I had the fantastic idea that
+if I so willed I could slip over the edge of the blocks, crawl about
+their sides without falling--like a fly on the vertical faces of a huge
+sugar loaf.
+
+I drew beside Ventnor. He was staring ahead, striving, I knew, to pierce
+the mists for some glimpse of Ruth.
+
+He turned to me, his face drawn with anxiety, his eyes feverish.
+
+“Can you see them, Walter?” His voice shook. “God--why did I ever let
+her go like that? Why did I let her go alone?”
+
+“They'll be close ahead, Martin.” I spoke out of a conviction I could
+not explain. “Whatever it is we're bound for, wherever it is the woman's
+taking us, she means to keep us together--for a time at least. I'm sure
+of it.”
+
+“She said--follow.” It was Drake beside us. “How the hell can we do
+anything else? We haven't any control over this bird we're on. But she
+has. What she meant, Ventnor, is that it would follow her.”
+
+“That's true”--new hope softened the haggard face--“that's true--but
+is it? We're reckoning with creatures that man's imagination never
+conceived--nor could conceive. And with this--woman--human in shape,
+yes, but human in thought--never. How then can we tell--”
+
+He turned once more, all his consciousness concentrated in his searching
+eyes.
+
+Drake's rifle slipped from his hand.
+
+He stooped to pick it up; then tugged with both hands. The rifle lay
+immovable.
+
+I bent and strove to aid him. For all the pair of us could do, the rifle
+might have been a part of the gleaming surface on which it rested. The
+tiny, deepset star points winked up--
+
+“They're--laughing at us!” grunted Drake.
+
+“Nonsense,” I answered, and tried to check the involuntary shuddering
+that shook me, as I saw it shake him. “Nonsense. These blocks are great
+magnets--that's what holds the rifle; what holds us, too.”
+
+“I don't mean the rifle,” he said; “I mean those points of lights--the
+eyes--”
+
+There came from Ventnor a cry of almost anguished relief. We
+straightened. Our head shot above the mists like those of swimmers from
+water. Unnoticed, we had been climbing out of them.
+
+And a hundred yards ahead of us, cleaving them, veiled in them almost to
+the shoulders, was Norhala, red-gold tresses steaming; and close beside
+her were the brown curls of Ruth. At her brother's cry she turned and
+her arm flashed out of the veils with reassuring gesture.
+
+A mile away was an opening in the valley's mountainous wall; toward it
+we were speeding. It was no ragged crevice, no nature split fissure; it
+gave the impression of a gigantic doorway.
+
+“Look,” whispered Drake.
+
+Between us and the vast gateway, gleaming triangles began to break
+through the vapors, like the cutting fins of sharks, glints of round
+bodies like gigantic porpoises--the vapors seethed with them. Quickly
+the fins and rolling curves were all about us. They centered upon the
+portal, streamed through--a horde of the metal things, leading us,
+guarding us, playing about us.
+
+And weird, unutterably weird was that spectacle--the vast and silent
+vale with its still, smooth vapors like a coverlet of cloud; the regal
+head of Norhala sweeping over them; the dull glint and gleam of the
+metal paradoxes flowing, in ordered motion, all about us; the titanic
+gateway, glowing before us.
+
+We were at its threshold; over it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. THE DRUMS OF THUNDER
+
+Upon that threshold the mists foamed like breaking billows, then ceased
+abruptly to be. Keeping exactly the distance I had noted when our gaze
+had risen above the fog, glided the block that bore Ruth and Norhala.
+In the strange light of the place into which we had emerged--and
+whether that place was canyon, corridor, or tunnel I could not then
+determine--it stood out sharply.
+
+One arm of Norhala held Ruth--and in her attitude I sensed a shielding
+intent, guardianship--the first really human impulse this shape of
+mystery and beauty had revealed.
+
+In front of them swept score upon score of her familiars--no longer
+dully lustrous, but shining as though cut from blue and polished steel.
+They--marched--in ordered rows, globes and cubes and pyramids; moving
+sedately now as units.
+
+I looked behind me; out of the spume boiling at the portal, were pouring
+forth other scores of the Metal Things, darting through like divers
+through a wave. And as they drew into our wake and swam into the light,
+their dim lustre vanished like a film; their surfaces grew almost
+radiant.
+
+Whence came the light that set them gleaming? Our pace had slackened--I
+looked about me. The walls of the cleft or tunnel were perpendicular,
+smooth and shining with a cold, metallic, greenish glow.
+
+Between the walls, like rhythmic flashing of fire-flies, pulsed soft and
+fugitive glimmerings that carried a sense of the infinitely minute--of
+electrons, it came to me, rather than atoms. Their irradiance was
+greenish, like the walls; but I was certain that these corpuscles did
+not come from them.
+
+They blinked and faded like motes within a shifting sunbeam; or, to use
+a more scientific comparison, like colloids within the illuminated field
+of the ultramicroscope; and like these latter it was as though the eyes
+took in not the minute particles themselves but their movement only.
+
+Save for these gleamings the light of the place, although crepuscular,
+was crystalline clear. High above us--five hundred, a thousand feet--the
+walls merged into a haze of clouded beryl.
+
+Rock certainly the cliffs were--but rock cut and planed, smoothed and
+polished and PLATED!
+
+Yes, that was it--plated. Plated with some metallic substance that was
+itself a reservoir of luminosity and from which, it came to me, pulsed
+the force that lighted the winking ions. But who could have done such a
+thing? For what purpose? How?
+
+And the meticulousness, the perfection of these smoothed cliffs struck
+over my nerves as no rasp could, stirring a vague resentment, an
+irritated desire for human inharmonies, human disorder.
+
+Absorbed in my examination I had forgotten those who must share with me
+my doubts and dangers. I felt a grip on my arm.
+
+“If we get close enough and I can get my feet loose from this damned
+thing I'll jump,” Drake said.
+
+“What?” I gasped, blankly, startled out of my preoccupation. “Jump
+where?”
+
+I followed his pointing finger. We were rapidly closing upon the other
+cube; it was now a scant twenty paces ahead; it seemed to be stopping.
+Ventnor was leaning forward, quivering with eagerness.
+
+“Ruth!” he called. “Ruth--are you all right?”
+
+Slowly she turned to us--my heart gave a great leap, then seemed
+to stop. For her sweet face was touched with that same unearthly
+tranquillity which was Norhala's; in her brown eyes was a shadow of that
+passionless spirit brooding in Norhala's own; her voice as she answered
+held within it more than echo of Norhala's faint, far-off golden
+chiming.
+
+“Yes,” she sighed; “yes, Martin--have no fear for me--”
+
+And turned from us, gazing forward once more with the woman and as
+silent as she.
+
+I glanced covertly at Ventnor, at Drake--had I imagined, or had they
+too seen? Then I knew they had seen, for Ventnor's face was white to the
+lips, and Drake's jaw was set, his teeth clenched, his eyes blazing with
+anger.
+
+“What's she doing to Ruth--you saw her face,” he gritted, half
+inarticulately.
+
+“Ruth!” There was anguish in Ventnor's cry.
+
+She did not turn again. It was as though she had not heard him.
+
+The cubes were now not five yards apart. Drake gathered himself;
+strained to loosen his feet from the shining surface, making ready to
+leap when they should draw close enough. His great chest swelled with
+his effort, the muscles of his neck knotted, sweat steamed down his
+face.
+
+“No use,” he gasped, “no use, Goodwin. It's like trying to lift yourself
+by your boot-straps--like a fly stuck in molasses.”
+
+“Ruth,” cried Ventnor once more.
+
+As though it had been a signal the block darted forward, resuming the
+distance it had formerly maintained between us.
+
+The vanguard of the Metal Things began to race. With an incredible speed
+they fled into, were lost in an instant within, the luminous distances.
+
+The cube that bore the woman and girl accelerated; flew faster and
+faster onward. And as swiftly our own followed it. The lustrous walls
+flowed by, dizzily.
+
+We had swept over toward the right wall of the cleft and were gliding
+over a broad ledge. This ledge was, I judged, all of a hundred feet in
+width. From it the floor of the place was dropping rapidly.
+
+The opposite precipices were slowly drawing closer. After us flowed the
+flanking host.
+
+Steadily our ledge arose and the floor of the canyon dropped. Now we
+were twenty feet above it, now thirty. And the character of the cliffs
+was changing. Veins of quartz shone under the metallic plating like
+cut crystal, like cloudy opals; here was a splash of vermilion, there a
+patch of amber; bands of pallid ochre stained it.
+
+My gaze was caught by a line of inky blackness in the exact center of
+the falling floor. So black was it that at first glance I took it for a
+vein of jetty lignite.
+
+It widened. It was a crack, a fissure. Now it was a yard in width, now
+three, and blackness seemed to well up from within it, blackness that
+was the very essence of the depths. Steadily the ebon rift expanded;
+spread suddenly wide open in two sharp-edged, flying wedges--
+
+Earth had dropped away. At our side a gulf had opened, an abyss,
+striking down depth upon depth; profound; immeasurable.
+
+We were human atoms, riding upon a steed of sorcery and racing along a
+split rampart of infinite space.
+
+I looked behind--scores of the cubes were darting from the metal host
+trailing us; in a long column of twos they flashed by, raced ahead. Far
+in front of us a gloom began to grow; deepened until we were rushing
+into blackest night.
+
+Through the murk stabbed a long lance of pale blue phosphorescence.
+It unrolled like a ribbon of wan flame, flicked like a serpent's
+tongue--held steady. I felt the Thing beneath us leap forward; its
+velocity grew prodigious; the wind beat upon us with hurricane force.
+
+I shielded my eyes with my hands and peered through the chinks of my
+fingers. Ranged directly in our path was a barricade of the cubes and
+upon them we were racing like a flying battering-ram. Involuntarily I
+closed my eyes against the annihilating impact that seemed inevitable.
+
+The Thing on which we rode lifted.
+
+We were soaring at a long angle straight to the top of the barrier; were
+upon it, and still with that awful speed unchecked were hurtling through
+the blackness over the shaft of phosphorescence, the ribbon of pale
+light that I had watched pierce it and knew now was but another span of
+the cubes that but a little before had fled past us. Beneath the span,
+on each side of it, I sensed illimitable void.
+
+We were over; rushing along in darkness. There began a mighty tumult,
+a vast crashing and roaring. The clangor waxed, beat about us with
+tremendous strokes of sound.
+
+Far away was a dim glowing, as of rising sun through heavy mists of
+dawn. The mists faded--miles away gleamed what at first glimpse seemed
+indeed to be the rising sun; a gigantic orb, whose lower limb just
+touched, was sharply, horizontally cut by the blackness, as though at
+its base that blackness was frozen.
+
+The sun? Reason returned to me; told me this globe could not be that.
+
+What was it then? Ra-Harmachis, of the Egyptians, stripped of his wings,
+exiled and growing old in the corridors of the Dead? Or that mocking
+luminary, the cold phantom of the God of light and warmth which the old
+Norsemen believed was set in their frozen hell to torment the damned?
+
+I thrust aside the fantasies, impatiently. But sun or no sun, light
+streamed from this orb, light in multicolored, lanced rays, banishing
+the blackness through which we had been flying.
+
+Closer we came and closer; lighter it grew about us, and by the growing
+light I saw that still beside us ran the abyss. And even louder, more
+thunderous, became the clamor.
+
+At the foot of the radiant disk I glimpsed a luminous pool. Into it, out
+of the depths, protruded a tremendous rectangular tongue, gleaming like
+gray steel.
+
+On the tongue an inky shape appeared; it lifted itself from the abyss,
+rushed upon the disk and took form.
+
+Like a gigantic spider it was, squat and horned. For an instant it was
+silhouetted against the smiling sphere, poised itself--and vanished
+through it.
+
+Now, not far ahead, silhouetted as had been the spider shape, blackened
+into sight a cube and on it Ruth and Norhala. It seemed to hover, to
+wait.
+
+“It's a door,” Drake's shout beat thinly in my ears against the
+hurricane of sound.
+
+What I thought had been an orb was indeed a gateway, a portal; and it
+was gigantic.
+
+The light streamed through it, the flaming colors, the lightning glare,
+the drifting shadows were all beyond it. The suggestion of sphere had
+been an illusion, born of the darkness in which we were moving and in
+its own luminescence.
+
+And I saw that the steel tongue was a ramp, a slide, dropping down into
+the gulf.
+
+Norhala raised her hands high above her head. Up from the darkness flew
+an incredible shape--like a monstrous, armored flat-backed crab; angled
+spikes protruded from it; its huge body was spangled with darting,
+greenish flames.
+
+It swept beneath us and by. On its back were multitudinous breasts from
+which issued blinding flashes--sapphire blue, emerald green, sun yellow.
+It hung poised as had that other nightmare shape, standing out jet black
+and colossal, rearing upon columnar legs, whose outlines were those of
+alternate enormous angled arrow-points and lunettes. Swiftly its form
+shifted; an instant it hovered, half disintegrate.
+
+Now I saw spinning spheres and darting cubes and pyramids click into new
+positions. The front and side legs lengthened, the back legs shortened,
+fitting themselves plainly to what must be a varying angle of descent
+beyond.
+
+And it was no chimera, no kraken of the abyss. It was a car made of
+the Metal Things. I caught again the flashes and thought that they were
+jewels or heaps of shining ores carried by the conscious machine.
+
+It vanished. In its place hung poised the cube that bore the enigmatic
+woman and Ruth. Then they were gone and we stood where but an instant
+before they had been.
+
+We were high above an ocean of living light--a sea of incandescent
+splendors that stretched mile upon uncounted mile away and whose
+incredible waves streamed thousands of feet in air, flew in gigantic
+banners, in tremendous streamers, in coruscating clouds of varicolored
+flame--as though torn by the talons of a mighty wind.
+
+My dazzled sight cleared, glare and blaze and searing incandescence
+took form, became ordered. Within the sea of light I glimpsed shapes
+cyclopean, unnameable.
+
+They moved slowly, with an awesome deliberateness. They shone darkly
+within the flame-woven depths. From them came the volleys of the
+lightnings.
+
+Score upon score of them there were--huge and enigmatic. Their flaming
+levins threaded the shimmering veils, patterned them, as though they
+were the flying robes of the very spirit of fire.
+
+And the tumult was as ten thousand Thors, smiting with hammers against
+the enemies of Odin. As a forge upon whose shouting anvils was being
+shaped a new world.
+
+A new world? A metal world!
+
+The thought spun through my mazed brain, was gone--and not until
+long after did I remember it. For suddenly all that clamor died; the
+lightnings ceased; all the flitting radiances paled and the sea of
+flaming splendors grew thin as moving mists. The storming shapes dulled
+with them, seemed to darken into the murk.
+
+Through the fast-waning light and far, far away--miles it seemed on high
+and many, many miles in length--a broad band of fluorescent amethyst
+shone. From it dropped curtains, shimmering, nebulous as the marching
+folds of the aurora; they poured, cascaded, from the amethystine band.
+
+Huge and purple-black against their opalescence bulked what at first I
+thought a mountain, so like was it to one of those fantastic buttes of
+our desert Southwest when their castellated tops are silhouetted against
+the setting sun; knew instantly that this was but subconscious striving
+to translate into terms of reality the incredible.
+
+It was a City!
+
+A city full five thousand feet high and crowned with countless spires
+and turrets, titanic arches, stupendous domes! It was as though the
+man-made cliffs of lower New York were raised scores of times their
+height, stretched a score of times their length. And weirdly enough it
+did suggest those same towering masses of masonry when one sees them
+blacken against the twilight skies.
+
+The pit darkened as though night were filtering down into it; the vast,
+purple-shadowed walls of the city sparkled out with countless lights.
+From the crowning arches and turrets leaped broad filaments of flame,
+flashing, electric.
+
+Was it my straining eyes, the play of the light and shadow--or were
+those high-flung excrescences shifting, changing shape? An icy
+hand stretched out of the unknown, stilled my heart. For they
+were shifting--arches and domes, turrets and spires; were melting,
+reappearing in ferment; like the lightning-threaded, rolling edges of
+the thundercloud.
+
+I wrenched my gaze away; saw that our platform had come to rest upon a
+broad and silvery ledge close to the curving frame of the portal and not
+a yard from where upon her block stood Norhala, her arm clasped about
+the rigid form of Ruth. I heard a sigh from Ventnor, an exclamation from
+Drake.
+
+Before one of us could cry out to Ruth, the cube glided to the edge of
+the shelf, dipped out of sight.
+
+That upon which we rode trembled and sped after it.
+
+There came a sickening sense of falling; we lurched against each other;
+for the first time the pony whinnied, fearfully. Then with awful speed
+we were flying down a wide, a glistening, a steeply angled ramp into the
+Pit, straight toward the half-hidden, soaring escarpments flashing afar.
+
+Far ahead raced the Thing on which stood woman and maid. Their hair
+streamed behind them, mingled, silken web of brown and shining veil
+of red-gold; little clouds of sparkling corpuscles threaded them, like
+flitting swarms of fire-flies; their bodies were nimbused with tiny,
+flickering tongues of lavender flame.
+
+About us, above us, began again to rumble the countless drums of the
+thunder.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. THE PORTAL OF FLAME
+
+It was as though we were on a meteor hurtling through space. The split
+air shrieked and shrilled, a keening barrier against the avalanche of
+the thunder. The blast bent us far back on thighs held rigid by the
+magnetic grip.
+
+The pony spread its legs, dropped its head; through the hurricane
+roaring its screaming pierced thinly, that agonizing, terrible
+lamentation which is of the horse and the horse alone when the limit of
+its endurance is reached.
+
+Ventnor crouched lower and lower, eyes shielded behind arms folded over
+his brows, straining for a glimpse of Ruth; Drake crouched beside him,
+bracing him, supporting him against the tempest.
+
+Our line of flight became less abrupt, but the speed increased, the
+wind-pressure became almost insupportable. I twisted, dropped upon my
+right arm, thrust my head against my shoulder, stared backward. When
+first I had looked upon the place I had sensed its immensity; now I
+began to realize how vast it must really be--for already the gateway
+through which we had come glimmered far away on high, shrunk to a hoop
+of incandescent brass and dwindling fast.
+
+Nor was it a cavern; I saw the stars, traced with deep relief the
+familiar Northern constellations. Pit it might be, but whatever terror,
+whatever ordeals were before us, we would not have to face them buried
+deep within earth. There was a curious comfort to me in the thought.
+
+Suddenly stars and sky were blotted out.
+
+We had plunged beneath the surface of the radiant sea.
+
+Lying in the position in which I was, I was sensible of a diminution
+of the cyclonic force; the blast streamed up and over the front of the
+cube. To me drifted only the wailings of our flight and the whimpering
+terror of the pony.
+
+I turned my head cautiously. Upon the very edge of the flying blocks
+squatted Drake and Ventnor, grotesquely frog-like. I crawled toward
+them--crawled, literally, like a caterpillar; for wherever my body
+touched the surface of the cubes the attracting force held it, allowed a
+creeping movement only, surface sliding upon surface--and weirdly enough
+like a human measuring-worm I looped myself over to them.
+
+As my bare palms clung to the Things I realized with finality that
+whatever their activation, their life, they WERE metal.
+
+There was no mistaking now the testimony of touch. Metal they were, with
+a hint upon contact of highly polished platinum, or at the least of a
+metal as finely grained as it.
+
+Also they had temperature, a curiously pleasant warmth--the surfaces
+were, I judged, around ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. I looked deep
+down into the little sparkling points that were, I knew, organs of
+sight; they were like the points of contact of innumerable intersecting
+crystal planes. They held strangest paradoxical suggestion of being
+close to the surface and still infinite distances away.
+
+And they were like--what was it they were like?--it came to me with a
+distinct shock.
+
+They were like the galaxies of little aureate and sapphire stars in the
+clear gray heavens of Norhala's eyes.
+
+I crept beside Drake, struck him with my head.
+
+“Can't move,” I shouted. “Can't lift my hands. Stuck fast--like a
+fly--just as you said.”
+
+“Drag 'em over your knees,” he cried, bending to me. “It slides 'em out
+of the attraction.”
+
+Acting as he had suggested I found to my astonishment I could slip my
+hands free; I caught his belt, tried to lift myself by it.
+
+“No use, Doc.” The old grin lightened for a moment his tense young face.
+“You'll have to keep praying till the power's turned off. Nothing here
+you can slide your knees on.”
+
+I nodded, waddling close to his side; then sank back on my haunches to
+relieve the strain upon my aching leg-muscles.
+
+“Can you see them ahead, Walter--Ruth and the woman?” Ventnor turned his
+anxious eyes toward me.
+
+I peered into the glimmering murk; shook my head. I could see nothing.
+It was indeed, as though the clustered cubes sped within a bubble of the
+now wanly glistening vapors; or rather as though in our passage--as a
+projectile does in air--we piled before us a thick wave of the mists
+which streaming along each side, closing in behind, obscured all that
+lay around.
+
+Yet I had, persistently, the feeling that beyond these shroudings was
+vast and ordered movement; marchings and counter-marchings of hosts
+greater even than those Golden Hordes of Genghis which ages agone had
+washed about the outer bases of the very peaks that hid this place.
+Came, too, flitting shadowings of huge shapes, unnameable, moving
+swiftly beside our way; gleamings that thrust themselves through the
+veils like wheeling javelins of flame.
+
+And always, always, everywhere that constant movement, rhythmic,
+terrifying--like myriads of feet of creatures of an unseen, stranger
+world marking time just outside the threshold of our own. Preparing,
+DRILLING there in some wide vestibule of space between the known and the
+unknown, alert and menacing--poised for the signal which would send them
+pouring over it.
+
+
+Once again I seemed to stand upon the brink of an abyss of incredible
+revelation, striving helplessly, struggling for realization--and so
+struggling became aware that our speed was swiftly slackening, the
+roaring blast dying down, the veils before us thinning.
+
+They cleared away. I saw Drake and Ventnor straighten up; raised myself
+to my own aching knees.
+
+We were at one end of a vortex, a funneling within the radiant vapors; a
+funnel whose further end a mile ahead broadened out into a huge
+circle, its mistily outlined edges impinging upon the towering scarp
+of the--city. It was as though before us lay, upon its side, a cone of
+crystalline clear air against whose curved sides some radiant medium
+heavier than air, lighter than water, pressed.
+
+The top arc of its prostrate base reached a thousand feet or more up the
+precipitous wall; above it all was hidden in sparkling nebulosities that
+were like still clouds of greenly glimmering fire-flies. Back from
+the curving sides of this cone, above it and below it, the pressing
+luminosities stretched into, it seemed, infinite distances.
+
+Through them, suddenly, thousands of bright beams began to dart, to
+dance, weaving and interweaving, shooting hither and yon--like myriads
+of great searchlights in a phosphorescent sea fog, like countless lances
+of the aurora thrusting through its own iridescent veils! And in the
+play of these beams was something appallingly ordered, appallingly
+rhythmic.
+
+It was--how can I describe it?--PURPOSEFUL; purposeful as the geometric
+shiftings of the Little Things of the ruins, of the summoning song of
+Norhala, of the Protean changes of the Smiting Shape and the Following
+Thing; and like all of these it was as laden with that baffling
+certainty of hidden meanings, of messages that the brain recognized as
+such yet knew it never could read.
+
+The rays seemed to spring upward from the earth. Now they were like
+countless lances of light borne by marching armies of Titans; now they
+crossed and angled and flew as though they were clouds of javelins
+hurled by battling swarms of the Genii of Light. And now they stood
+upright while through them, thrusting them aside, bending them, passed
+vast, vague shapes like mountains forming and dissolving; like darkening
+monsters of some world of light pushing through thick forests of
+slender, high-reaching trees of cold flame; shifting shadows of
+monstrous chimerae slipping through jungles of bamboo with trunks of
+diamond fire; phantasmal leviathans swimming through brakes of giant
+reeds of radiance rising from the sparking ooze of a sea of star shine.
+
+Whence came the force, the mechanism that produced this cone of clarity,
+this NOT searchlight, but unlight in the midst of light? Not from
+behind, that was certain--for turning I saw that behind us the mist was
+as thick. I turned again--it came to me, why I knew not, yet with an
+absolute certainty, that the energy, the force emanated from the distant
+wall itself.
+
+The funnel, the cone, did not expand from where we were standing, now
+motionless.
+
+It began at the wall and focused upon us.
+
+Within the great circle the surface of the wall was smooth, utterly
+blank; upon it was no trace of those flitting lights we had seen before
+we had plunged down toward the radiant sea. It shone with a pale blue
+phosphorescence. It was featureless, smooth, a blind cliff of polished,
+blue metal--and that was all.
+
+“Ruth!” groaned Ventnor. “Where is she?”
+
+Aghast at my mental withdrawal from him, angry at myself for my
+callousness, awkwardly I tried to crawl over to him, to touch him,
+comfort him as well as I might.
+
+And then, as though his cry had been a signal, the great cone began to
+move. Slowly the circled base slipped down the shimmering facades; down,
+steadily down; I realized that we had paused at the edge of some steep
+declivity, for the bottom of the cone was now at a decided angle while
+the upper edge of the circle had dropped a full two hundred feet below
+the place where it had rested--and still it fell.
+
+
+There came a gasp of relief from Ventnor, a sigh from Drake while, from
+my own heart, a weight rolled. Not ten yards ahead of us and still deep
+within the luminosity had appeared the regal head of Norhala, the lovely
+head of Ruth. The two rose out of the glow like swimmers floating from
+the depths. Now they were clear before us, and now we could see the
+surface of the cube on which they rode.
+
+But neither turned to us; each stared straightly, motionless along the
+axis of the sinking cone, the woman's left arm holding Ruth close to her
+side.
+
+Drake's hand caught my shoulder in a grip that hurt--nor did he need to
+point toward that which had wrung the exclamation from him. The funnel
+had broken from its slow falling; it had made one swift, startling
+drop and had come to rest. Its recumbent side was now flattened into a
+triangular plane, widening from the narrow tip in which we stood to all
+of five hundred feet where its base rested against the blue wall, and
+falling at a full thirty-degree pitch.
+
+The misty-edged circle had become an oval, a flattened ellipse another
+five hundred feet high and three times that in length. And in its exact
+center, shining forth as though it opened into a place of pale azure
+incandescence was another rectangular Cyclopean portal.
+
+On each side of it, in the apparently solid face of the gleaming,
+metallic cliffs, a slit was opening.
+
+They began as thin lines a hundred yards in height through which
+the intense light seemed to hiss; quickly they opened--widening like
+monstrous cat pupils until at last, their widening ceasing, they glared
+forth, the blue incandescence gushing from them like molten steel from
+an opened sluice.
+
+Deep within them I sensed a movement. Scores of towering shapes swam
+within and glided out of them, each reflecting the vivid light as though
+they themselves were incandescent. Around their crests spun wide and
+flaming coronets.
+
+They rushed forth, wheeling, whirling, driven like leaves in a
+whirlwind. Out they swirled from the cat's eyes of the glimmering wall,
+these dervish obelisks crowded with spinning fires. They vanished in the
+mists. Instantly with their going, the eyes contracted; were but slits;
+were gone. And before us within the oval was only the waiting portal.
+
+The leading block leaped forward. As abruptly, those that bore us
+followed. Again under that strain of projectile flight we clutched each
+other; the pony screamed in terror. The metal cliff rushed to meet us
+like a thunder cloud of steel; the portal raced upon us--a square mouth
+of cold blue flame.
+
+And into it we swept; were devoured by it.
+
+Light in blinding, intolerable flood beat about us, blackening the sight
+with agony. We pressed, the three of us, against the side of the pony,
+burying our faces in its shaggy coat, striving to hide our eyes from the
+radiance which, strain closely as we might, seemed to pierce through the
+body of the little beast, through our own heads, searing the sight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X. “WITCH! GIVE BACK MY SISTER”
+
+How long we were within that glare I do not know; it seemed unending
+hours; it was of course only minutes--seconds, perhaps. Then I was
+sensible of a permeating shadow, a darkness gentle and healing.
+
+I raised my head and opened my eyes. We were moving tranquilly, with
+a curious suggestion of homing leisureliness, through a soft, blue
+shimmering darkness. It was as though we were drifting within some high
+borderland of light; a region in which that rapid vibration we call the
+violet was mingled with a still more rapid vibration whose quick pulsing
+was felt by the brain but ever fled ere that brain could register it in
+terms of color. And there seemed to be a film over my sight; dazzlement
+from the unearthly blaze, I thought, shaking my head impatiently.
+
+My eyes focused upon an object a little more than a foot away; my neck
+grew rigid, my scalp prickled while I stared, unbelieving. And that at
+which I stared was--a skeleton hand. Every bone a grayish black, sharply
+silhouetted, clean as some master surgeon's specimen, it was extended
+as though clutching at--clutching at--what was that toward which it was
+reaching?
+
+Again the icy prickling over scalp and skin--for its talons stretched
+out to grasp a steed that Death himself might have ridden, a rack whose
+bare skull hung drooping upon bent vertebrae.
+
+I raised my hands to my face to shut out the ghostly sight--and swiftly
+the clutching bony hand moved toward me--was before my eyes--touched me.
+
+The cry that sheer horror wrested from me was strangled by realization.
+And so acute was my relief, so reassuring was it to have in the midst
+of these mysteries some sane, understandable thing occur that I laughed
+aloud.
+
+For the skeleton hand was my own. The mournful ghastly mount of death
+was--our pony. And when I looked again I knew what I would see--and
+see them I did--two tall skeletons, skulls resting on their bony arms,
+leaning against the frame of the beast.
+
+While ahead of us, floating poised upon the surface of the glistening
+cube, were two women skeletons--Ruth and Norhala!
+
+Weird enough was the sight. Dureresque, grimly awful as materialization
+of a scene of the Dance Macabre--and yet--vastly comforting.
+
+For here was something which was well within the range of human
+knowledge. It was the light about us that did it; a vibration that even
+as I conjectured, was within the only partly explored region of the
+ultraviolet and the comparatively unexplored region above it.
+
+Yet there were differences, for there was none of that misty halo around
+the bones, the flesh which the X-rays cannot render wholly invisible.
+The skeletons stood out clean cut, with no trace of fleshly vestments.
+
+I crept over, spoke to the two.
+
+“Don't look up yet,” I said. “Don't open your eyes. We're going through
+a queer light. It has an X-ray quality. You're going to see me as a
+skeleton--”
+
+“What?” shouted Drake. Disobeying my warning he straightened, glared
+at me. And disquieting as the spectacle had been before, fully
+understanding it as I did, I could not restrain my shudder at the utter
+weirdness of that skull which was his head thrusting itself toward me.
+
+The skeleton that was Ventnor turned to me; was arrested by the sight of
+the flitting pair ahead. I saw the fleshless jaws clamp, then opened to
+speak.
+
+Abruptly, upon the skeletons in front the flesh dropped back. Girl and
+woman stood there once again robed in beauty.
+
+So swift was that transition from the grisly unreal to the normal that
+even to my unsuperstitious mind it smacked of necromancy. The next
+instant the three of us stood looking at each other, clothed once more
+in the flesh, and the pony no longer the steed of death, but our shaggy,
+patient little companion.
+
+The light had changed; the high violet had gone from it, and it was shot
+with yellow gleamings like fugitive sunbeams. We were passing through
+a wide corridor that seemed to be unending. The yellow light grew
+stronger.
+
+“That light wasn't exactly the Roentgen variety,” Drake interrupted my
+absorption in our surroundings. “And I hope to God it's as different as
+it seemed. If it's not we may be up against a lot of trouble.”
+
+“More trouble than we're in?” I asked, a trifle satirically.
+
+“X-ray burns,” he answered, “and no way to treat them in this place--if
+we live to want treatment,” he ended grimly.
+
+“I don't think we were subjected to their action long enough--” I began,
+and was silent.
+
+The corridor had opened without warning into a place for whose immensity
+I have no images that are adequate. It was a chamber that was vaster
+than ten score of the Great Halls of Karnac in one; great as that fabled
+hall in dread Amenti where Osiris sits throned between the Searcher of
+Hearts and the Eater of Souls, judging the jostling hosts of the newly
+dead.
+
+Temple it was in its immensity, and its solemn vastness--but unlike any
+temple ever raised by human toil. In no ruin of earth's youth giants'
+work now crumbling under the weight of time had I ever sensed a
+shadow of the strangeness with which this was instinct. No--nor in the
+shattered fanes that once had held the gods of old Egypt, nor in the
+pillared shrines of Ancient Greece, nor Imperial Rome, nor mosque,
+basilica nor cathedral.
+
+All these had been dedicated to gods which, whether created by humanity
+as science believes, or creators of humanity as their worshippers
+believed, still held in them that essence we term human.
+
+The spirit, the force, that filled this place had in it nothing, NOTHING
+of the human.
+
+No place? Yes, there was one--Stonehenge. Within that monolithic circle
+I had felt a something akin to this, as inhuman; a brooding spirit
+stony, stark, unyielding--as though not men but a people of stone had
+raised the great Menhirs.
+
+This was a sanctuary built by a people of metal!
+
+It was filled with a soft yellow glow like pale sunshine. Up from its
+floor arose hundreds of tremendous, square pillars down whose polished
+sides the crocus light seemed to flow.
+
+Far, far as the gaze could reach, the columns marched, oppressively
+ordered, appallingly mathematical. From their massiveness distilled a
+sense of power, mysterious, mechanical yet--living; something priestly,
+hierophantic--as though they were guardians of a shrine.
+
+Now I saw whence came the light suffusing this place. High up among the
+pillars floated scores of orbs that shone like pale gilt frozen suns.
+Great and small, through all the upper levels these strange luminaries
+gleamed, fixed and motionless, hanging unsupported in space. Out from
+their shining spherical surfaces darted rays of the same pale gold,
+rigid, unshifting, with the same suggestion of frozen stillness.
+
+“They look like big Christmas-tree stars,” muttered Drake.
+
+“They're lights,” I answered. “Of course they are. They're not
+matter--not metal, I mean--”
+
+“There's something about them like St. Elmo's fire, witch
+lights--condensations of atmospheric electricity,” Ventnor's voice was
+calm; now that it was plain we were nearing the heart of this mystery
+in which we were enmeshed he had clearly taken fresh grip, was again his
+observant, scientific self.
+
+We watched, once more silent; and indeed we had spoken little since
+we had begun that ride whose end we sensed close. In the unfolding of
+enigmatic happening after happening the mind had deserted speech and
+crouched listening at every door of sight and hearing to gather some
+clue to causes, some thread of understanding.
+
+Slowly now we were gliding through the forest of pillars; so effortless,
+so smooth our flight that we seemed to be standing still, the tremendous
+columns flitting past us, turning and wheeling around us, dizzyingly. My
+head swam with the mirage motion, I closed my eyes.
+
+“Look,” Drake was shaking me. “Look. What do you make of that?”
+
+Half a mile ahead the pillars stopped at the edge of a shimmering,
+quivering curtain of green luminescence. High, high up past the pale
+gilt suns its smooth folds ran, into the golden amber mist that canopied
+the columns.
+
+In its sparkling was more than a hint of the dancing corpuscles of the
+aurora; it was, indeed, as though woven of the auroral rays. And all
+about it played shifting, tremulous shadows formed by the merging of the
+golden light with the curtain's emerald gleaming.
+
+Up to its base swept the cube that bore Ruth and Norhala--and stopped.
+From it leaped the woman, and drew Ruth down beside her, then turned and
+gestured toward us.
+
+That upon which we rode drew close. I felt it quiver beneath me; felt on
+the instant, the magnetic grip drop from me, angle downward and leave me
+free. Shakily I arose from aching knees, and saw Ventnor flash down and
+run, rifle in hand, toward his sister.
+
+Drake bent for his gun. I moved unsteadily toward the side of the
+clustered cubes. There came a curious pushing motion driving me to the
+edge. Sliding over upon me came Drake and the pony--
+
+The cube tilted, gently, playfully--and with the slightest of jars the
+three of us stood beside it on the floor, we two men gaping at it in
+renewed wonder, and the little beast stretching its legs, lifting its
+feet and whinnying with relief.
+
+Then abruptly the four blocks that had been our steed broke from each
+other; that which had been the woman's glided to them.
+
+The four clicked into place behind it and darted from sight.
+
+“Ruth!” Ventnor's voice was vibrant with his fear. “Ruth! What is wrong
+with you? What has she done to you?”
+
+We ran to his side. He stood clutching her hands, searching her eyes.
+They were wide, unseeing, dream filled. Upon her face the calm and
+stillness, which were mirrored reflections of Norhala's unearthly
+tranquillity, had deepened.
+
+“Brother.” The sweet voice seemed far away, drifting out of untroubled
+space, an echo of Norhala's golden chimings--“Brother, there is nothing
+wrong with me. Indeed--all is--well with me--brother.”
+
+He dropped the listless palms, faced the woman, tall figure tense, drawn
+with mingled rage and anguish.
+
+“What have you done to her?” he whispered in Norhala's own tongue.
+
+Her serene gaze took him in, undisturbed by his anger save for the
+faintest shadow of wonder, of perplexity.
+
+“Done?” she repeated, slowly. “I have stilled all that was troubled
+within her--have lifted her above sorrow. I have given her the peace--as
+I will give it to you if--”
+
+“You'll give me nothing,” he interrupted fiercely; then, his passion
+breaking through all restraint--“Yes, you damned witch--you'll give me
+back my sister!”
+
+In his rage he had spoken English; she could not, of course, have
+understood the words, but their anger and hatred she did understand.
+Her serenity quivered, broke. The strange stars within her eyes began
+to glitter forth as they had when she had summoned the Smiting Thing.
+Unheeding, Ventnor thrust out a hand, caught her roughly by one bare,
+lovely shoulder.
+
+“Give her back to me, I say!” he cried. “Give her back to me!”
+
+The woman's eyes grew--awful. Out of the distended pupils the strange
+stars blazed; upon her face was something of the goddess outraged. I
+felt the shadow of Death's wings.
+
+“No! No--Norhala! No, Martin!” the veils of inhuman calm shrouding Ruth
+were torn; swiftly the girl we knew looked out from them. She threw
+herself between the two, arms outstretched.
+
+“Ventnor!” Drake caught his arms, held them tight; “that's not the way
+to save her!”
+
+Ventnor stood between us, quivering, half sobbing. Never until then had
+I realized how great, how absorbing was that love of his for Ruth. And
+the woman saw it, too, even though dimly; envisioned it humanly. For,
+under the shock of human passion, that which I thought then as utterly
+unknown to her as her cold serenity was to us, the sleeping soul--I
+use the popular word for those emotional complexes that are peculiar to
+mankind--stirred, awakened.
+
+Wrath fled from her knitted brows; her eyes dropping to the girl, lost
+their dreadfulness; softened. She turned them upon Ventnor, they brooded
+upon him; within their depths a half-troubled interest, a questioning.
+
+A smile dawned upon the exquisite face, humanizing it, transfiguring
+it, touching with tenderness the sweet and sleeping mouth--as a hovering
+dream the lips of the slumbering maid.
+
+And on the face of Ruth, as upon a mirror, I watched that same slow,
+understanding tenderness reflected!
+
+“Come,” said Norhala, and led the way through the sparkling curtains.
+As she passed, an arm around Ruth's neck, I saw the marks of Ventnor's
+fingers upon her white shoulder, staining its purity, marring it like a
+blasphemy.
+
+For an instant I hung behind, watching their figures grow misty within
+the shining shadows; then followed hastily. Entering the mists I was
+conscious of a pleasant tingling, an acceleration of the pulse, an
+increase of that sense of well-being which, I grew suddenly aware,
+had since the beginning of our strange journey minimized the nervous
+attrition of constant contact with the abnormal.
+
+Striving to classify, to reduce to order, my sensations I drew close to
+the others, overtaking them in a dozen paces. A dozen paces more and we
+stepped out of the curtainings.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI. THE METAL EMPEROR
+
+We stood at the edge of a well whose walls were of that same green
+vaporous iridescence through which we had just come, but finer grained,
+compact; as though here the corpuscles of which they were woven were far
+closer spun. Thousands of feet above us the mighty cylinder uprose, and
+in the lessened circle that was its mouth I glimpsed the bright stars;
+and knew by this it opened into the free air.
+
+All of half a mile in diameter was this shaft, and ringed regularly
+along its height by wide amethystine bands--like rings of a hollow
+piston. They were, in color, replicas of that I had glimpsed before
+our descent into this place and against whose gleaming cataracts the
+outlines of the incredible city had lowered. And they were in motion,
+spinning smoothly, and swiftly.
+
+Only one swift glance I gave them, my eyes held by a most
+extraordinary--edifice--altar--machine--I could not find the word for
+it--then.
+
+Its base was a scant hundred yards from where we had paused and
+concentric with the sides of the pit. It stood upon a thick circular
+pedestal of what appeared to be cloudy rock crystal supported by
+hundreds of thick rods of the same material.
+
+Up from it lifted the structure, a thing of glistening cones and
+spinning golden disks; fantastic yet disquietingly symmetrical; bizarre
+as an angled headdress worn by a mountainous Javanese god--yet coldly,
+painfully mathematical. In every direction the cones pointed, seemingly
+interwoven of strands of metal and of light.
+
+What was their color? It came to me--that of the mysterious element
+which stains the sun's corona, that diadem seen only when our day star
+is in eclipse; the unknown element which science has named coronium,
+which never yet has been found on earth and that may be electricity
+in its one material form; electricity that is ponderable; force whose
+vibrations are keyed down to mass; power transmuted into substance.
+
+Thousands upon thousands the cones bristled, pyramiding to the base
+of one tremendous spire that tapered up almost to the top of the shaft
+itself.
+
+In their grouping the mind caught infinite calculations carried into
+infinity; an apotheosis of geometry compassing the rhythms of unknown
+spatial dimensions; concentration of the equations of the star hordes.
+
+The mathematics of the Cosmos.
+
+From the left of the crystalline base swept an enormous sphere. It was
+twice the height of a tall man, and it was a paler blue than any of
+these Things I had seen, almost, indeed, an azure; different, too, in
+other subtle, indefinable ways.
+
+Behind it glided a pair of the pyramidal shapes, their pointed
+tips higher by a yard or more than the top of the sphere. They
+paused--regarding us. Out from the opposite arc of the crystal pedestal
+moved six other globes, somewhat smaller than the first and of a deep
+purplish luster.
+
+They separated, lining up on each side of the leader now standing a
+little in advance of the twin tetrahedrons, rigid and motionless as
+watching guards.
+
+There they stood--that enigmatic row, intent, studying us beneath their
+god or altar or machine of cones and disks within their cylinder walled
+with light.
+
+And at that moment there crystallized within my consciousness the
+sublimation of all the strangenesses of all that had gone before, a
+panic loneliness as though I had wandered into an alien world--a world
+as unfamiliar to humanity, as unfamiliar with it as our own would seem
+to a thinking, mobile crystal adrift among men.
+
+Norhala raised her white arms in salutation; from her throat came a
+lilting theme of her weirdly ordered, golden chanting. Was it speech, I
+wondered; and if so--prayer or entreaty or command?
+
+The great sphere quivered and undulated. Swifter than the eye could
+follow it dilated; opened!
+
+Where the azure globe had been, flashed out a disk of flaming splendors,
+the very secret soul of flowered flame! And simultaneously the pyramids
+leaped up and out behind it--two gigantic, four-rayed stars blazing with
+cold blue fires.
+
+The green auroral curtainings flared out, ran with streaming
+radiance--as though some Spirit of Jewels had broken bonds of
+enchantment and burst forth jubilant, flooding the shaft with its freed
+glories. Norhala's song ceased; an arm dropped down upon the shoulders
+of Ruth.
+
+Then woman and girl began to float toward the radiant disk.
+
+As one, the three of us sprang after them. I felt a shock that was like
+a quick, abrupt tap upon every nerve and muscle, stiffening them into
+helpless rigidity.
+
+Paralyzing that sharp, unseen contact had been, but nothing of pain
+followed it. Instead it created an extraordinary acuteness of sight and
+hearing, an abnormal keying up of the observational faculties, as though
+the energy so mysteriously drawn from our motor centers had been thrown
+back into the sensory.
+
+I could take in every minute detail of the flashing miracle of gemmed
+fires and its flaming ministers. Halfway between them and us Norhala and
+Ruth drifted; I could catch no hint of voluntary motion on their part
+and knew that they were not walking, but were being borne onward by some
+manifestation of that same force which held us motionless.
+
+I forgot them in my contemplation of the Disk.
+
+It was oval, twenty feet in height, I judged, and twelve in its greatest
+width. A broad band, translucent as sun golden chrysolite, ran about its
+periphery.
+
+Set within this zodiac and spaced at mathematically regular intervals
+were nine ovoids of intensely living light. They shone like nine
+gigantic cabochon cut sapphires; they ranged from palest, watery blue
+up through azure and purple and down to a ghostly mauve shot with sullen
+undertones of crimson.
+
+In each of them was throned a flame that seemed the very fiery essence
+of vitality.
+
+The--BODY--was convex, swelling outward like the boss of a shield;
+shimmering rosy-gray and crystalline. From the vital ovoids ran a
+pattern of sparkling threads, irised and brilliant as floss of molten
+jewels; converging with interfacings of spirals, of volutes and of
+triangles into the nucleus.
+
+And that nucleus, what was it?
+
+Even now I can but guess--brain in part as we understand brain,
+certainly; but far, far more than that in its energies, its powers.
+
+It was like an immense rose. An incredible rose of a thousand close
+clustering petals. It blossomed with a myriad shifting hues. And instant
+by instant the flood of varicolored flame that poured into its petalings
+down from the sapphire ovoids waxed and waned in crescendoes and
+diminuendoes of relucent harmonies--ecstatic, awesome.
+
+The heart of the rose was a star of incandescent ruby.
+
+From the flaming crimson center to aureate, flashing penumbra it was
+instinct with and poured forth power--power vast and conscious.
+
+Not with that same completeness could I realize the ministering star
+shapes, half hidden as they were by the Disk. Their radiance was less,
+nor had they its miracle of pulsing gem fires. Blue they were, blue of
+a peculiar vibrancy, and blue were the glistening threads that ran
+down from blue-black circular convexities set within each of the points
+visible to me.
+
+Unlike in shape, their flame of vitality dimmer than the ovoids of the
+Disk's golden zone, still I knew that they were even as those--ORGANS,
+organs of unknown senses, unknown potentialities. Their nuclei I could
+not observe.
+
+The floating figures had drawn close to that disk and had paused.
+
+And on the moment of their pausing I felt a surge of strength, a
+snapping of the spell that had bound us, an instantaneous withdrawal of
+the inhibiting force. Ventnor broke into a run, holding his rifle at
+the alert. We raced after him; were close to the shining shapes. And,
+gasping, we stopped short not a dozen paces away.
+
+For Norhala had soared up toward the flaming rose of the Disk as though
+lifted by gentle, unseen hands. Close to it for an instant she swung. I
+saw the exquisite body gleam through her thin robes as though bathed in
+soft flames of rosy pearl.
+
+Higher she floated, and toward the right of the zodiac. From the edges
+of three of the ovoids swirled a little cloud of tentacles, gossamer
+filaments of opal. They whipped out a full yard from the Disk's surface,
+touching her, caressing her.
+
+For a moment she hung there, her face hidden from us; then was dropped
+softly to her feet and stood, arms stretched wide, her copper hair
+streaming cloudily about her regal head.
+
+And up past her floated Ruth, levitated as had been she--and her face,
+ecstatic as though she were gazing into Paradise, yet drenched with the
+tranquillity of the infinite. Her wide eyes stared up toward that rose
+of splendors through which the pulsing colors now raced more swiftly.
+She hung poised before it while around her head a faint aureole began to
+form.
+
+Again the gossamer threads thrust forth, searched her. They ran over her
+rough clothing--perplexedly. They coiled about her neck, stole through
+her hair, brushed shut her eyes, circled her brow, her breasts, girdled
+her.
+
+Weirdly was it like some intelligence observing, studying, some creature
+of another species--puzzled by its similarity and unsimilarity with the
+one other creature of its kind it knew, and striving to reconcile those
+differences. And like such a questioning brain calling upon others for
+counsel, it swung Ruth upward to the watching star at the right.
+
+A rifle shot rang out.
+
+Another--the reports breaking the silence like a profanation. Unseen by
+either of us, Ventnor had slipped to one side where he could cover the
+core of ruby flame that must have seemed to him the heart of the Disk's
+rose of fire. He knelt a few yards away, white lipped, eyes cold gray
+ice, sighting carefully for a third shot.
+
+“Don't! Martin--don't fire!” I shouted, leaping toward him.
+
+“Stop! Ventnor--” Drake's panic cry mingled with my own.
+
+But before we could reach him, Norhala flew to him, like a darting
+swallow. Down the face of the Disk glided the upright body of Ruth,
+struck softly, stood swaying.
+
+And out of the blue-black convexity within a star point of one of the
+opened pyramids a lance of intense green flame darted, a lightning bolt
+as real as any hurled by tempest, upon Ventnor.
+
+The shattered air closed behind the streaming spark with the sound of
+breaking glass.
+
+It struck--Norhala.
+
+It struck her. It seemed to splash upon her, to run down her like water.
+One curling tongue writhed over her bare shoulder and leaped to the
+barrel of the rifle in Ventnor's hands. It flashed up it and licked
+him. The gun was torn from his grip, hurled high in air, exploding as it
+went. He leaped convulsively from his knees and dropped.
+
+I heard a wailing, low, bitter and heartbroken. Past us ran Ruth, all
+dream, all unearthliness gone from a face now a tragic mask of human
+woe and terror. She threw herself down beside her brother, felt of his
+heart; then raised herself upon her knees and thrust out supplicating
+hands to the shapes.
+
+“Don't hurt him any more! He didn't mean it!” she cried out to them
+piteously--like a child. She reached up, caught one of Norhala's hands.
+“Norhala--don't let them kill him. Don't let them hurt him any more.
+Please!” she sobbed.
+
+Beside me I heard Drake cursing.
+
+“If they touch her I'll kill the woman! I will, by God I will!” He
+strode to Norhala's side.
+
+“If you want to live, call off these devils of yours.” His voice was
+strangled.
+
+She looked at him, wonder deepening on the tranquil brow, in the clear,
+untroubled gaze. Of course she could not understand his words--but it
+was not that which made my own sick apprehension grow.
+
+It was that she did not understand what called them forth. Did not even
+understand what reason lay behind Ruth's sorrow, Ruth's prayer.
+
+And more and more wondering grew in her eyes as she looked from the
+threatening Drake to the supplicating Ruth, and from them to the still
+body of Ventnor.
+
+“Tell her what I say, Goodwin. I mean it.”
+
+I shook my head. That was not the way, I knew. I looked toward the Disk,
+still flanked with its sextette of spheres, still guarded by the flaming
+blue stars. They were motionless, calm, watching. I sensed no hostility,
+no anger; it was as though they were waiting for us to--to--waiting for
+us to do what?
+
+It came to me--they were indifferent. That was it--as indifferent as we
+could be to the struggle of an ephemera; and as mildly curious.
+
+“Norhala,” I turned to the woman, “she would not have him suffer; she
+would not have him die. She loves him.”
+
+“Love?” she repeated, and all of her wonderment seemed crystallized in
+the word. “Love?” she asked.
+
+“She loves him,” I said; and then, why I did not know, but I added,
+pointing to Drake: “and he loves her.”
+
+There was a tiny, astonished sob from Ruth. Again Norhala brooded over
+her. Then with a little despairing shake of her head, she paced over and
+faced the great Disk.
+
+
+Tensely we waited. Communication there was between them, interchange
+of--thought; how carried out I would not hazard even to myself.
+
+But of a surety these two--the goddess woman, the wholly unhuman shape
+of metal, of jeweled fires and conscious force--understood each other.
+
+For she turned, stood aside--and the body of Ventnor quivered, arose
+from the floor, stood upright and with closed eyes, head dropping upon
+one shoulder, glided toward the Disk like a dead man carried by those
+messengers never seen by man who, the Arabs believe, bear the death
+drugged souls before Allah for their awakening.
+
+Ruth moaned and hid her eyes; Drake reached down, gathered her up in his
+arms, held her close.
+
+Ventnor's body stood before the Disk, then swam up along its face. The
+tendrils waved out, felt of it, thrust themselves down through the wide
+collar of the shirt. The floating form passed higher, over the edge of
+the Disk; lay high beside the right star point of the rayed shape to
+which Ruth had been passing when Ventnor's shot brought the tragedy upon
+us. I saw other tentacles whip forth, examine, caress.
+
+Then down the body swung, was borne through air, laid gently at our
+feet.
+
+“He is not--dead,” it was Norhala beside me; she lifted Ruth's face from
+Drake's breast. “He will not die. It may be he will walk again. They
+can not help,” there was a shadow of apology in her tones. “They did
+not know. They thought it was the”--she hesitated as though at loss for
+words--“the--the Fire Play.”
+
+“The Fire Play?” I gasped.
+
+“Yes,” she nodded. “You shall see it. And now I will take him to my
+house. You are safe--now, nor need you trouble. For he has given you to
+me.”
+
+“Who has given us to you--Norhala?” I asked, as calmly as I could.
+
+“He”--she nodded to the Disk, then spoke the phrase that was both
+ancient Assyria's and ancient Persia's title for their all-conquering
+rulers, and that meant--“the King of Kings. The Great King, Master of
+Life and Death.”
+
+She took Ruth from Drake's arms, pointing to Ventnor.
+
+“Bear him,” she commanded, and led the way back through the walls of
+light.
+
+As we lifted the body, I slipped my hand through the shirt, felt at the
+heart. Faint was the pulsation and slow, but regular.
+
+Close to the encircling vapors I cast one look behind me. The shapes
+stood immobile, flashing disks, gigantic radiant stars and the six great
+spheres beneath their geometric super-Euclidean god or shrine or machine
+of interwoven threads of luminous force and metal--still motionless,
+still watching.
+
+We emerged into the place of pillars. There stood the hooded pony and
+its patience, its uncomplaining acceptance of its place as servant to
+man brought a lump into my throat, salved, I suppose, my human vanity,
+abased as it had been by the colossal indifference of those things to
+which we were but playthings.
+
+Again Norhala sent forth her call. Out of the maze glided her quintette
+of familiars; again the four clicked into one. Upon its top we lifted,
+Drake ascending first, the pony; then the body of Ventnor.
+
+I saw Norhala lead Ruth to the remaining cube; saw the girl break away
+from her, leap beside me, and kneeling at her brother's head, cradle
+it against her soft breast. Then as I found in the medicine case the
+hypodermic needle and the strychnine for which I had been searching, I
+began my examination of Ventnor.
+
+The cubes quivered--swept away through the forest of columns.
+
+We crouched, the three of us, blind to anything that lay about us,
+heedless of whatever road of wonders we were on, striving to strengthen
+in Ventnor the spark of life so near extinction.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII. “I WILL GIVE YOU PEACE”
+
+In our concentration upon Ventnor none of us had given thought to the
+passing of time, nor where we were going. We stripped him to the waist,
+and while Ruth massaged head and neck, Drake's strong fingers kneaded
+chest and abdomen. I had used to the utmost my somewhat limited medical
+knowledge.
+
+We had found no mark nor burn upon him, not even upon his hands over
+which had run the licking flame. The slightly purplish, cyanotic
+tinge of his skin had given way to a clear pallor; the skin was itself
+disquietingly cold, the blood-pressure only slightly subnormal. The
+pulse was more rapid, stronger; the breathing faint but regular, and
+with no laboring. The pupils of his eyes were contracted almost to the
+point of invisibility.
+
+I could get no nervous reactions whatever. I am familiar with the
+effects of electric shock and know what to do in such cases, but
+Ventnor's symptoms, while similar in part, presented other features
+unknown to me and most puzzling. There was a passive automatism, a
+perplexing muscular rigidity which caused arms and legs, hands and head
+to remain, doll-like, in any position placed.
+
+Several times during my labors I had been aware of Norhala gazing down
+upon us; but she made no effort to help, nor did she speak.
+
+Now, my strained attention relaxing, I began to receive and note
+impressions from without. There was a different feeling in the air,
+a diminution of the magnetic tension; I smelled the blessed breath of
+trees and water.
+
+The light about us was clear and pearly, about the intensity of the moon
+at full. Looking back along the way we had been traveling, I saw a half
+mile away vertical, knife-sharp edges of two facing cliffs, the gap
+between them a mile or more wide.
+
+Through them we must have passed, for beyond them were the radiant mists
+of the pit of the city, and through this precipitous gateway filtered
+the enveloping luminosity. On each side of us uprose gradually
+converging and perpendicular scarps along whose base huddled a sparse
+foliage.
+
+There came a low whistle of astonishment from Drake; I turned. We were
+slowly gliding toward something that looked like nothing so much as a
+huge and shimmering bubble of mingled sapphire and turquoise, swimming
+up from and two-thirds above and the balance still hidden within earth.
+It seemed to draw to itself the light, sending it back with gleamings
+of the gray-blue of the star sapphire, with pellucid azures and lazulis
+like clouded jades, with glistening peacock iridescences and tender,
+milky greens of tropic shallows.
+
+Little turrets globular and topaz, yellow and pierced with tiny
+hexagonal openings clustered about it like baby bubbles just nestling
+down to rest.
+
+Great trees shadowed it, unfamiliar trees among whose glossy leaves
+blossomed in wreaths flowers pink and white as apple-blossoms.
+From their graceful branches strange fruits, golden and scarlet and
+pear-shaped, hung pendulous.
+
+It was an elfin palace; a goblin dwelling; such a bower as some
+mirthful, beauty-loving Jinn King of Jewels might have built from
+enchanted hoards for some well-beloved daughter of earth.
+
+All of fifty feet in height was the blue globe, and up to a wide and
+ovaled entrance ran a broad and shining roadway. Along this the cubes
+swept and stopped.
+
+“My house,” murmured Norhala.
+
+The attraction that had held us to the surface of the blocks relaxed,
+angled through changed and assisting lines of force; the hosts of
+minute eyes sparkling quizzically, interestedly, at us, we gently slid
+Ventnor's body; lifted down the pony.
+
+“Enter,” sighed Norhala, and waved a welcoming hand.
+
+“Tell her to wait a minute,” ordered Drake.
+
+He slipped the bandage from off the pony's head, threw off the
+saddlebags, and led it to the side of the roadway where thick, lush
+grass was growing, spangled with flowerets. There he hobbled it and
+rejoined us. Together we picked up Ventnor and passed slowly through the
+portal.
+
+We stood in a shadowed chamber. The light that filled it was
+translucent, and oddly enough with little of the bluish quality I had
+expected. Crystalline it was; the shadows crystalline, too, rigid--like
+the facets of great crystals. And as my eyes accustomed themselves I saw
+that what I had thought shadows actually were none.
+
+They were slices of semitransparent stone like pale moonstones,
+springing from the curving walls and the high dome, and bisecting and
+intersecting the chamber. They were pierced with oval doorways over
+which fell glimmering metallic curtains--silk of silver and gold.
+
+I glimpsed a pile of this silken stuff near by, and as we laid our
+burden upon it Ruth caught my arm with a little frightened cry.
+
+Through a curtained oval sidled a figure.
+
+Black and tall, its long and gnarled arms swung apelike; its shoulders
+were distorted, one so much longer than the other that the hand upon
+that side hung far below the knee.
+
+It walked with a curious, crablike motion. Upon its face were stamped
+countless wrinkles and its blackness seemed less that of pigmentation
+than the weathering of unbelievable years, the very stain of
+ancientness. And about neither face nor figure was there anything to
+show whether it was man or woman.
+
+From the twisted shoulders a short and sleeveless red tunic fell.
+Incredibly old the creature was--and by its corded muscles, its sinewy
+tendons, as incredibly powerful. It raised within me a half sick
+revulsion, loathing. But the eyes were not ancient, no. Irisless,
+lashless, black and brilliant, they blazed out of the face's carven web
+of wrinkles, intent upon Norhala and filled with a flame of worship.
+
+
+It threw itself at her feet, prostrate, the inordinately long arms
+outstretched.
+
+“Mistress!” it whined in a high and curiously unpleasant falsetto.
+“Great lady! Goddess!”
+
+She stretched out a sandaled foot, touched one of the black taloned
+hands, and at the contact I saw a shiver of ecstasy run through the lank
+body. “Yuruk--” she began, and paused, regarding us.
+
+“The goddess speaks! Yuruk hears! The goddess speaks!” It was a chant of
+adoration.
+
+“Yuruk. Rise. Look upon the strangers.”
+
+The creature--and now I knew what it was--writhed, twisted, and
+hideously apelike crouched upon its haunches, hands knuckling the floor.
+
+By the amazement in the unwinking eyes it was plain that not till now
+had the eunuch taken cognizance of us. The amazement fled, was replaced
+with a black fire of malignancy, of hatred--jealousy.
+
+“Augh!” he snarled; leaped to his feet; thrust an arm toward Ruth. She
+gave a little cry, cowered against Drake.
+
+“None of that!” He struck down the clutching arm.
+
+“Yuruk!” There was a hint of anger in the bell-toned voice. “Yuruk,
+these belong to me. No harm must come to them. Yuruk--beware!”
+
+“The goddess commands. Yuruk obeys.” If fear quavered in the words,
+beneath was more than a trace of a sullenness, too, sinister enough.
+
+“That's a nice little playmate for her new playthings,” muttered Drake.
+“If that bird gets the least bit gay--I shoot him pronto.” He gave Ruth
+a reassuring hug. “Cheer up, Ruth. Don't mind that thing. He's something
+we can handle.”
+
+Norhala waved a white hand; Yuruk sidled over to one of the curtained
+ovals and through it, reappearing almost instantly with a huge platter
+upon which were fruits, and a curdly white liquid in bowls of thick
+porcelain.
+
+“Eat,” she said, as the gnarled black arms placed the platter at our
+feet.
+
+“Hungry?” asked Drake. Ruth shook her head violently.
+
+“I'm going out for the saddlebags,” said Drake. “We'll use our own
+stuff--while it lasts. I'm taking no chances on what the Yuruk lad
+brings--with all due respect to Norhala's good intentions.”
+
+He started for the doorway; the eunuch blocked his way.
+
+“We have with us food of our own, Norhala,” I explained. “He goes to get
+it.”
+
+She nodded indifferently; clapped her hands. Yuruk shrank back, and out
+strode Drake.
+
+“I am weary,” sighed Norhala. “The way was long. I will refresh
+myself--”
+
+She stretched out a foot toward Yuruk. He knelt, unlaced the turquoise
+bands, drew off the sandals. Her hands sought her breast, dwelt for an
+instant there.
+
+Down slipped her silken veils, clingingly, slowly, as though reluctant
+to unclasp her; whispering they fell from the high and tender breasts,
+the delicate rounded hips, and clustered about her feet in soft
+petalings as of some flower of pale amber foam. Out of the calyx of that
+flower arose the gleaming miracle of her body crowned with glowing glory
+of her cloudy hair.
+
+Naked she was, yet clothed with an unearthly purity, the purity of the
+far-flung, serene stars, of the eternal snows upon some calm, high-flung
+peak, the tranquil, silver dawns of spring; protected by some spell of
+divinity which chilled and slew the flame of desire. A maiden Ishtar, a
+virginal Isis; a woman--yet with no more of woman's lure than if she had
+been some exquisite and breathing statue of mingled ivory and milk of
+pearls.
+
+So she stood, indifferent to us who gazed upon her, withdrawn, musing,
+as though she had forgotten us. And that serene indifference, with its
+entire absence of what we term sex consciousness, revealed to me once
+more how great was the abyss between us and her.
+
+Slowly she raised her arms, wound the floating tresses into a coronal.
+I saw Drake enter with the saddlebags; saw them drop from hands relaxing
+under the shock of this amazing tableau; saw his eyes widen and fill
+with wonder and half-awed admiration.
+
+Now Norhala stepped out of her fallen robes and moved toward the further
+wall, Yuruk following. He stooped, raised an ewer of silver and began
+gently to pour over her shoulders its contents. Again and again he bent
+and filled the vessel, dipping it into a shallow basin from which came
+the bubbling and chuckling of a little spring. And again I marveled at
+the marble smoothness and fineness of her skin on which the caressing
+water left tiny silvery globules, gemming it. The eunuch slithered to
+one side, drew from a quaint chest clothes of white floss; patted her
+dry with them; threw over her shoulders a silken robe of blue.
+
+Back she floated to us; hovered over Ruth, crouching with her brother's
+head upon her knees.
+
+She made a motion as though to draw the girl to her; hesitated as Ruth's
+face set in a passion of denial. A shadow of kindness drifted through
+the wide, mysterious eyes; a shadow of pity joined it as she looked
+curiously down on Ventnor.
+
+“Bathe,” she murmured, and pointed to the pool. “And rest. No harm shall
+come to any of you here. And you--” A hand rested for a moment lightly
+on the girl's curly head. “When you desire it--I will again give
+you--peace!”
+
+She parted the curtains, and the eunuch still following, was hidden
+beyond them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII. “VOICE FROM THE VOID”
+
+Helplessly we looked at each other. Then called forth perhaps by what
+she saw in Drake's eyes, perhaps by another thought, Ruth's cheeks
+crimsoned, her head drooped; the web of her hair hid the warm rose of
+her face, the frozen pallor of Ventnor's.
+
+Abruptly, she sprang to her feet. “Walter! Dick! Something's happening
+to Martin!”
+
+Before she had ceased we were beside her; bending over Ventnor. His
+mouth was opening, slowly, slowly--with an effort agonizing to watch.
+Then his voice came through lips that scarcely moved; faint, faint as
+though it floated from infinite distances, a ghost of a voice whispering
+with phantom breath out of a dead throat.
+
+“Hard--hard! So hard!” the whispering complained. “Don't know how long I
+can keep connection--with voice.
+
+“Was fool to shoot. Sorry--might have gotten you in worse trouble--but
+crazy with fear for Ruth--thought, too, might be worth chance.
+Sorry--not my usual line--”
+
+The thin thread of sound ceased. I felt my eyes fill with tears; it was
+like Ventnor to flay himself like this for what he thought stupidity,
+like him to make this effort to admit his supposed fault and crave
+forgiveness--as like him as that mad attack upon the flaming Disk in its
+own temple, surrounded by its ministers, had been so bafflingly unlike
+his usual cool, collected self.
+
+“Martin,” I called, bending closer, “it's nothing, old friend. No one
+blames you. Try to rouse yourself.”
+
+“Dear,” it was Ruth, passionately tender, “it's me. Can you hear me?”
+
+“Only speck of consciousness and motionless in the void,” the whisper
+began again. “Terribly alive, terribly alone. Seem outside space
+yet--still in body. Can't see, hear, feel--short-circuited from every
+sense--but in some strange way realize you--Ruth, Walter, Drake.
+
+“See without seeing--here floating in darkness that is also light--black
+light--indescribable. In touch, too, with these--”
+
+Again the voice trailed into silence; returned, word and phrase pouring
+forth disconnected, with a curious and turbulent rhythm, like rushing
+wave crests linked by half-seen threads of the spindrift, vocal
+fragments of thought swiftly assembled by some subtle faculty of the
+mind as they fell into a coherent, incredible message.
+
+“Group consciousness--gigantic--operating within our sphere--operating
+also in spheres of vibration, energy, force--above, below one to which
+humanity reacts--perception, command forces known to us--but in
+greater degree--cognizant, manipulate unknown energies--senses known to
+us--unknown--can't realize them fully--impossible cover, only impinge
+on contact points akin to our senses, forces--even these profoundly
+modified by additional ones--metallic, crystalline, magnetic,
+electric--inorganic with every power of organic--consciousness basically
+same as ours--profoundly changed by differences in mechanism through
+which it finds expression--difference our bodies--theirs.
+
+“Conscious, mobile--inexorable, invulnerable. Getting clearer--see more
+clearly--see--” the voice shrilled out in a shuddering, thin lash of
+despair--“No! No--oh, God--no!”
+
+Then clearly and solemnly:
+
+“And God said: let us make men in our image, after our likeness, and
+let them have dominion over all the earth, and every creeping thing that
+creepeth upon the earth.”
+
+A silence; we bent closer, listening; the still, small voice took up
+the thread once more--but clearly further on. Something we had missed
+between that text from Genesis and what we were now hearing; something
+that even as he had warned us, he had not been able to articulate. The
+whisper broke through clearly in the middle of a sentence.
+
+“Nor is Jehovah the God of myriads of millions who through those same
+centuries, and centuries upon centuries before them, found earth a
+garden and grave--and all these countless gods and goddesses only
+phantom barriers raised by man to stand between him and the eternal
+forces man's instinct has always warned him are ever in readiness to
+destroy. That do destroy him as soon as his vigilance relaxes, his
+resistance weakens--the eternal, ruthless law that will annihilate
+humanity the instant it runs counter to that law and turns its will and
+strength against itself--”
+
+A little pause; then came these singular sentences:
+
+“Weaklings praying for miracles to make easy the path their own wills
+should clear. Beggars who whine for alms from dreams. Shirkers each
+struggling to place upon his god the burden whose carrying and whose
+carrying alone can give him strength to walk free and unafraid, himself
+godlike among the stars.”
+
+And now distinctly, unfalteringly, the voice went on:
+
+“Dominion over all the earth? Yes--as long as man is fit to rule; no
+longer. Science has warned us. Where was the mammal when the giant
+reptiles reigned? Slinking hidden and afraid in the dark and secret
+places. Yet man sprang from these skulking beasts.
+
+“For how long a time in the history of earth has man been master of it?
+For a breath--for a cloud's passing. And will remain master only until
+something grown stronger wrests mastery from him--even as he wrested it
+from his ravening kind--as they took it from the reptiles--as did the
+reptiles from the giant saurians--which snatched it from the nightmare
+rulers of the Triassic--and so down to whatever held sway in the murk of
+earth dawn.
+
+“Life! Life! Life! Life everywhere struggling for completion!
+
+“Life crowding other life aside, battling for its moment of supremacy,
+gaining it, holding it for one rise and fall of the wings of time
+beating through eternity--and then--hurled down, trampled under the feet
+of another straining life whose hour has struck.
+
+“Life crowding outside every barred threshold in a million circling
+worlds, yes, in a million rushing universes; pressing against the doors,
+bursting them down, overwhelming, forcing out those dwellers who had
+thought themselves so secure.
+
+“And these--these--” the voice suddenly dropped, became thickly,
+vibrantly resonant, “over the Threshold, within the House of Man--nor
+does he even dream that his doors are down. These--Things of metal whose
+brains are thinking crystals--Things that suck their strength from the
+sun and whose blood is the lightning.
+
+“The sun! The sun!” he cried. “There lies their weakness!”
+
+The voice rose in pitch, grew strident.
+
+“Go back to the city! Go back to the city! Walter--Drake. They are not
+invulnerable. No! The sun--strike them through the sun! Go into the
+city--not invulnerable--the Keeper of the Cones--strike at the Cones
+when--the Keeper of the Cones--ah-h-h-ah--”
+
+We shrank back appalled, for from the parted, scarcely moving lips in
+the unchanging face a gust of laughter, mad, mocking, terrifying, racked
+its way.
+
+“Vulnerable--under the law--even as we! The Cones!
+
+“Go!” he gasped. A tremor shook him; slowly the mouth closed.
+
+“Martin! Brother,” wept Ruth. I thrust my hand into his breast; felt
+the heart beating, with a curious suggestion of stubborn, unshakable
+strength, as though every vital force had concentrated there as in a
+beleaguered citadel.
+
+But Ventnor himself, the consciousness that was Ventnor was gone; had
+withdrawn into that subjective void in which he had said he floated--a
+lonely sentient atom, his one line of communication with us cut; severed
+from us as completely as though he were, as he had described it, outside
+space.
+
+And Drake and I looked at each other's eyes, neither daring to be first
+to break the silence of which the muffled sobbing of the girl seemed to
+be the sorrowful soul.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV. “FREE! BUT A MONSTER!”
+
+The peculiar ability of the human mind to slip so readily into the
+refuge of the commonplace after, or even during, some well-nigh
+intolerable crisis, has been to me long one of the most interesting
+phenomena of our psychology.
+
+It is instinctively a protective habit, of course, acquired through
+precisely the same causes that had given to animals their protective
+coloration--the stripes, say, of the zebra and tiger that blend so
+cunningly with the barred and speckled shadowings of bush and jungle,
+the twig and leaflike shapes and hues of certain insects; in fact, all
+that natural camouflage which was the basis of the art of concealment so
+astonishingly developed in the late war.
+
+Like the animals of the wild, the mind of man moves through a
+jungle--the jungle of life, passing along paths beaten out by the
+thought of his countless forefathers in their progress from birth to
+death.
+
+And these paths are bordered and screened, figuratively and
+literally, with bush and trees of his own selection, setting out and
+cultivation--shelters of the familiar, the habitual, the customary.
+
+On these ancestral paths, within these barriers of usage, man moves
+hidden and secure as the animals in their haunts--or so he thinks.
+
+Outside them lie the wildernesses and the gardens of the unknown, and
+man's little trails are but rabbit-runs in an illimitable forest.
+
+But they are home to him!
+
+Therefore it is that he scurries from some open place of revelation,
+some storm of emotion, some strength-testing struggle, back into the
+shelter of the obvious; finding it an intellectual environment that
+demands no slightest expenditure of mental energy or initiative,
+strength to sally forth again into the unfamiliar.
+
+I crave pardon for this digression. I set it down because now I remember
+how, when Drake at last broke the silence that had closed in upon
+the passing of that still, small voice the essence of these thoughts
+occurred to me.
+
+He strode over to the weeping girl, and in his voice was a roughness
+that angered me until I realized his purpose.
+
+“Get up, Ruth,” he ordered. “He came back once and he'll come back
+again. Now let him be and help us get a meal together. I'm hungry.”
+
+She looked up at him, incredulously, indignation rising.
+
+“Eat!” she exclaimed. “You can be hungry?”
+
+“You bet I can--and I am,” he answered cheerfully. “Come on; we've got
+to make the best of it.”
+
+“Ruth,” I broke in gently, “we'll all have to think about ourselves a
+little if we're to be of any use to him. You must eat--and then rest.”
+
+“No use crying in the milk even if it's spilt,” observed Drake, even
+more cheerfully brutal. “I learned that at the front where we got so
+we'd yelp for food even when the lads who'd been bringing it were all
+mixed up in it.”
+
+She lifted Ventnor's head from her lap, rested it on the silks; arose,
+eyes wrathful, her little hands closed in fists as though to strike him.
+
+“Oh--you brute!” she whispered. “And I thought--I thought--Oh, I hate
+you!”
+
+“That's better,” said Dick. “Go ahead and hit me if you want. The madder
+you get the better you'll feel.”
+
+For a moment I thought she was going to take him at his word; then her
+anger fled.
+
+“Thanks--Dick,” she said quietly.
+
+And while I sat studying Ventnor, they put together a meal from the
+stores, brewed tea over the spirit-lamp with water from the bubbling
+spring. In these commonplaces I knew that she at least was finding
+relief from that strain of the abnormal under which we had labored so
+long. To my surprise I found that I was hungry, and with deep relief I
+watched Ruth partake of food and drink even though lightly.
+
+About her seemed to hover something of the ethereal, elusive, and
+disquieting. Was it the strangely pellucid light that gave the effect, I
+wondered; and knew it was not, for as I scanned her covertly, there
+fell upon her face that shadow of inhuman tranquillity, of unearthly
+withdrawal which, I guessed, had more than anything else maddened
+Ventnor into his attack upon the Disk.
+
+I watched her fight against it, drive it back. White lipped, she raised
+her head and met my gaze. And in her eyes I read both terror and--shame.
+
+It came to me that painful as it might be for her the time for
+questioning had come.
+
+“Ruth,” I said, “I know it's not necessary to remind you that we're in
+a tight place. Every fact and every scrap of knowledge that we can lay
+hold of is of the utmost importance in enabling us to determine our
+course.
+
+“I'm going to repeat your brother's question--what did Norhala do to
+you? And what happened when you were floating before the Disk?”
+
+The blaze of interest in Drake's eyes at these questions changed to
+amazement at her stricken recoil from them.
+
+“There was nothing,” she whispered--then defiantly--“nothing. I don't
+know what you mean.”
+
+“Ruth!” I spoke sharply now, in my own perplexity. “You do know. You
+must tell us--for his sake.” I pointed toward Ventnor.
+
+
+She drew a long breath.
+
+“You're right--of course,” she said unsteadily. “Only I--I thought maybe
+I could fight it out myself. But you'll have to know it--there's a taint
+upon me.”
+
+I caught in Drake's swift glance the echo of my own thrill of
+apprehension for her sanity.
+
+“Yes,” she said, now quietly. “Some new and alien thing within my heart,
+my brain, my soul. It came to me from Norhala when we rode the flying
+block, and--he--sealed upon me when I was in--his”--again she crimsoned,
+“embrace.”
+
+And as we gazed at her, incredulously:
+
+“A thing that urges me to forget you two--and Martin--and all the
+world I've known. That tries to pull me from you--from all--to drift
+untroubled in some vast calm filled with an ordered ecstasy of peace.
+And whose calling I want, God help me, oh, so desperately to heed!
+
+“It whispered to me first,” she said, “from Norhala--when she put her
+arm around me. It whispered and then seemed to float from her and cover
+me like--like a veil, and from head to foot. It was a quietness and
+peace that held within it a happiness at one and the same time utterly
+tranquil and utterly free.
+
+“I seemed to be at the doorway to unknown ecstasies--and the life I had
+known only a dream--and you, all of you--even Martin, dreams within a
+dream. You weren't--real--and you did not--matter.”
+
+“Hypnotism,” muttered Drake, as she paused.
+
+“No.” She shook her head. “No--more than that. The wonder of it
+grew--and grew. I thrilled with it. I remember nothing of that ride, saw
+nothing--except that once through the peace enfolding me pierced warning
+that Martin was in peril, and I broke through to see him clutching
+Norhala and to see floating up in her eyes death for him.
+
+“And I saved him--and again forgot. Then, when I saw that
+beautiful, flaming Shape--I felt no terror, no fear--only a
+tremendous--joyous--anticipation, as though--as though--” She faltered,
+hung her head, then leaving that sentence unfinished, whispered: “and
+when--it--lifted me it was as though I had come at last out of some
+endless black ocean of despair into the full sun of paradise.”
+
+“Ruth!” cried Drake, and at the pain in his cry she winced.
+
+“Wait,” she said, and held up a little, tremulous hand. “You asked--and
+now you must listen.”
+
+She was silent; and when once more she spoke her voice was low,
+curiously rhythmic; her eyes rapt:
+
+“I was free--free from every human fetter of fear or sorrow or love or
+hate; free even of hope--for what was there to hope for when everything
+desirable was mine? And I was elemental; one with the eternal things yet
+fully conscious that I was--I.
+
+“It was as though I were the shining shadow of a star afloat upon the
+breast of some still and hidden woodland pool; as though I were a little
+wind dancing among the mountain tops; a mist whirling down a quiet glen;
+a shimmering lance of the aurora pulsing in the high solitudes.
+
+“And there was music--strange and wondrous music and terrible, but not
+terrible to me--who was part of it. Vast chords and singing themes that
+rang like clusters of little swinging stars and harmonies that were like
+the very voice of infinite law resolving within itself all discords. And
+all--all--passionless, yet--rapturous.
+
+“Out of the Thing that held me, out from its fires pulsed vitality--a
+flood of inhuman energy in which I was bathed. And it was as though this
+energy were--reassembling me, fitting me even closer to the elemental
+things, changing me fully into them.
+
+“I felt the little tendrils touching, caressing--then came the shots.
+Awakening was--dreadful, a struggling back from drowning. I saw
+Martin--blasted. I drove the--the spell away from me, tore it away.
+
+“And, O Walter--Dick--it hurt--it hurt--and for a breath before I ran
+to him it was like--like coming from a world in which there was no
+disorder, no sorrow, no doubts, a rhythmic, harmonious world of light
+and music, into--into a world that was like a black and dirty kitchen.
+
+“And it's there,” her voice rose, hysterically. “It's still within
+me--whispering, whispering; urging me away from you, from Martin, from
+every human thing; bidding me give myself up, surrender my humanity.
+
+“Its seal,” she sobbed. “No--HIS seal! An alien consciousness sealed
+within me, that tries to make the human me a slave--that waits to
+overcome my will--and if I surrender gives me freedom, an incredible
+freedom--but makes me, being still human, a--monster.”
+
+She hid her face in her hands, quivering.
+
+“If I could sleep,” she wailed. “But I'm afraid to sleep. I think I
+shall never sleep again. For sleeping how do I know what I may be when I
+wake?”
+
+I caught Drake's eye; he nodded. I slipped my hand down into the
+medicine-case, brought forth a certain potent and tasteless combination
+of drugs which I carry upon explorations.
+
+I dropped a little into her cup, then held it to her lips. Like a child,
+unthinking, she obeyed and drank.
+
+“But I'll not surrender.” Her eyes were tragic. “Never think it! I can
+win--don't you know I can?”
+
+“Win?” Drake dropped down beside her, drew her toward him. “Bravest girl
+I've known--of course you'll win. And remember this--nine-tenths of what
+you're thinking now is purely over-wrought nerves and weariness. You'll
+win--and we'll win, never doubt it.”
+
+“I don't,” she said. “I know it--oh, it will be hard--but I will--I
+will--”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV. THE HOUSE OF NORHALA
+
+Her eyes closed, her body relaxed; the potion had done its work quickly.
+We laid her beside Ventnor on the pile of silken stuffs, covered them
+both with a fold, then looked at each other long and silently--and I
+wondered whether my face was as grim and drawn as his.
+
+“It appears,” he said at last, curtly, “that it's up to you and me for
+powwow quick. I hope you're not sleepy.”
+
+“I am not,” I answered as curtly; the edge of nerves in his manner of
+questioning doing nothing to soothe my own, “and even if I were I would
+hardly expect to put all the burden of the present problem upon you by
+going to sleep.”
+
+“For God's sake don't be a prima donna,” he flared up. “I meant no
+offense.”
+
+“I'm sorry, Dick,” I said. “We're both a little jumpy, I guess.” He
+nodded; gripped my hand.
+
+“It wouldn't be so bad,” he muttered, “if all four of us were all
+right. But Ventnor's down and out, and God alone knows for how long. And
+Ruth--has all the trouble we have and some special ones of her own. I've
+an idea”--he hesitated--“an idea that there was no exaggeration in that
+story she told--an idea that if anything she underplayed it.”
+
+“I, too,” I replied somberly. “And to me it is the most hideous phase
+of this whole situation--and for reasons not all connected with Ruth,” I
+added.
+
+“Hideous!” he repeated. “Unthinkable--yet all this is unthinkable.
+And still--it is! And Ventnor--coming back--that way. Like a lost soul
+finding voice.
+
+“Was it raving, Goodwin? Or could he have been--how was it he put it--in
+touch with these Things and their purpose? Was that message--truth?”
+
+“Ask yourself that question,” I said. “Man--you know it was truth. Had
+not inklings of it come to you even before he spoke? They had to me.
+His message was but an interpretation, a synthesis of facts I, for one,
+lacked the courage to admit.”
+
+“I, too,” he nodded. “But he went further than that. What did he mean by
+the Keeper of the Cones--and that the Things--were vulnerable under the
+same law that orders us? And why did he command us to go back to the
+city? How could he know--how could he?”
+
+“There's nothing inexplicable in that, at any rate,” I answered.
+“Abnormal sensitivity of perception due to the cutting off of all
+sensual impressions. There's nothing uncommon in that. You have its most
+familiar form in the sensitivity of the blind. You've watched the same
+thing at work in certain forms of hypnotic experimentation, haven't you?
+
+“Through the operation of entirely understandable causes the mind gains
+the power to react to vibrations that normally pass unperceived; is able
+to project itself through this keying up of perception into a wider area
+of consciousness than the normal. Just as in certain diseases of the ear
+the sufferer, though deaf to sounds within the average range of hearing,
+is fully aware of sound vibrations far above and far below those the
+healthy ear registers.”
+
+“I know,” he said. “I don't need to be convinced. But we accept these
+things in theory--and when we get up against them for ourselves we
+doubt.
+
+“How many people are there in Christendom, do you think, who believe
+that the Saviour ascended from the dead, but who if they saw it today
+would insist upon medical inspection, doctor's certificates, a
+clinic, and even after that render a Scotch verdict? I'm not speaking
+irreverently--I'm just stating a fact.”
+
+Suddenly he moved away from me, strode over to the curtained oval
+through which Norhala had gone.
+
+“Dick,” I cried, following him hastily, “where are you going? What are
+you going to do?”
+
+“I'm going after Norhala,” he answered. “I'm going to have a showdown
+with her or know the reason why.”
+
+“Drake,” I cried again, aghast, “don't make the mistake Ventnor did.
+That's not the way to win through. Don't--I beg you, don't.”
+
+“You're wrong,” he answered stubbornly. “I'm going to get her. She's got
+to talk.”
+
+He thrust out a hand to the curtains. Before he could touch them, they
+were parted. Out from between them slithered the black eunuch. He stood
+motionless, regarding us; in the ink-black eyes a red flame of hatred. I
+pushed myself between him and Drake.
+
+“Where is your mistress, Yuruk?” I asked.
+
+“The goddess has gone,” he replied sullenly.
+
+“Gone?” I said suspiciously, for certainly Norhala had not passed us.
+“Where?”
+
+“Who shall question the goddess?” he asked. “She comes and she goes as
+she pleases.”
+
+I translated this for Drake.
+
+“He's got to show me,” he said. “Don't think I'm going to spill any
+beans, Goodwin. But I want to talk to her. I think I'm right, honestly I
+do.”
+
+
+After all, I reflected, there was much in his determination to recommend
+it. It was the obvious thing to do--unless we admitted that Norhala was
+superhuman; and that I would not admit. In command of forces we did not
+yet know, en rapport with these People of Metal, sealed with that alien
+consciousness Ruth had described--all these, yes. But still a woman--of
+that I was certain. And surely Drake could be trusted not to repeat
+Ventnor's error.
+
+“Yuruk,” I said, “we think you lie. We would speak to your mistress.
+Take us to her.”
+
+“I have told you that the goddess is not here,” he said. “If you do not
+believe it is nothing to me. I cannot take you to her for I do not know
+where she is. Is it your wish that I take you through her house?”
+
+“It is,” I said.
+
+“The goddess has commanded me to serve you in all things.” He bowed,
+sardonically. “Follow.”
+
+Our search was short. We stepped out into what for want of better words
+I can describe only as a central hall. It was circular, and strewn with
+thick piled small rugs whose hues had been softened by the alchemy of
+time into exquisite, shadowy echoes of color.
+
+The walls of this hall were of the same moonstone substance that had
+enclosed the chamber upon whose inner threshold we were. They whirled
+straight up to the dome in a crystalline, cylindrical cone. Four
+doorways like that in which we stood pierced them. Through each of their
+curtainings in turn we peered.
+
+All were precisely similar in shape and proportions, radiating in a
+lunetted, curved base triangle from the middle chamber; the curvature of
+the enclosing globe forming back wall and roof; the translucent slicings
+the sides; the circle of floor of the inner hall the truncating lunette.
+
+The first of these chambers was utterly bare. The one opposite held a
+half-dozen suits of the lacquered armor, as many wicked looking, short
+and double-edged swords and long javelins. The third I judged to be the
+lair of Yuruk; within it was a copper brazier, a stand of spears and a
+gigantic bow, a quiver full of arrows leaning beside it. The fourth room
+was littered with coffers great and small, of wood and of bronze, and
+all tightly closed.
+
+The fifth room was beyond question Norhala's bedchamber. Upon its floor
+the ancient rugs were thick. A low couch of carven ivory inset with gold
+rested a few feet from the doorway. A dozen or more of the chests were
+scattered about and flowing over with silken stuffs.
+
+Upon the back of four golden lions stood a high mirror of polished
+silver. And close to it, in curiously incongruous domestic array stood
+a stiffly marshaled row of sandals. Upon one of the chests were heaped
+combs and fillets of shell and gold and ivory studded with jewels blue
+and yellow and crimson.
+
+To all of these we gave but a passing glance. We sought for Norhala.
+And of her we found no shadow. She had gone even as the black eunuch had
+said; flitting unseen past Ruth, perhaps, absorbed in her watch over her
+brother; perhaps through some hidden opening in this room of hers.
+
+Yuruk let drop the curtains, sidled back to the first room, we after
+him. The two there had not moved. We drew the saddlebags close, propped
+ourselves against them.
+
+The black eunuch squatted a dozen feet away, facing us, chin upon his
+knees, taking us in with unblinking eyes blank of any emotion. Then
+he began to move slowly his tremendously long arms in easy, soothing
+motion, the hands running along the floor upon their talons in arcs
+and circles. It was curious how these hands seemed to be endowed with a
+volition of their own, independent of the arms upon which they swung.
+
+And now I could see only the hands, shuttling so smoothly, so
+rhythmically back and forth--weaving so sleepily, so sleepily back and
+forth--black hands that dripped sleep--hypnotic.
+
+Hypnotic! I sprang from the lethargy closing upon me. In one quick side
+glance I saw Drake's head nodding--nodding in time to the movement of
+the black hands. I jumped to my feet, shaking with an intensity of rage
+unfamiliar to me; thrust my pistol into the wrinkled face.
+
+“Damn you!” I cried. “Stop that. Stop it and turn your back.”
+
+The corded muscles of the arms contracted, the claws of the slithering
+paws drew in as though he were about to clutch me; the ebon pools of
+eyes were covered with a frozen film of hate.
+
+He could not have known what was this tube with which I menaced him,
+but its threat he certainly sensed and was afraid to meet. He squattered
+about, wrapped his arms around his knees, crouched with back toward us.
+
+“What's the matter?” asked Drake drowsily.
+
+“He tried to hypnotize us,” I answered shortly. “And pretty nearly did.”
+
+“So that's what it was.” He was now wide awake. “I watched those hands
+of his and got sleepier and sleepier--I guess we'd better tie Mr. Yuruk
+up.” He jumped to his feet.
+
+“No,” I said, restraining him. “No. He's safe enough as long as we're on
+the alert. I don't want to use any force on him yet. Wait until we know
+we can get something worth while by doing it.”
+
+“All right,” he nodded, grimly. “But when the time comes I'm telling you
+straight, Doc, I'm going the limit. There's something about that human
+spider that makes me itch to squash him--slowly.”
+
+“I'll have no compunction--when it's worth while,” I answered as grimly.
+
+We sank down again against the saddlebags; Drake brought out a black
+pipe, looked at it sorrowfully; at me appealingly.
+
+“All mine was on that pony that bolted,” I answered his wistfulness.
+
+“All mine was on my beast, too,” he sighed. “And I lost my pouch in that
+spurt from the ruins.”
+
+He sighed again, clamped white teeth down upon the stem.
+
+“Of course,” he said at last, “if Ventnor was right in that--that
+disembodied analysis of his, it's rather--well, terrifying, isn't it?”
+
+“It's all of that,” I replied, “and considerably more.”
+
+“Metal, he said,” Drake mused. “Things of metal with brains of thinking
+crystal and their blood the lightnings. You accept that?”
+
+“So far as my own observation has gone--yes,” I said. “Metallic yet
+mobile. Inorganic but with all the quantities we have hitherto thought
+only those of the organic and with others added. Crystalline, of course,
+in structure and highly complex. Activated by magnetic-electric forces
+consciously exerted and as much a part of their life as brain energy
+and nerve currents are of our human life. Animate, moving, sentient
+combinations of metal and electric energy.”
+
+He said:
+
+“The opening of the Disk from the globe and of the two blasting stars
+from the pyramids show the flexibility of the outer--plate would you
+call it? I couldn't help thinking of the armadillo after I had time to
+think at all.”
+
+“It may be”--I struggled against the conviction now strong upon me--“it
+may be that within that metallic shell is an organic body, something
+soft--animal, as there is within the horny carapace of the turtle, the
+nacreous valves of the oyster, the shells of the crustaceans--it may be
+that even their inner surface is organic--”
+
+“No,” he interrupted, “if there is a body--as we know a body--it must
+be between the outer surface and the inner, for the latter is crystal,
+jewel hard, impenetrable.
+
+“Goodwin--Ventnor's bullets hit fair. I saw them strike. They did not
+ricochet--they dropped dead. Like flies dashed up against a rock--and
+the Thing was no more conscious of their striking than a rock would have
+been of those flies.”
+
+
+“Drake,” I said, “my own conviction is that these creatures are
+absolutely metallic, entirely inorganic--incredible, unknown forms. Let
+us go on that basis.”
+
+“I think so, too,” he nodded; “but I wanted you to say it first. And
+yet--is it so incredible, Goodwin? What is the definition of vital
+intelligence--sentience?
+
+“Haeckel's is the accepted one. Anything which can receive a stimulus,
+that can react to a stimulus and retains memory of a stimulus must be
+called an intelligent, conscious entity. The gap between what we have
+long called the organic and the inorganic is steadily decreasing. Do you
+know of the remarkable experiments of Lillie upon various metals?”
+
+“Vaguely,” I said.
+
+“Lillie,” he went on, “proved that under the electric current and other
+exciting mediums metals exhibited practically every reaction of the
+human nerve and muscle. It grew weary, rested, and after resting
+was perceptibly stronger than before; it got what was practically
+indigestion, and it exhibited a peculiar but unmistakable memory. Also,
+he found, it could acquire disease and die.
+
+“Lillie concluded that there existed a real metallic consciousness. It
+was Le Bon who first proved also that metal is more sensitive than
+man, and that its immobility is only apparent. (Le Bon in 'Evolution of
+Matter,' Chapter eleven.)
+
+“Take the block of magnetic iron that stands so gray and apparently
+lifeless, subject it to a magnetic current lifeless, what happens? The
+iron block is composed of molecules which under ordinary conditions are
+disposed in all possible directions indifferently. But when the current
+passes through there is tremendous movement in that apparently inert
+mass. All of the tiny particles of which it is composed turn and shift
+until their north poles all point more or less approximately in the
+direction of the magnetic force.
+
+“When that happens the block itself becomes a magnet, filled with and
+surrounded by a field of magnetic energy; instinct with it. Outwardly it
+has not moved; actually there has been prodigious motion.”
+
+“But it is not conscious motion,” I objected.
+
+“Ah, but how do you know?” he asked. “If Jacques Loeb* is right, that
+action of the iron molecules is every bit as conscious a movement as
+the least and the greatest of our own. There is absolutely no difference
+between them.
+
+“Your and my and its every movement is nothing but an involuntary and
+inevitable reaction to a certain stimulus. If he's right, then I'm a
+buttercup--but that's neither here nor there. Loeb--all he did was
+to restate destiny, one of humanity's oldest ideas, in the terms of
+tropisms, infusoria and light. Omar Khayyam chemically reincarnated in
+the Rockefeller Institute. Nevertheless those who accept his theories
+have to admit that there is essentially no difference between their
+impulses and the rush of filings toward a magnet.
+
+“Equally nevertheless, Goodwin, the iron does meet Haeckel's three
+tests--it can receive a stimulus, it does react to that stimulus and it
+retains memory of it; for even after the current has ceased it remains
+changed in tensile strength, conductivity and other qualities that were
+modified by the passage of that current; and as time passes this memory
+fades. Precisely as some human experience increases wariness, caution,
+which keying up of qualities remains with us after the experience
+has passed, and fades away in the ratio of our sensitivity plus
+retentiveness divided by the time elapsing from the original
+experience--exactly as it is in the iron.”
+
+     * Professor Jacques Loeb, of the Rockefeller Institute, New
+     York, “The Mechanistic Conception of Life.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI. CONSCIOUS METAL!
+
+“Granted,” I acquiesced. “We now come to their means of locomotion. In
+its simplest terms all locomotion is progress through space against
+the force of gravitation. Man's walk is a series of rhythmic stumbles
+against this force that constantly strives to drag him down to earth's
+face and keep him pressed there. Gravitation is an etheric--magnetic
+vibration akin to the force which holds, to use your simile again,
+Drake, the filing against the magnet. A walk is a constant breaking of
+the current.
+
+“Take a motion picture of a man walking and run it through the lantern
+rapidly and he seems to be flying. We have none of the awkward fallings
+and recoveries that are the tempo of walking as we see it.
+
+“I take it that the movement of these Things is a conscious breaking of
+the gravitational current just as much as is our own movement, but by a
+rhythm so swift that it appears to be continuous.
+
+“Doubtless if we could so control our sight as to admit the vibrations
+of light slowly enough we would see this apparently smooth motion as a
+series of leaps--just as we do when the motion-picture operator
+slows down his machine sufficiently to show us walking in a series of
+stumbles.
+
+“Very well--so far, then, we have nothing in this phenomenon which the
+human mind cannot conceive as possible; therefore intellectually we
+still remain masters of the phenomena; for it is only that which human
+thought cannot encompass which it need fear.”
+
+“Metallic,” he said, “and crystalline. And yet--why not? What are we but
+bags of skin filled with certain substances in solution and stretched
+over a supporting and mobile mechanism largely made up of lime? Out of
+that primeval jelly which Gregory * calls Protobion came after untold
+millions of years us with our skins, our nails, and our hair; came, too,
+the serpents with their scales, the birds with their feathers; the horny
+hide of the rhinoceros and the fairy wings of the butterfly; the shell
+of the crab, the gossamer loveliness of the moth and the shimmering
+wonder of the mother-of-pearl.
+
+     * J. W. Gregory, F.R.S.D.Sc., Professor of Geology,
+     University of Glasgow.
+
+“Is there any greater gap between any of these and the metallic? I think
+not.”
+
+“Not materially,” I answered. “No. But there remains--consciousness!”
+
+“That,” he said, “I cannot understand. Ventnor spoke of--how did he put
+it?--a group consciousness, operating in our sphere and in spheres above
+and below ours, with senses known and unknown. I got--glimpses--Goodwin,
+but I cannot understand.”
+
+“We have agreed for reasons that seem sufficient to us to call these
+Things metallic, Dick,” I replied. “But that does not necessarily mean
+that they are composed of any metal that we know. Nevertheless, being
+metal, they must be of crystalline structure.
+
+“As Gregory has pointed out, crystals and what we call living matter had
+an equal start in the first essentials of life. We cannot conceive life
+without giving it the attribute of some sort of consciousness. Hunger
+cannot be anything but conscious, and there is no other stimulus to eat
+but hunger.
+
+“The crystals eat. The extraction of power from food is conscious
+because it is purposeful, and there can be no purpose without
+consciousness; similarly the power to work from such derived energy is
+also purposeful and therefore conscious. The crystals do both. And the
+crystals can transmit all these abilities to their children, just as we
+do. For although there would seem to be no reason why they should not
+continue to grow to gigantic size under favorable conditions--yet they
+do not. They reach a size beyond which they do not develop.
+
+“Instead, they bud--give birth, in fact--to smaller ones, which increase
+until they reach the size of the preceding generation. And like the
+children of man and animals, these younger generations grow on precisely
+as their progenitors!
+
+“Very well, then--we arrive at the conception of a metallically
+crystalline being, which by some explosion of the force of evolution
+has burst from the to us familiar and apparently inert stage into these
+Things that hold us. And is there any greater difference between the
+forms with which we are familiar and them than there is between us and
+the crawling amphibian which is our remote ancestor? Or between that and
+the amoeba--the little swimming stomach from which it evolved? Or the
+amoeba and the inert jelly of the Protobion?
+
+“As for what Ventnor calls a group consciousness I would assume that
+he means a communal intelligence such as that shown by the bees and the
+ants--that in the case of the former Maeterlinck calls the 'Spirit
+of the Hive.' It is shown in their groupings--just as the geometric
+arrangement of those groupings shows also clearly their crystalline
+intelligence.
+
+“I submit that in their rapid coordination either for attack or movement
+or work without apparent communication having passed between the units,
+there is nothing more remarkable than the swarming of a hive of bees
+where also without apparent communication just so many waxmakers,
+nurses, honey-gatherers, chemists, bread-makers, and all the varied
+specialists of the hive go with the old queen, leaving behind sufficient
+number of each class for the needs of the young queen.
+
+“All this apportionment is effected without any means of communication
+that we recognize. Still it is most obviously intelligent selection.
+For if it were haphazard all the honeymakers might leave and the hive
+starve, or all the chemists might go and the food for the young bees not
+be properly prepared--and so on and so on.”
+
+“But metal,” he muttered, “and conscious. It's all very well--but where
+did that consciousness come from? And what is it? And where did they
+come from? And most of all, why haven't they overrun the world before
+this?
+
+“Such development as theirs, such an evolution, presupposes aeons of
+time--long as it took us to drag up from the lizards. What have
+they been doing--why haven't they been ready to strike--if Ventnor's
+right--at humanity until now?”
+
+“I don't know,” I answered, helplessly. “But evolution is not the
+slow, plodding process that Darwin thought. There seem to be
+explosions--nature will create a new form almost in a night. Then comes
+the long ages of development and adjustment, and suddenly another new
+race appears.
+
+“It might be so of these--some extraordinary conditions that shaped
+them. Or they might have developed through the ages in spaces within
+the earth--there's that incredible abyss we saw that is evidently one of
+their highways. Or they might have dropped here upon some fragment of a
+broken world, found in this valley the right conditions and developed in
+amazing rapidity. * They're all possible theories--take your pick.”
+
+     * Professor Svante Arrhenius's theory of propagation of life
+     by means of minute spores carried through space. See his
+     “Worlds in the Making.”--W.T.G.
+
+“Something's held them back--and they're rushing to a climax,” he
+whispered. “Ventnor's right about that--I feel it. And what can we do?”
+
+“Go back to their city,” I said. “Go back as he ordered. I believe he
+knows what he's talking about. And I believe he'll be able to help us.
+It wasn't just a request he made, nor even an appeal--it was a command.”
+
+“But what can we do--just two men--against these Things?” he groaned.
+
+“Maybe we'll find out--when we're back in the city,” I answered.
+
+“Well,” his old reckless cheerfulness came back to him, “in every crisis
+of this old globe it's been up to one man to turn the trick. We're two.
+And at the worst we can only go down fighting a little before the rest
+of us. So, after all, whatEVER the hell, WHAT the hell.”
+
+For a time we were silent.
+
+“Well,” he said at last, “we have to go to the city in the morning.”
+ He laughed. “Sounds as though we were living in the suburbs, somehow,
+doesn't it?”
+
+“It can't be many hours before dawn,” I said. “Turn in for a while, I'll
+wake you when I think you've slept enough.”
+
+“It doesn't seem fair,” he protested, but sleepily.
+
+“I'm not sleepy,” I told him; nor was I.
+
+But whether I was or not, I wanted to question Yuruk, uninterrupted and
+undisturbed.
+
+Drake stretched himself out. When his breathing showed him fast asleep
+indeed, I slipped over to the black eunuch and crouched, right hand
+close to the butt of my automatic, facing him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII. YURUK
+
+“Yuruk,” I whispered, “you love us as the wheat field loves the hail;
+we are as welcome to you as the death cord to the condemned. Lo, a door
+opened into a land of unpleasant dreams you thought sealed, and we came
+through. Answer my questions truthfully and it may be that we shall
+return through that door.”
+
+Interest welled up in the depths of the black eyes.
+
+“There is a way from here,” he muttered. “Nor does it pass
+through--Them. I can show it to you.”
+
+I had not been blind to the flash of malice, of cunning, that had shot
+across the wrinkled face.
+
+“Where does that way lead?” I asked. “There were those who sought us;
+men clad in armor with javelins and arrows. Does your way lead to them,
+Yuruk?”
+
+For a time he hesitated, the lashless lids half closed.
+
+“Yes,” he said sullenly. “The way leads to them; to their place. But
+will it not be safer for you there--among your kind?”
+
+“I don't know that it will,” I answered promptly. “Those who are unlike
+us smote those who are like us and drove them back when they would have
+taken and slain us. Why is it not better to remain with them than to go
+to our kind who would destroy us?”
+
+“They would not,” he said “If you gave them--her.” He thrust a long
+thumb backward toward sleeping Ruth. “Cherkis would forgive much for
+her. And why should you not? She is only a woman.”
+
+He spat--in a way that made me want to kill him.
+
+“Besides,” he ended, “have you no arts to amuse him?”
+
+“Cherkis?” I asked.
+
+“Cherkis,” he whined. “Is Yuruk a fool not to know that in the world
+without, new things have arisen since long ago we fled from Iskander
+into the secret valley? What have you to beguile Cherkis beyond this
+woman flesh? Much, I think. Go then to him--unafraid.”
+
+Cherkis? There was a familiar sound to that. Cherkis? Of course--it
+was the name of Xerxes, the Persian Conqueror, corrupted by time into
+this--Cherkis. And Iskander? Equally, of course--Alexander. Ventnor had
+been right.
+
+“Yuruk,” I demanded directly, “is she whom you call goddess--Norhala--of
+the people of Cherkis?”
+
+“Long ago,” he answered; “long, long ago there was trouble in their
+city, even in the great dwelling place of Cherkis. I fled with her who
+was the mother of the goddess. There were twenty of us; and we fled
+here--by the way which I will show you--”
+
+He leered cunningly; I gave no sign of interest.
+
+“She who was the mother of the goddess found favor in the sight of the
+ruler here,” he went on. “But after a time she grew old and ugly and
+withered. So he slew her--like a little mound of dust she danced and
+blew away after he had slain her; and also he slew others who had grown
+displeasing to him. He blasted me--as he was blasted--” He pointed to
+Ventnor.
+
+“Then it was that, recovering, I found my crooked shoulder. The goddess
+was born here. She is kin to Him Who Rules! How else could she shed the
+lightnings? Was not the father of Iskander the god Zeus Ammon, who came
+to Iskander's mother in the form of a great snake? Well? At any rate the
+goddess was born--shedder of the lightnings even from her birth. And she
+is as you see her.
+
+“Cleave to your kind! Cleave to your kind!” Suddenly he shrilled.
+“Better is it to be whipped by your brother than to be eaten by the
+tiger. Cleave to your kind. Look--I will show you the way to them.”
+
+He sprang to his feet, clasped my wrist in one of his long hands, led
+me through the curtained oval into the cylindrical hall, parted the
+curtainings of Norhala's bedroom and pushed me within. Over the floor he
+slid, still holding fast to me, and pressed against the farther wall.
+
+
+An ovoid slice of the gemlike material slid aside, revealing a doorway.
+I glimpsed a path, a trail, leading into a forest pallid green beneath
+the wan light. This way thrust itself like a black tongue into the
+boskage and vanished in the depths.
+
+“Follow it.” He pointed. “Take those who came with you and follow it.”
+
+The wrinkles upon his face writhed with his eagerness.
+
+“You will go?” panted Yuruk. “You will take them and go by that path?”
+
+“Not yet,” I answered absently. “Not yet.”
+
+And was brought abruptly to full alertness, vigilance, by the flame of
+rage that filled the eyes thrust so close.
+
+“Lead back,” I directed curtly. He slid the door into place, turned
+sullenly. I followed, wondering what were the sources of the bitter
+hatred he so plainly bore for us; the reasons for his eagerness to be
+rid of us despite the commands of this woman who to him at least was
+goddess.
+
+And by that curious human habit of seeking for the complex when the
+simple answer lies close, failed to recognize that it was jealousy of
+us that was the root of his behavior; that he wished to be, as it would
+seem he had been for years, the only human thing near Norhala; failed
+to realize this, and with Ruth and Drake was terribly to pay for this
+failure.
+
+I looked down upon the pair, sleeping soundly; upon Ventnor lost still
+in trance.
+
+“Sit,” I ordered the eunuch. “And turn your back to me.”
+
+I dropped down beside Drake, my mind wrestling with the mystery, but
+every sense alert for movement from the black. Glibly enough I had
+passed over Dick's questioning as to the consciousness of the Metal
+People; now I faced it knowing it to be the very crux of these
+incredible phenomena; admitting, too, that despite all my special
+pleading, about that point swirled in my own mind the thickest mists of
+uncertainty. That their sense of order was immensely beyond a man's was
+plain.
+
+As plain was it that their knowledge of magnetic force and its
+manipulation were far beyond the sphere of humanity. That they had
+realization of beauty this palace of Norhala's proved--and no human
+imagination could have conceived it nor human hands have made its
+thought of beauty real. What were their senses through which their
+consciousness fed?
+
+Nine in number had been the sapphire ovals set within the golden zone of
+the Disk. Clearly it came to me that these were sense organs!
+
+But--nine senses!
+
+And the great stars--how many had they? And the cubes--did they open as
+did globe and pyramid?
+
+Consciousness itself--after all what is it? A secretion of the brain?
+The cumulative expression, wholly chemical, of the multitudes of cells
+that form us? The inexplicable governor of the city of the body of which
+these myriads of cells are the citizens--and created by them out of
+themselves to rule?
+
+Is it what many call the soul? Or is it a finer form of matter, a
+self-realizing force, which uses the body as its vehicle just as other
+forces use for their vestments other machines? After all, I thought,
+what is this conscious self of ours, the ego, but a spark of realization
+running continuously along the path of time within the mechanism we call
+the brain; making contact along that path as the electric spark at the
+end of a wire?
+
+Is there a sea of this conscious force which laps the shores of the
+farthest-flung stars; that finds expression in everything--man and rock,
+metal and flower, jewel and cloud? Limited in its expression only by the
+limitations of that which animates, and in essence the same in all. If
+so, then this problem of the life of the Metal People ceased to be a
+problem; was answered!
+
+So thinking I became aware of increasing light; strode past Yuruk to
+the door and peeped out. Dawn was paling the sky. I stooped over Drake,
+shook him. On the instant he was awake, alert.
+
+“I only need a little sleep, Dick,” I said. “When the sun is well up,
+call me.”
+
+“Why, it's dawn,” he whispered. “Goodwin, you ought not to have let me
+sleep so long. I feel like a damned pig.”
+
+“Never mind,” I said. “But watch the eunuch closely.”
+
+I rolled myself up in his warm blanket; sank almost instantly into
+dreamless slumber.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII. INTO THE PIT
+
+High was the sun when I awakened; or so, I supposed, opening my eyes
+upon a flood of daylight. As I lay, lazily, recollection rushed upon me.
+
+It was no sky into which I was gazing; it was the dome of Norhala's
+elfin home. And Drake had not aroused me. Why? And how long had I slept?
+
+I jumped to my feet, stared about. Ruth nor Drake nor the black eunuch
+was there!
+
+“Ruth!” I shouted. “Drake!”
+
+There was no answer. I ran to the doorway. Peering up into the white
+vault of the heavens I set the time of day as close to seven; I had
+slept then three hours, more or less. Yet short as that time of slumber
+had been, I felt marvelously refreshed, reenergized; the effect, I was
+certain, of the extraordinarily tonic qualities of the atmosphere of
+this place. But where were the others? Where Yuruk?
+
+I heard Ruth's laughter. Some hundred yards to the left, half hidden
+by a screen of flowering shrubs, I saw a small meadow. Within it a
+half-dozen little white goats nuzzled around her and Dick. She was
+milking one of them.
+
+Reassured, I drew back into the chamber, knelt over Ventnor. His
+condition was unchanged. My gaze fell upon the pool that had been
+Norhala's bath. Longingly I looked at it; then satisfying myself
+that the milking process was not finished, slipped off my clothes and
+splashed about.
+
+I had just time to get back in my clothes when through the doorway came
+the pair, each carrying a porcelain pannikin full of milk.
+
+There was no shadow of fear or horror on her face. It was the old Ruth
+who stood before me; nor was there effort in the smile she gave me. She
+had been washed clean in the waters of sleep.
+
+“Don't worry, Walter,” she said. “I know what you're thinking. But
+I'm--ME again.”
+
+“Where is Yuruk?” I turned to Drake bruskly to smother the sob of
+sheer happiness I felt rising in my throat; and at his wink and warning
+grimace abruptly forebore to press the question.
+
+“You men pick out the things and I'll get breakfast ready,” said Ruth.
+
+Drake picked up the teakettle and motioned me before him.
+
+“About Yuruk,” he whispered when he had gotten outside. “I gave him a
+little object lesson. Persuaded him to go down the line a bit, showed
+him my pistol, and then picked off one of Norhala's goats with it. Hated
+to do it, but I knew it would be good for his soul.
+
+“He gave one screech and fell on his face and groveled. Thought it was
+a lightning bolt, I figure; decided I had been stealing Norhala's stuff.
+'Yuruk,' I told him, 'that's what you'll get, and worse, if you lay a
+finger on that girl inside there.'”
+
+“And then what happened?” I asked.
+
+“He beat it back there.” He grinned, pointing toward the forest through
+which ran the path the eunuch had shown me. “Probably hiding back of a
+tree.”
+
+As we filled the container at the outer spring, I told him of the
+revelations and the offer Yuruk had made to me.
+
+“Whew-w!” he whistled. “In the nutcracker, eh? Trouble behind us and
+trouble in front of us.”
+
+“When do we start?” he asked, as we turned back.
+
+“Right after we've eaten,” I answered. “There's no use putting it off.
+How do you feel about it?”
+
+“Frankly, like the chief guest at a lynching party,” he said. “Curious
+but none too cheerful.”
+
+Nor was I. I was filled with a fever of scientific curiosity. But I was
+not cheerful--no!
+
+
+We ministered to Ventnor as well as we could; forcing open his set jaws,
+thrusting a thin rubber tube down past his windpipe into his gullet and
+dropping through it a few ounces of the goat milk. Our own breakfasting
+was silent enough.
+
+We could not take Ruth with us upon our journey; that was certain; she
+must stay here with her brother. She would be safer in Norhala's home
+than where we were going, of course, and yet to leave her was most
+distressing. After all, I wondered, was there any need of both of us
+taking the journey; would not one do just as well?
+
+Drake could stay--
+
+“No use of putting all our eggs in one basket,” I broached the subject.
+“I'll go down by myself while you stay and help Ruth. You can always
+follow if I don't turn up in a reasonable time.”
+
+His indignation at this proposal was matched only by her own.
+
+“You'll go with him, Dick Drake,” she cried, “or I'll never look at or
+speak to you again!”
+
+“Good Lord! Did you think for a minute I wouldn't?” Pain and wrath
+struggled on his face. “We go together or neither of us goes. Ruth will
+be all right here, Goodwin. The only thing she has any cause to fear is
+Yuruk--and he's had his lesson.
+
+“Besides, she'll have the rifles and her pistols, and she knows how
+to use them. What d'ye mean by making such a proposition as that?” His
+indignation burst all bounds.
+
+Lamely I tried to justify myself.
+
+“I'll be all right,” said Ruth. “I'm not afraid of Yuruk. And none of
+these Things will hurt me--not after--not after--” Her eyes fell, her
+lips quivered, then she faced us steadily. “Don't ask me how I know
+that,” she said quietly. “Believe me, I do know it. I am closer to--them
+than you two are. And if I choose I can call upon that alien strength
+their master gave me. It is for you two that I fear.”
+
+“No fear for us,” Drake burst out hastily. “We're Norhala's little
+playthings. We're tabu. Take it from me, Ruth, I'd bet my head there
+isn't one of these Things, great or small, and no matter how many, that
+doesn't by this time know all about us.
+
+“We'll probably be received with demonstrations of interest by the
+populace as welcome guests. Probably we'll find a sign--'Welcome to our
+City'--hung up over the front gate.”
+
+She smiled, a trifle tremulously.
+
+“We'll come back,” he said. Suddenly he leaned forward, put his hands on
+her shoulders. “Do you think there is anything that could keep me from
+coming back?” he whispered.
+
+She trembled, wide eyes searching deep into his.
+
+“Well,” I broke in, a bit uncomfortably, “we'd better be starting.
+I think as Drake does, that we're tabu. Barring accident there's
+no danger. And if I guess right about these Things, accident is
+impossible.”
+
+“As inconceivable as the multiplication table going wrong,” he laughed,
+straightening.
+
+And so we made ready. Our rifles would be worse than useless, we knew;
+our pistols we decided to carry as Drake put it, “for comfort.” Canteens
+filled with water; a couple of emergency rations, a few instruments,
+including a small spectroscope, a selection from the medical kit--all
+these packed in a little haversack which he threw over his broad
+shoulders.
+
+I pocketed my compact but exceedingly powerful field-glasses. To my
+poignant and everlasting regret my camera had been upon the bolting
+pony, and Ventnor had long been out of films for his.
+
+We were ready for our journey.
+
+
+Our path led straight away, a smooth and dark-gray road whose surface
+resembled cement packed under enormous pressure. It was all of fifty
+feet wide and now, in daylight, glistened faintly as though overlaid
+with some vitreous coating. It narrowed abruptly into a wedged way that
+stopped at the threshold of Norhala's door.
+
+Diminishing through the distance, it stretched straight as an arrow
+onward and vanished between perpendicular cliffs which formed the
+frowning gateway through which the night before we had passed upon the
+coursing cubes from the pit of the city. Here, as then, a mistiness
+checked the gaze.
+
+Ruth with us, we made a brief inspection of the surroundings of
+Norhala's house. It was set as though in the narrowest portion of
+an hour-glass. The precipitous walls marched inward from the gateway
+forming the lower half of the figure; at the back they swung apart at a
+wider angle.
+
+This upper part of the hour-glass was filled with a park-like forest. It
+was closed, perhaps twenty miles away, by a barrier of cliffs.
+
+How, I wondered, did the path which Yuruk had pointed out to me pierce
+them? Was it by pass or tunnel; and why was it the armored men had not
+found and followed it?
+
+The waist between these two mountain wedges was a valley not more than
+a mile wide. Norhala's house stood in its center; and it was like a
+garden, dotted with flowering and fragrant lilies and here and there a
+tiny green meadow. The great globe of blue that was Norhala's dwelling
+seemed less to rest upon the ground than to emerge from it; as though
+its basic curvatures were hidden in the earth.
+
+What was its substance I could not tell. It was as though built of the
+lacquer of the gems whose colors it held. And beautiful, wondrously,
+incredibly beautiful it was--an immense bubble of froth of molten
+sapphires and turquoises.
+
+We had not time to study its beauties. A few last instructions to Ruth,
+and we set forth down the gray road. Hardly had we taken a few steps
+when there came a faint cry from her.
+
+“Dick! Dick--come here!”
+
+He sprang to her, caught her hands in his. For a moment, half frightened
+it seemed, she considered him.
+
+“Dick,” I heard her whisper. “Dick--come back safe to me!”
+
+I saw his arms close about her, hers tighten around his neck; black hair
+touched the silken brown curls, their lips met, clung. I turned away.
+
+In a little time he joined me; head down, silent, he strode along beside
+me, utterly dejected.
+
+A hundred more yards and we turned. Ruth was still standing on the
+threshold of the house of mystery, watching us. She waved her hands,
+flitted in, was hidden from us. And Drake still silent, we pushed on.
+
+The walls of the gateway were close. The sparse vegetation along the
+base of the cliffs had ceased; the roadway itself had merged into the
+smooth, bare floor of the canyon. From vertical edge to vertical edge
+of the rocky portal stretched a curtain of shimmering mist. As we drew
+nearer we saw that this was motionless, and less like vapor of water
+than vapor of light; it streamed in oddly fixed lines like atoms of
+crystals in a still solution. Drake thrust an arm within it, waved it;
+the mist did not move. It seemed instead to interpenetrate the arm--as
+though bone and flesh were spectral, without power to dislodge the
+shining particles from position.
+
+We passed within it--side by side.
+
+Instantly I knew that whatever these veils were, they were not moisture.
+The air we breathed was dry, electric. I was sensible of a decided
+stimulation, a pleasant tingling along every nerve, a gaiety almost
+light-headed. We could see each other quite plainly, the rocky floor on
+which we trod as well. Within this vapor of light there was no ghost
+of sound; it was utterly empty of it. I saw Drake turn to me, his mouth
+open in a laugh, his lips move in speech--and although he bent close to
+my ear, I heard nothing. He frowned, puzzled, and walked on.
+
+
+Abruptly we stepped into an opening, a pocket of clear air. Our ears
+were filled with a high, shrill humming as unpleasantly vibrant as the
+shriek of a sand blast. Six feet to our right was the edge of the
+ledge on which we stood; beyond it was a sheer drop into space. A shaft
+piercing down into the void and walled with the mists.
+
+But it was not that shaft that made us clutch each other. No! It was
+that through it uprose a colossal column of the cubes. It stood a
+hundred feet from us. Its top was another hundred feet above the level
+of our ledge and its length vanished in the depths.
+
+And its head was a gigantic spinning wheel, yards in thickness, tapering
+at its point of contact with the cliff wall into a diameter half that
+of the side closest the column, gleaming with flashes of green flame and
+grinding with tremendous speed at the face of the rock.
+
+Over it, attached to the cliff, was a great vizored hood of some pale
+yellow metal, and it was this shelter that cutting off the vaporous
+light like an enormous umbrella made the pocket of clarity in which we
+stood, the shaft up which sprang the pillar.
+
+All along the length of that column as far as we could see the
+myriad tiny eyes of the Metal People shone out upon us, not twinkling
+mischievously, but--grotesque as this may seem, I cannot help it--wide
+with surprise.
+
+Only an instant longer did the great wheel spin. I saw the screaming
+rock melting beneath it, dropping like lava. Then, as though it had
+received some message, abruptly its motion now ceased.
+
+It tilted; looked down upon us!
+
+I noted that its grinding surface was studded thickly with the smaller
+pyramids and that the tips of these were each capped with what seemed
+to be faceted gems gleaming with the same pale yellow radiance as the
+Shrine of the Cones.
+
+The column was bending; the wheel approaching.
+
+Drake seized me by the arm, drew me swiftly back into the mists. We were
+shrouded in their silences. Step by step we went on, peering for
+the edge of the shelf, feeling in fancy that prodigious wheeled face
+stealing upon us; afraid to look behind lest in looking we might step
+too close to the unseen verge.
+
+Yard after yard we slowly covered. Suddenly the vapors thinned; we
+passed out of them--
+
+A chaos of sound beat about us. The clanging of a million anvils; the
+clamor of a million forges; the crashing of a hundred years of thunder;
+the roarings of a thousand hurricanes. The prodigious bellowings of the
+Pit beating against us now as they had when we had flown down the long
+ramp into the depths of the Sea of Light.
+
+Instinct with unthinkable power was that clamor; the very voice of
+Force. Stunned, nay BLINDED, by it, we covered ears and eyes.
+
+As before, the clangor died, leaving in its wake a bewildered silence.
+Then that silence began to throb with a vast humming, and through that
+humming rang a murmur as that of a river of diamonds.
+
+We opened our eyes, felt awe grip our throats as though a hand had
+clutched them.
+
+Difficult, difficult almost beyond thought is it for me now to essay to
+draw in words the scene before us then. For although I can set down what
+it was we saw, I nor any man can transmute into phrases its essence, its
+spirit, the intangible wonder that was its synthesis--the appallingly
+beautiful, soul-shaking strangeness of it, its grandeur, its fantasy,
+and its alien terror.
+
+The Domain of the Metal Monster--it was filled like a chalice with Its
+will; was the visible expression of that will.
+
+We stood at the very rim of a wide ledge. We looked down into an immense
+pit, shaped into a perfect oval, thirty miles in length I judged, and
+half that as wide, and rimmed with colossal precipices. We were at the
+upper end of this deep valley and on the tip of its axis; I mean that
+it stretched longitudinally before us along the line of greatest length.
+Five hundred feet below was the pit's floor. Gone were the clouds of
+light that had obscured it the night before; the air crystal clear;
+every detail standing out with stereoscopic sharpness.
+
+First the eyes rested upon a broad band of fluorescent amethyst, ringing
+the entire rocky wall. It girdled the cliffs at a height of ten thousand
+feet, and from this flaming zone, as though it clutched them, fell the
+curtains of sparkling mist, the enigmatic, sound-slaying vapors.
+
+But now I saw that all of these veils were not motionless like those
+through which we had just passed. To the northwest they were pulsing
+like the aurora, and like the aurora they were shot through with swift
+iridescences, spectrums, polychromatic gleamings. And always these were
+ordered, geometric--like immense and flitting prismatic crystals flying
+swiftly to the very edges of the veils, then darting as swiftly back.
+
+From zone and veils the gaze leaped to the incredible City towering not
+two miles away from us.
+
+Blue black, shining, sharply cut as though from polished steel, it
+reared full five thousand feet on high!
+
+How great it was I could not tell, for the height of its precipitous
+walls barred the vision. The frowning facade turned toward us was, I
+estimated, five miles in length. Its colossal scarp struck the eyes
+like a blow; its shadow, falling upon us, checked the heart. It was
+overpowering--dreadful as that midnight city of Dis that Dante saw
+rising up from another pit.
+
+It was a metal city, mountainous.
+
+Featureless, smooth, the immense wall of it heaved heavenward. It should
+have been blind, that vast oblong face--but it was not blind. From it
+radiated alertness, vigilance. It seemed to gaze toward us as though
+every foot were manned with sentinels; guardians invisible to the eyes
+whose concentration of watchfulness was caught by some subtle hidden
+sense higher than sight.
+
+It was a metal city, mountainous and--AWARE.
+
+About its base were huge openings. Through and around these portals
+swirled hordes of the Metal People; in units and in combinations coming
+and going, streaming in and out, forming as they came and went patterns
+about the openings like the fretted spume of great breakers surging
+into, retreating from, ocean-bitten gaps in some iron-bound coast.
+
+From the immensity of the City the eyes dropped back to the Pit in which
+it lay. Its floor was plaquelike, a great plane smooth as though turned
+by potter's wheel, broken by no mound nor hillock, slope nor terrace;
+level, horizontal, flawlessly flat. On it was no green living thing--no
+tree nor bush, meadow nor covert.
+
+It was alive with movement. A ferment that was as purposeful as it was
+mechanical, a ferment symmetrical, geometrical, supremely ordered--
+
+The surging of the Metal Hordes.
+
+There they moved beneath us, these enigmatic beings, in a countless
+host. They marched and countermarched in battalions, in regiments, in
+armies. Far to the south I glimpsed a company of colossal shapes like
+mobile, castellated and pyramidal mounts. They were circling, weaving
+about each other with incredible rapidity--like scores of great pyramids
+crowned with gigantic turrets and dancing. From these turrets came vivid
+flashes, lightning bright--on their wake the rolling echoes of faraway
+thunder.
+
+Out of the north sped a squadron of obelisks from whose tops flamed
+and flared the immense spinning wheels, appearing at this distance like
+fiery whirling disks.
+
+Up from their setting the Metal People lifted themselves in a thousand
+incredible shapes, shapes squared and globed and spiked and shifting
+swiftly into other thousands as incredible. I saw a mass of them draw
+themselves up into the likeness of a tent skyscraper high; hang so for
+an instant, then writhe into a monstrous chimera of a dozen towering
+legs that strode away like a gigantic headless and bodiless tarantula in
+steps two hundred feet long. I watched mile-long lines of them shape and
+reshape into circles, into interlaced lozenges and pentagons--then lift
+in great columns and shoot through the air in unimaginable barrage.
+
+Through all this incessant movement I sensed plainly purpose, knew
+that it was definite activity toward a definite end, caught the clear
+suggestion of drill, of maneuver.
+
+And when the shiftings of the Metal Hordes permitted we saw that all
+the flat floor of the valley was stripped and checkered, stippled and
+tessellated with every color, patterned with enormous lozenges and
+squares, rhomboids and parallelograms, pentagons and hexagons and
+diamonds, lunettes, circles and spirals; harlequined yet harmonious;
+instinct with a grotesque suggestion of a super-Futurism.
+
+But always this patterning was ordered, always COHERENT. As though
+it were a page on which was spelled some untranslatable other world
+message.
+
+Fourth Dimensional revelations by some Euclidean deity! Commandments
+traced by some mathematical God!
+
+Looping across the vale, emerging from the sparkling folds of the
+southernmost curtainings and vanishing into the gleaming veils of the
+easternmost, ran a broad ribbon of pale-green jade; not straightly but
+with manifold convolutions and flourishes. It was like a sentence in
+Arabic.
+
+It was margined with sapphire blue. All along its twisting course two
+broad bands of jet margined the cerulean shore. It was spanned by scores
+of flashing crystal arches. Nor were these bridges--even from that
+distance I knew they were no bridges. From them came the crystalline
+murmurings.
+
+Jade? This stream jade? If so then it must be in truth molten, for I
+caught its swift and polished rushing! It was no jade. It was in truth a
+river; a river running like a writing across a patterned plane.
+
+I looked upward--up to the circling peaks. They were a stupendous
+coronet thrusting miles deep into the dazzling sky. I raised my glasses,
+swept them. In color they were an immense and variegated flower with
+countless multiform petals of stone; in outline they were a ring of
+fortresses built by fantastic unknown Gods.
+
+Up they thrust--domed and arched, spired and horned, pyramided, fanged
+and needled. Here were palisades of burning orange with barbicans of
+incandescent bronze; there aiguilles of azure rising from bastions of
+cinnabar red; turrets of royal purple, obelisks of indigo; titanic forts
+whose walls were splashed with vermilion, with citron yellows and with
+rust of rubies; watch towers of flaming scarlet.
+
+Scattered among them were the flashing emeralds of the glaciers and the
+immense pallid baroques of the snow fields.
+
+Like a diadem the summits ringed the Pit. Below them ran the ring of
+flashing amethyst with its aural mists. Between them lay the vast and
+patterned flat covered with still symbol and inexplicable movement.
+Under their summits brooded the blue black, metallic mass of the Seeing
+City.
+
+Within circling walls, over plain and from the City hovered a cosmic
+spirit not to be understood by man. Like an emanation of stars and
+space, it was yet gem fine and gem hard, crystalline and metallic,
+lapidescent and--
+
+Conscious!
+
+Down from the ledge where we stood fell a steep ramp, similar to that by
+which, in the darkness, we had descended. It dropped at an angle of at
+least forty-five degrees; its surface was smooth and polished.
+
+Through the mists at our back stole a shining block. It paused, seemed
+to perk itself; spun so that in turn each of its six faces took us in.
+
+I felt myself lifted upon it by multitudes of little invisible hands;
+saw Drake whirling up beside me. I moved toward him--through the force
+that held us. A block swept away from the ledge, swayed for a moment.
+Under us, as though we were floating in air, the Pit lay stretched.
+There was a rapid readjustment, a shifting of our two selves upon
+another surface. I looked down upon a tremendous, slender pillar of the
+cubes, dropping below, five hundred feet to the valley's floor a column
+of which the block that held us was the top.
+
+Gone was the whirling wheel that had crowned it, but I knew this for the
+Grinding Thing from which we had fled; the questing block had been its
+scout. As though curious to know more of us, the Shape had sought us out
+through the mists, its messenger had caught us, delivered us to it.
+
+The pillar leaned over--bent like that shining pillar that had bridged
+for us, at Norhala's commands, the abyss. The floor of the valley arose
+to meet us. Further and further leaned the pillar. Again there was a
+rapid shifting of us to another surface of the crowning cube. Fast now
+swept up toward us the valley floor. A dizziness clouded my sight. There
+was a little shock, a rolling over the Thing that had held us--
+
+We stood upon the floor of the Pit.
+
+And breaking from the immense and prostrate shaft on whose top we had
+ridden downward came score upon score of the cubes. They broke from it,
+disintegrating it; circled about us, curiously, interestedly, twinkling
+at us from their deep sparkling points of eyes.
+
+Helplessly we gazed at those who circled around us. Then suddenly I felt
+myself lifted once more, was tossed to the surface of the nearest block.
+Upon it I spun while the tiny eyes searched me. Then like a human ball
+it tossed me to another. I caught a glimpse of Drake's tall figure
+drifting through the air.
+
+The play became more rapid, breathtaking. It was play; I recognized
+that. But it was perilous play for us. I felt myself as fragile as a
+doll of glass in the hands of careless children.
+
+I was tossed to a waiting cube. On the ground, not ten feet from me,
+was Drake, swaying dizzily. Suddenly the cube that held me tightened its
+grip; tightened it so that it drew me irresistibly flat down upon its
+surface. Before I dropped, Drake's body leaped toward me as though drawn
+by a lasso. He fell at my side.
+
+Then pursued by scores of the Things and like some mischievous boy
+bearing off the spoils, the block that held us raced away, straight for
+an open portal. A blaze of incandescent blue flame blinded me; again
+as the dazzlement faded I saw Drake beside me--a skeleton form. Swiftly
+flesh melted back upon him, clothed him.
+
+The cube stopped, abruptly; the hosts of little unseen hands raised
+us, slid us gently over its edge, set us upright beside it. And it sped
+away.
+
+All about us stretched another of those vast halls in which on high
+burned the pale-gilt suns. Between its colossal columns streamed
+thousands of the Metal Folk; no longer hurriedly, but quietly,
+deliberately, sedately.
+
+We were within the City--even as Ventnor had commanded.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX. THE CITY THAT WAS ALIVE
+
+Close beside us was one of the cyclopean columns. We crept to it;
+crouched at its base opposite the drift of the Metal People; strove,
+huddled there, to regain our shaken poise. Like bagatelles we felt in
+that tremendous place, the weird luminaries gleaming above like garlands
+of frozen suns, the enigmatic hosts of animate cubes and spheres and
+pyramids trooping past.
+
+They ranged in size from shapes yard-high to giants of thirty feet or
+more. They paid no heed to us, did not stop; streaming on, engrossed in
+whatever mysterious business was summoning them. And after a time their
+numbers lessened; thinned down to widely separate groups, to stragglers;
+then ceased. The hall was empty of them.
+
+As far as the eye could reach the columned spaces stretched. I was
+conscious once more of that unusual flow of energy through every vein
+and nerve.
+
+“Follow the crowd!” said Drake. “Do you feel just full of pep and
+ginger, by the way?”
+
+“I am aware of the most extraordinary vigor,” I answered.
+
+“Some weird joint,” he mused, looking about him. “Wonder if they have
+any windows? This whole place looked solid to me--what I could see of
+it. Wonder if we'll get up against it for air? These Things don't need
+it, that's sure. Wonder--”
+
+He broke off staring fascinatedly at the pillar behind us.
+
+“Look here, Goodwin!” There was a tremor in his voice. “What do you make
+of THIS?”
+
+I followed his pointing finger; looked at him inquiringly.
+
+“The eyes!” he said impatiently. “Don't you see them? The eyes in the
+column!”
+
+And now I saw them. The pillar was a pale metallic blue, in color a
+trifle darker than the Metal Folk. All within it were the myriads of
+tiny crystalline points that we had grown to know were the receptors
+of some strange sense of sight. But they did not sparkle as did those
+others; they were dull, lifeless. I touched the surface. It was smooth,
+cool--with none of that subtle, warm vitality that pulsed through all
+the Things with which I had come in contact. I shook my head, realizing
+as I did so what a shock the incredible possibility he had suggested had
+given me.
+
+“No,” I said. “There is a resemblance, yes. But there is no force about
+this--stuff; no life. Besides, such a thing is utterly incredible.”
+
+“They might be--dormant,” he suggested stubbornly. “Can you see any mark
+of their joining--if they ARE the cubes?”
+
+Together we scanned the pillar minutely. The faces seemed unbroken,
+continuous; there was no trace of those thin and shining lines that
+marked the juncture of the cubes when they had clicked together to form
+the bridge of the abyss or that had gleamed, crosslike, upon the back of
+the combined four upon which we had followed Norhala.
+
+“It's a sheer impossibility. It's madness to think such a thing, Drake!”
+ I exclaimed, and wondered at my own vehemence of denial.
+
+“Maybe,” he shook his head doubtfully. “Maybe--but--well--let's be on
+our way.”
+
+We strode on, following the direction the Metal Folk had gone. Clearly
+Drake was still doubtful; at each pillar he hesitated, scanning it
+closely with troubled eyes.
+
+But I, having determinedly dismissed the idea, was more interested
+in the fantastic lights that flooded this columned hall with their
+buttercup radiance. They were still and unwinking; not disks, I could
+see now, but globes. Great and small, they floated motionless, their
+rays extending rigidly and as still as the orb that shed them.
+
+Yet rigid as they were there was nothing about either rays or orbs that
+suggested either hardness or the metallic. They were vaporous, soft as
+St. Elmo's fire, the witch lights that cling at times to the spars of
+ships, weird gleaming visitors from the invisible ocean of atmospheric
+electricity.
+
+When they disappeared, as they did frequently, it was instantaneously,
+completely, with a disconcerting sleight-of-hand finality. I noted,
+though, that when they did vanish, immediately close to where they
+had been other orbs swam forth with that same astonishing abruptness;
+sometimes only one, larger it might be than that which had gone;
+sometimes a cluster of smaller globes, their frozen, crocused rays
+impinging.
+
+What could they be, I wondered--how fixed, and what the source of
+their light? Products of electro-magnetic currents and born of the
+interpenetration of such streams flowing above us? Such a theory might
+account for their disappearance, and reappearance, shiftings of the
+flows that changed the light producing points of contact. Wireless
+lights? If so here was an idea that human science might elaborate if
+ever we returned to--
+
+“Now which way?” Drake broke in upon my musing. The hall had ended. We
+stood before a blank wall vanishing into the soft mists hiding the roof
+of the chamber.
+
+“I thought we had been going along the way They went,” I said in
+amazement.
+
+“So did I,” he answered. “We must have circled. They never went through
+THAT unless--unless--” He hesitated.
+
+“Unless what?” I asked sharply.
+
+“Unless it opened and let them through,” he said. “Have you forgotten
+those great ovals--like cat's eyes that opened in the outer walls?” he
+added quietly.
+
+I HAD forgotten. I looked again at the wall. Certainly it was smooth,
+lineless. In one unbroken, shining surface it rose, a facade of polished
+metal. Within it the deep set points of light were duller even than they
+had been in the pillars; almost indeed indistinguishable.
+
+“Go on to the left,” I said none too patiently. “And get that absurd
+notion out of your head.”
+
+“All right.” He flushed. “But you don't think I'm afraid, do you?”
+
+“If what you're thinking were true, you'd have a right to be,” I replied
+tartly. “And I want to tell you I'D be afraid. Damned afraid.”
+
+For perhaps two hundred paces we skirted the base of the wall. We came
+abruptly to an opening, an oblong passageway fully fifty foot wide by
+twice as high. At its entrance the mellow, saffron light was cut off as
+though by an invisible screen. The tunnel itself was filled with a dim
+grayish blue luster. For an instant we contemplated it.
+
+“I wouldn't care to be caught in there by any rush,” I hesitated.
+
+“There's not much good in thinking of that now,” said Drake, grimly.
+“A few chances more or less in a joint of this kind is nothing between
+friends, Goodwin; take it from me. Come on.”
+
+We entered. Walls, floor and roof were composed of the same substance as
+the great pillars, the wall of the outer chamber; filled like them with
+dimmed replicas of the twinkling eye points.
+
+“Odd that all the places in here are square,” muttered Drake. “They
+don't seem to have used any spherical or pyramidal ideas in their
+building--if it is a building.”
+
+It was true. All was mathematically straight up and down and across. It
+was strange--still we had seen little as yet.
+
+There was a warmth about this passageway we trod; a difference in the
+air of it. The warmth grew, a dry and baking heat; but stimulative
+rather than oppressive. I touched the walls; the warmth did not come
+from them. And there was no wind. Yet as we went on the heat increased.
+
+The passageway turned at a right angle, continuing in a corridor
+half its former dimensions. Far away shone a high bar of pale yellow
+radiance, rising like a pillar of light from floor to roof. Toward it,
+perforce, we trudged. Its brilliancy grew greater.
+
+A few paces away from it we stopped. The yellow luminescence streamed
+through a slit not more than a foot wide in the wall. We were in a
+cul-de-sac for the opening was not wide enough for either Drake or me
+to push through. Through it with the light gushed the curious heat
+enveloping us.
+
+Drake walked to the opening, peered through. I joined him.
+
+At first all that I could see was a space filled with the saffron
+lambency. Then I saw that this was splashed with tiny flashes of the
+jewel fires; little lances and javelin thrusts of burning emeralds and
+rubies; darting gem hard flames rose scarlet and pale sapphire; quick
+flares of violet.
+
+Into my sight through the irised, crocus mist swam the radiant body of
+Norhala!
+
+She stood naked, clad only in the veils of her hair that glowed now
+like spun silk of molten copper, her strange eyes wide and smiling, the
+galaxies of tiny stars sparkling through their gray depths.
+
+And all about her swirled a countless host of the Little Things!
+
+From them came the gem fires piercing the aureate mists. They played
+and frolicked about her in scores of swiftly forming, swiftly changing,
+goblin shapes. They circled her feet in shining, elfin rings; then
+opening into flaming disks and stars, shot up and spun about the white
+miracle of her body in great girdles of multi-colored living fires.
+Mingled with disk and star were tiny crosses gleaming with sullen, deep
+crimsons and smoky orange.
+
+A flash of blue incandescence and a slender pillared shape leaped from
+the floor; became a coronet, a whirling, flashing halo toward which
+streamed up the flaming tendrilings of her tresses. Other halos circled
+her arms and breasts; they spun like bracelets about the outstretched
+arms.
+
+Then like a swiftly rushing wave a host of the Little Things thrust
+themselves up, covered her, hid her in a coruscating cloud.
+
+I saw an exquisite arm thrust itself from their clinging, wave gaily;
+saw her glorious head emerge from the incredible, the seething draperies
+of living jewels. I heard her laughter, sweet and golden and far away.
+
+Goddess of the Inexplicable! Madonna of the Metal Babes!
+
+The Nursery of the Metal People!
+
+Norhala was gone, blotted out from our sight! Gone too were the bar of
+light and the chamber into which we had been peering. We stared at a
+smooth, blank wall. With that same ensorcelled swiftness the wall had
+closed even as we had stared through it; closed so quickly that we had
+not seen its motion.
+
+I gripped Drake; shrank with him into the farthest corner--for on the
+other side of us the wall was opening. First it was only a crack; then
+rapidly it widened. There stretched another passageway, luminous and
+long; far down it we glimpsed movement. Closer that movement came,
+grew plainer. Out of the mistily luminous distances, three abreast and
+filling the corridor from side to side, raced upon us a company of the
+great spheres!
+
+Back we cowered from their approach--back and back; arms outstretched,
+pressing against the barrier, flattening ourselves against the shock of
+the destroying impact menacing.
+
+“It's all up,” muttered Drake. “No place to run. They're bound to smash
+us. Stick close, Doc. Get back to Ruth. Maybe I can stop them!”
+
+Before I could check him, he had leaped straight in the path of the
+rushing globes, now a scant twoscore yards away.
+
+The globes stopped--halted a few feet from him. They seemed to
+contemplate us, astonished. They turned upon themselves, as though
+consulting. Slowly they advanced. We were pushed forward and lifted
+gently. Then as we hung suspended, held by that force which always I can
+liken only to myriads of tiny invisible hands, the shining arcs of their
+backs undulated beneath us.
+
+Their files swung around the corner and marched down the passage by
+which we had come from the immense hall. And when the last rank had
+passed from under us we were dropped softly to our feet; stood swaying
+in their wake.
+
+A curious frenzy of helpless indignation shook me, a rage of humiliation
+obscuring all gratitude I should have felt for our escape. Drake's eyes
+blazed wrath.
+
+“The insolent devils!” He raised clenched fists. “The insolent,
+domineering devils!”
+
+We stared after them.
+
+Was the passage growing narrower--closing? Even as I gazed I saw it
+shrink; saw its walls slide silently toward each other. I pushed Drake
+into the newly opened way and sprang after him.
+
+Behind us was an unbroken wall covering all that space in which but a
+moment before we had stood!
+
+Is it to be wondered that a panic seized us; that we began to run
+crazily down the alley that still lay open before us, casting over
+our shoulders quick, fearful glances to see whether that inexorable,
+dreadful closing was continuing, threatening to crush us between these
+walls like flies in a vise of steel?
+
+But they did not close. Unbroken, silent, the way stretched before us
+and behind us. At last, gasping, avoiding each other's gaze, we paused.
+
+And at that very moment of pause a deeper tremor shook me, a trembling
+of the very foundations of life, the shuddering of one who faces the
+inconceivable knowing at last that the inconceivable--IS.
+
+For, abruptly, walls and floor and roof broke forth into countless
+twinklings!
+
+As though a film had been withdrawn from them, as though they had
+awakened from slumber, myriads of little points of light shone forth
+upon us from the pale-blue surfaces--lights that considered us, measured
+us--mocked us.
+
+The little points of living light that were the eyes of the Metal
+People!
+
+This was no corridor cut through inert matter by mechanic art; its
+opening had been caused by no hidden mechanisms! It was a living
+Thing--walled and floored and roofed by the living bodies--of the Metal
+People themselves.
+
+Its opening, as had been the closing of that other passage, was the
+conscious, coordinate and voluntary action of the Things that formed
+these mighty walls.
+
+An action that obeyed, was directed by, the incredibly gigantic,
+communistic will which, like the spirit of the hive, the soul of the
+formicary, animated every unit of them.
+
+A greater realization swept us. If THIS were true, then those pillars in
+the vast hall, its towering walls--all this City was one living Thing!
+
+Built of the animate bodies of countless millions! Tons upon countless
+tons of them shaping a gigantic pile of which every atom was sentient,
+mobile--intelligent!
+
+A Metal Monster!
+
+Now I knew why it was that its frowning facade had seemed to watch us
+Argus-eyed as the Things had tossed us toward it. It HAD watched us!
+
+That flood of watchfulness pulsing about us had been actual
+concentration of regard of untold billions of tiny eyes of the living
+block which formed the City's cliff.
+
+A City that Saw! A City that was Alive!
+
+No secret mechanism then--back darted my mind to that first terror--had
+closed the wall, shutting from our sight Norhala at play with the Little
+Things. None had opened the way for, had closed the way behind, the
+coursing spheres. It had been done by the conscious action of the
+conscious Things of whose living bodies was built this whole tremendous
+thinking pile!
+
+
+I think that for a moment we both went a little mad as that staggering
+truth came to us. I know we started to run once more, side by side,
+gripping like frightened children each other's hands. Then Drake
+stopped.
+
+“By all the HELL of this place,” he said, solemnly, “I'll run no more.
+After all--we're men. If they kill us, they kill us. But by the God who
+made me I'll run from them no more. I'll die standing.”
+
+His courage steadied me. Defiantly we marched on. Up from below us, down
+from the roof, out from the walls of our way the hosts of eyes gleamed
+and twinkled upon us.
+
+“Who could have believed it?” he muttered, half to himself. “A living
+city of them! A living nest of them; a prodigious living nest of metal!”
+
+“A nest?” I caught the word. What did it suggest? That was it--the nest
+of the army ants, the city of the army ants, that Beebe had studied in
+the South American jungles and once described to me. After all, was this
+more wonderful, more unbelievable than that--the city of ants which was
+formed by their living bodies precisely as this was of the bodies of the
+Cubes?
+
+How had Beebe * phrased it--“the home, the nest, the hearth, the nursery,
+the bridal suite, the kitchen, the bed and board of the army ants.”
+ Built of and occupied by those blind and deaf and savage little insects
+which by the guidance of smell alone carried on the most intricate
+operations, the most complex activities. Nothing here was stranger than
+that, I reflected--if once one could rid the mind of the paralyzing
+influence of the shapes of the Metal Things. Whence came the stimuli
+that moved THEM, the stimuli to which THEY reacted?
+
+     * William Beebe, Atlantic Monthly, October, 1919.
+
+Well then--whence and how came the orders to which the ANTS responded;
+that bade them open THIS corridor in their nest, close THAT, form this
+chamber, fill that one? Was one more mysterious than the other?
+
+Breaking into my current of thoughts came consciousness that I was
+moving with increased speed; that my body was fast growing lighter.
+
+Simultaneously with this recognition I felt myself lifted from the
+floor of the corridor and levitated with considerable rapidity forward;
+looking down I saw that floor several feet below me. Drake's arm wound
+itself around my shoulder.
+
+“Closing up behind us,” he muttered. “They're putting us--out.”
+
+It was, indeed, as though the passageway had wearied of our deliberate
+progress. Had decided to--give us a lift. Rearward it was shutting. I
+noted with interest how accurately this motion kept pace with our own
+speed, and how fluidly the walls seemed to run together.
+
+Our movement became accelerated. It was as though we floated buoyantly,
+weightless, upon some swift stream. The sensation was curiously
+pleasant, languorous--what was that word Ruth had used?--ELEMENTAL--and
+free. The supporting force seemed to flow equally from walls and
+floor; to reach down to us from the roof. It was slumberously even, and
+effortless. I saw that in advance of us the living corridor was opening
+even as behind us it was closing.
+
+All around us the little eye points twinkled and--laughed.
+
+There was no danger here--there could be none. Deeper and deeper dropped
+my mind into the depths of that alien tranquillity. Faster and faster we
+floated--onward.
+
+Abruptly, ahead of us shone a blaze of daylight. We passed into it. The
+force holding us withdrew its grip; I felt solidity beneath my feet;
+stood and leaned back against a smooth wall.
+
+The corridor had ended and--had shut us out from itself.
+
+“Bounced!” exclaimed Drake.
+
+And incongruous, flippant, colloquial as was that word, I know none that
+would better describe my own feelings.
+
+We were BOUNCED out upon a turret jutting from the barrier. And before
+us lay spread the most amazing, the most extraordinary fantastic scene
+upon which, I think, the vision of man has rested since the advent of
+time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX. VAMPIRES OF THE SUN
+
+It was a crater; a half mile on high and all of two thousand feet across
+ran the circular lip of its vast rim. Above it was a circle of white and
+glaring sky in whose center flamed the sun.
+
+And instantly, before my vision could grasp a tithe of that panorama, I
+knew that this place was the very heart of the City; its vital ganglion;
+its soul.
+
+Around the crater lip were poised thousands of concave disks, vernal
+green, enormous. They were like a border of gigantic, upthrust shields;
+and within each, emblazoned like a shield's device, was a blinding
+flower of flame--the reflected, dilated face of the sun. Below this
+diadem hung, pendent, clusters of other disks, swarmed like the globular
+hiving of the constellation Hercules' captured stars. And each of these
+prisoned the image of our sun.
+
+A hundred feet below us was the crater floor.
+
+Up from it thrust a mountainous forest of the pallidly radiant cones;
+bristling; prodigious. Tier upon tier, thicket upon thicket, phalanx
+upon phalanx they climbed. Up and up, pyramidically, they flung their
+spiked hosts.
+
+They drew together two thousand feet above us, clustering close about
+the foot of a single huge spire which thrust itself skyward above them.
+The crest of this spire was truncated. From its shorn tip radiated
+scores of long and slender spokes holding in place a thousand feet wide
+wheel of wan green disks whose concave surfaces, unlike those smooth
+ones girding the crater, were curiously faceted.
+
+This amazing structure rested upon a myriad-footed base of crystal,
+even as had that other cornute fantasy beside which we had met the great
+Disk. But it was in size to that as--as Leviathan to a minnow. From it
+streamed the same baffling suggestion of invincible force transmuted
+into matter; energy coalesced into the tangible; power made concentrate
+in the vestments of substance.
+
+Half-way between crater lip and floor began the hordes of the Metal
+People.
+
+In colossal animate cheveau-de-frise of hundred-foot girders they thrust
+themselves out from the curving walls--walls, I knew, as alive as they!
+
+From these Brobdignagian beams they swung in ropes and clusters--spheres
+and cubes studded as thickly with the pyramids as ever Titan's mace with
+spikes. Group after bizarre group they dropped; pendulous. Coppices
+of slender columns of thistled globes sprang up to meet the festooned
+joists.
+
+Between the girders they draped themselves in long, stellated garlands;
+grouped themselves in innumerable, kaleidoscopic patterns.
+
+They clicked into place around the golden turret in which we crouched.
+
+In fantastic arrases they swayed in front of us--now hiding by, now
+revealing through their quicksilver interweavings the mounts of the
+Cones.
+
+And steadily those flowing in below added to their multitudes; gliding
+up cable and pillar; building out still further the living girders,
+stringing themselves upon living festoon and living garland, weaving in
+among them, changing their shapes, rewriting their symbols.
+
+They swung and threaded swiftly, in shifting arabesque, in Gothic
+traceries, in lace-like fantasies; utterly bizarre, unutterably
+beautiful--crystalline, geometric always.
+
+Abruptly their movement ceased--so abruptly that the stoppage of all the
+ordered turmoil had the quality of appalling silence.
+
+An unimaginable tapestry bedight with incredible broidery, the Metal
+People draped the vast cup.
+
+Pillared it as though it were a temple.
+
+Garnished it with their bodies as though it were a shrine.
+
+Across the floor toward the Cones glided a palely lustrous sphere. In
+shape only a globe like all its kind, yet it was invested with power; it
+radiated power as a star does light; was clothed in unseen garments of
+supernal force. In its wake drifted two great pyramids; after them ten
+spheres but little smaller than the Shape which led.
+
+“The Metal Emperor!” breathed Drake.
+
+On they swept until they reached the base of the Cones. They paused at
+the edge of the crystal tabling. They turned.
+
+There was a flashing as of a meteor bursting. The globe had opened into
+that splendor of jewel fires before which had floated Norhala and Ruth.
+
+I saw again the luminous ovals of sapphire, studding its golden zone,
+the mystic rose of pulsing, petal flame, the still core of incandescent
+ruby that was the heart of that rose.
+
+Strangely I felt my own heart veer toward this--Thing; bowing before its
+beauty and its strength; almost worshiping!
+
+A shock of revulsion went through me. I shot a quick, half frightened
+glance at Drake. He was crouching dangerously close to the lip of the
+ledge, hands clasped and knuckles white with the intensity of his grip,
+eyes rapt, staring--upon the verge of worship even as I had been.
+
+“Drake!” I thrust my elbow into his side brutally. “None of that!
+Remember you're human! Guard yourself, man--guard yourself!”
+
+“What?” he muttered; then, abruptly: “How did you know?”
+
+“I felt it myself,” I answered: “For God's sake, Dick--hold fast to
+yourself! Remember Ruth!”
+
+He shook his head violently--as though to be rid of some clinging,
+cloying thing.
+
+“I'll not forget again,” he said.
+
+He huddled down once more close to the edge of the shelf; peering over.
+No one of the Metal People had moved; the silence, the stillness, was
+unbroken.
+
+Now the flanking pyramids shot forth into twin stars, blazing with
+violet luminescences. And one by one after them the ten lesser spheres
+expanded into flaming orbs; beautiful they were, but far less glorious
+than that Disk of whom they were the counselors?--ministers?--what?
+
+Still there was no movement among all the arrased, girdered, pillared
+hosts.
+
+There came a little wailing; far away it was and far. Nearer it drew.
+Was that a tremor that passed through the crowded crater? A quick pulse
+of--eagerness?
+
+“Hungry!” whispered Drake. “They're HUNGRY!”
+
+
+Closer was the wailing; again that faint tremor quivered over the place.
+And now I caught it--a quick and avid pulsing.
+
+“Hungry,” whispered Drake again. “Like a lot of lions with the keeper
+coming along with meat.”
+
+The wailing was below us. I felt, not a quiver this time, but an
+unmistakable shock pass through the Horde. It throbbed--and passed.
+
+Into the field of our vision, up to the flaming Disk rushed an immense
+cube.
+
+Thrice the height of a tall man--as I think I have noted before--when it
+unfolded its radiance was that shape of mingled beauty and power I call
+the Metal Emperor.
+
+Yet this Thing eclipsed it. Black, uncompromising, in some indefinable
+way BRUTAL, its square bulk blotted out the Disk's effulgence; shrouded
+it. And a shadow seemed to fall upon the crater. The violet fires of the
+flanking stars pulsed out--watchfully, threateningly.
+
+For only an instant the darkening block loomed against the Disk;
+blackened it.
+
+There came another meteor burst of light. Where the cube had been was
+now a tremendous, fiery cross--a cross inverted.
+
+Its upper arm arose to twice the length either of its horizontals or
+the square that was its foot. In its opening it must have turned, for
+its--FACE--was toward us and away from the Cones, its body hid the Disk,
+and almost all the surfaces of the two watchful Stars.
+
+Eighty feet at least in height, this cruciform shape stood. It flamed
+and flickered with angry, smoky crimsons and scarlets; with sullen
+orange glowings and glitterings of sulphurous yellows. Within its fires
+were none of those leaping, multicolored glories that were the Metal
+Emperor's; no trace of the pulsing, mystic rose; no shadow of jubilant
+sapphire; no purple royal; no tender, merciful greens nor gracious
+opalescences. Nothing even of the blasting violet of the Stars.
+
+All angry, smoky reds and ochres the cross blazed forth--and in its
+lurid glowings was something sinister, something real, something cruel,
+something--nearer to earth, closer to man.
+
+“The Keeper of the Cones and the Metal Emperor!” muttered Drake. “I
+begin to get it--yes--I begin to get--Ventnor!”
+
+Once more the pulse, the avid throbbing shook the crater. And as swiftly
+in its wake rushed back the stillness, the silence.
+
+The Keeper turned--I saw its palely lustrous blue metallic back. I drew
+out my little field-glasses, focussed them.
+
+The Cross slipped sidewise past the Disk, its courtiers, its stellated
+guardians. As it went by they swung about with it; ever facing it.
+
+And now at last was clear a thing that had puzzled greatly--the
+mechanism of that opening process by which sphere became oval disk,
+pyramid a four-pointed star and--as I had glimpsed in the play of the
+Little Things about Norhala, could see now so plainly in the Keeper--the
+blocks took this inverted cruciform shape.
+
+The Metal People were hollow!
+
+Hollow metal--boxes!
+
+In their enclosing sides dwelt all their vitality--their
+powers--themselves!
+
+And those sides were--everything that THEY were!
+
+Folded, the oval disk became the sphere; the four points of the star,
+the square from which those points radiated; shutting became the
+pyramid; the six faces of the cubes were when opened the inverted cross.
+
+Nor were these flexible, mobile walls massive. They were indeed,
+considering the apparent mass of the Metal Folk, most astonishingly
+fragile. Those of the Keeper, despite its eighty feet of height, could
+not have been more than a yard in thickness. At the edges I thought I
+could see groovings; noted the same appearances at the outlines of
+the Stars. Seen sidewise, the body of the Metal Emperor showed as a
+convexity; its surface smooth, with a suggestion of transparency.
+
+The Keeper was bending; its oblong upper plane dropping forward as
+though upon a hinge. Lower and lower this flange bent--in a grotesque,
+terrifying obeisance; a horrible mockery of reverence.
+
+Was this mountain of Cones then actually a shrine--an idol of the Metal
+People--their God?
+
+The oblong that was the upper half of the cruciform Shape extended now
+at right angles to the horizontal arms. It hovered, a rectangle forty
+feet long, as many feet over the floor at the base of the crystal
+pedestal. It bent again, this time from the hinge that held the
+outstretched arms to the base. And now it was a huge truncated cross, a
+T-shaped figure, hovering only twenty feet above the pave.
+
+Down from the Keeper writhed and flicked a tangle of tentacles;
+serpentine, whiplike. Silvery white, they were dyed with the scarlet and
+orange flaming of the surface now hidden from my eyes; reflected those
+sullen and angry gleamings. Vermiceous, coiling, they seemed to drop
+from every inch of the overhanging planes.
+
+Something there was beneath them--something like an immense and luminous
+tablet. The tentacles were moving over it--pressing here, thrusting
+there, turning, pushing, manipulating--
+
+
+A shuddering passed through the crowding cones. I saw the tremor shake
+their bristling hosts, oscillate the great spire, set the faceted disks
+quivering.
+
+The trembling grew; a vibration in every separate cone that became even
+more rapid. There was a faint, curiously oppressive humming--like the
+distant echo of a tempest in chaos.
+
+Faster, ever faster grew the vibration. Now the sharp outlines of the
+cones were dissolving.
+
+And now they were--gone.
+
+The mount of the cones had become a mighty pyramid of pale green
+radiance--one tremendous, pallid flame, of which the spire was the
+tongue. Out from the disked wheel at its shorn tip gushed a flood of
+light--light that gathered itself from the leaping radiance below it.
+
+The tentacles of the Keeper moved more swiftly over the enigmatic
+tablet; writhing cloudily; confusedly rapid. The faceted disks wavered;
+turned upward; the wheel began to whirl--faster--faster--
+
+Up from that flaming circle, out into the sky leaped a thick, pale green
+column of intensest light.
+
+With prodigious speed, as compact as water, CONCENTRATE, it
+struck--straight out toward the face of the sun.
+
+It thrust up with the speed of light--the speed of light? A thought came
+to me; incredible I believed it even as I reacted to it. My pulse is
+uniformly seventy to the minute. I sought my wrist, found the artery,
+made allowance for its possible acceleration, began to count.
+
+“What's the matter?” asked Drake.
+
+“Take my glasses,” I muttered, trying to keep up, while speaking, my
+tally. “Matches in my pocket. Smoke the lenses. I want to look at sun.”
+
+With a look of stupefied amazement which, at another time I would have
+found laughable, he obeyed.
+
+“Hold them to my eyes,” I ordered.
+
+Three minutes had gone by.
+
+There it was--that for which I sought. Clear through the darkened lenses
+I could see the sun spot, high up on the northern-most limb of the
+sun. An unimaginable cyclone of incandescent gases; an unthinkably huge
+dynamo pouring its floods of electro-magnetism upon all the circling
+planets; that solar crater which we now know was, when at its maximum,
+all of one hundred and fifty thousand miles across; the great sun spot
+of the summer of 1919--the most enormous ever recorded by astronomical
+science.
+
+Five minutes had gone by.
+
+Common sense whispered to me. There was no use keeping my eyes fixed
+to the glasses. Even if that thought were true--even if that pillar
+of radiance were a MESSENGER, an earth-hurled bolt flying to the sun
+through atmosphere and outer space with the speed of light, even if it
+were this stupendous creation of these Things, still between eight and
+nine minutes must elapse before it could reach the orb; and as many
+minutes must go by before the image of whatever its impact might produce
+upon the sun could pass back over the bridge of light spanning the
+ninety millions of miles between it and us.
+
+And after all did not that hypothesis belong to the utterly impossible?
+Even were it so--what was it that the Metal Monster expected to follow?
+This radiant shaft, colossal as it was to us, was infinitesimal compared
+to the target at which it was aimed.
+
+What possible effect could that spear have upon the solar forces?
+
+And yet--and yet--a gnat's bite can drive an elephant mad. And Nature's
+balance is delicate; and what great happenings may follow the slightest
+disturbance of her infinitely sensitive, her complex, equilibrium? It
+might be--it might be--
+
+Eight minutes had passed.
+
+“Take the glasses,” I bade Drake. “Look up at the sun spot--the big
+one.”
+
+“I see it.” He had obeyed me. “What of it?”
+
+Nine minutes.
+
+The shaft, if I were right, had by now touched the sun. What was to
+follow?
+
+“I don't get you at all,” said Drake, and lowered the glasses.
+
+Ten minutes.
+
+“What's happening? Look at the Cones! Look at the Emperor!” gasped
+Drake.
+
+
+I peered down, then almost forgot to count.
+
+The pyramidal flame that had been the mount of Cones was shrunken. The
+pillar of radiance had not lessened--but the mechanism that was its
+source had retreated whole yards within the field of its crystal base.
+
+And the Metal Emperor! Dulled and faint were his fires, dimmed his
+splendors; and fainter still were the violet luminescences of the
+watching Stars, the shimmering livery of his court.
+
+The Keeper of the Cones! Were not its outstretched planes hovering lower
+and lower over the gleaming tablet; its tentacles moving aimlessly,
+feebly--wearily?
+
+I had a sense of force being withdrawn from all about me. It was as
+though all the City were being drained of life--as though vitality were
+being sucked from it to feed this pyramid of radiance; drained from it
+to forge the thrusting spear piercing sunward.
+
+The Metal People seemed to hang limply, inert; the living girders seemed
+to sag; the living columns to bend; to droop and to sway.
+
+Twelve minutes.
+
+With a nerve-racking crash one of the laden beams fell; dragging down
+with it others; bending, shattering in its fall a thicket of the
+horned columns. Behind us the sparkling eyes of the wall were dimmed,
+vacant--dying. Something of that hellish loneliness, that demoniac
+desire for immolation that had assailed us in the haunted hollow of the
+ruins began to creep over me.
+
+The crowded crater was fainting. The life was going out of the City--its
+magnetic life, draining into the shaft of green fire.
+
+Duller grew the Metal Emperor's glories.
+
+Fourteen minutes.
+
+“Goodwin,” cried Drake, “the life's going out of these Things! Going out
+with that ray they're shooting.”
+
+Fifteen minutes.
+
+I watched the tentacles of the Keeper grope over the tablet. Abruptly
+the flaming pyramid darkened--WENT OUT.
+
+The radiant pillar hurtled upward like a thunder-bolt; vanished in
+space.
+
+Before us stood the mount of cones, shrunken to a sixth of its former
+size.
+
+Sixteen minutes.
+
+All about the crater-lip the ringed shields tilted; thrust themselves
+on high, as though behind each was an eager lifting arm. Below them the
+hived clusters of disks changed from globules into wide coronets.
+
+Seventeen minutes.
+
+I dropped my wrist; seized the glasses from Drake; raised them to the
+sun. For a moment I saw nothing--then a tiny spot of white incandescence
+shone forth at the lower edge of the great spot. It grew into a point of
+radiance, dazzling even through the shadowed lenses.
+
+I rubbed my eyes; looked again. It was still there, larger--blazing with
+an ever increasing and intolerable intensity.
+
+I handed the glasses to Drake, silently.
+
+“I see it!” he muttered. “I see it! And THAT did it--that! Goodwin!”
+ There was panic in his cry. “Goodwin! The spot! it's widening! It's
+widening!”
+
+I snatched the glasses from him. I caught again the dazzling flashing.
+But whether Drake HAD seen the spot widen, change--to this day I do not
+know.
+
+To me it seemed unchanged--and yet--perhaps it was not. It may be that
+under that finger of force, that spear of light, that wound in the side
+of our sun HAD opened further--
+
+That the sun had winced!
+
+I do not to this day know. But whether it had or not--still shone the
+intolerably brilliant light. And miracle enough that was for me.
+
+Twenty minutes--subconsciously I had gone on counting--twenty minutes--
+
+About the cratered girdle of the upthrust shields a glimmering mistiness
+was gathering; a translucent mist, beryl pale and beryl clear. In a
+heart-beat it had thickened into a vast and vaporous ring through whose
+swarms of corpuscles the sun's reflected image upon each disk shone
+clear--as though seen through clouds of transparent atoms of aquamarine.
+
+Again the filaments of the Keeper moved--feebly. As one of the hosts of
+circling shields shifted downward. Brilliant, ever more brilliant, waxed
+the fast-thickening mists.
+
+Abruptly, and again as one, the disks began to revolve. From every
+concave surface, from the surfaces of the huge circlets below them,
+flashed out a stream of green fire--green as the fire of green life
+itself. Corpuscular, spun of uncounted rushing, dazzling ions the great
+rays struck across, impinged upon the thousand-foot wheel that crowned
+the cones; set it whirling.
+
+Over it I saw form a limpid cloud of the brilliant vapors. Whence came
+these sparkling nebulosities, these mists of light? It was as though the
+clustered, spinning disks reached into the shadowless air, sucked from
+it some unseen, rhythmic energy and transformed it into this visible,
+coruscating flood.
+
+For now it was a flood. Down from the immense wheel came pouring
+cataracts of green fires. They cascaded over the cones; deluged them;
+engulfed them.
+
+Beneath that radiant inundation the cones grew. Perceptibly their volume
+increased--as though they gorged themselves upon the light. No--it was
+as though the corpuscles flew to them, coalesced and built themselves
+into the structure.
+
+Out and further out upon the base of crystal they crept. And higher and
+higher soared their tips, thrusting, ever thrusting upward toward the
+whirling wheel that fed them.
+
+Now from the Keeper's planes writhed the Keeper's tangle of tentacles,
+uncoiling eagerly, avidly, through the twenty feet of space between
+their source and the enigmatic mechanism they manipulated. The crater's
+disks tilted downward. Into the vast hollow shot their jets of green
+radiance, drenching the Metal Hordes, splashing from the polished walls
+wherever the Metal Hordes had left those living walls exposed.
+
+All about us was a trembling, an accelerating pulse of life. Colossal,
+rhythmic, ever quicker, ever more powerfully that pulse throbbed--a
+prodigious vibration monstrously alive.
+
+“Feeding!” whispered Drake. “Feeding! Feeding on the sun!”
+
+Faster danced the radiant beams. The crater was a cauldron of green
+fires through which the conical rays angled and interwove, crossed and
+mingled. And where they mingled, where they crossed, flamed out suddenly
+immense rayless orbs; palpitant for an instant, then dissolving in
+spiralling, feathery spray of pallid emerald incandescences.
+
+Stronger and stronger beat the pulse of returning life.
+
+A jetting stream struck squarely upon the Metal Emperor. Out blazed his
+splendors--jubilant. His golden zodiac, no longer tarnished and dull,
+ran with sun flames; the wondrous rose was a racing, lambent miracle.
+
+Up snapped the Keeper; towered behind him, all flickering scarlets and
+leaping yellows--no longer wrathful or sullen.
+
+The place dripped radiance; was filling like a chrisom with radiance.
+
+Us, too, the sparkling mists bathed.
+
+I was conscious of a curiously wild exhilaration; a quickening of the
+pulse; an abnormally rapid breathing. I stooped to touch Drake; sparks
+leaped from my outstretched fingers, great green sparks that crackled as
+they impacted upon him. He gave them no heed; but stared with fascinated
+eyes upon the crater.
+
+Now from every side broke a tempest of gem fires. From every girder
+and column, from every arras, pendent and looping, burst diamond
+glitterings, ruby luminescences, lanced flames of molten emerald and
+sapphires, flashings of amethyst and opal, meteoric iridescences,
+dazzling spectrums.
+
+The hollow was a cave of some Aladdin of the Titans ablaze with
+enchanted hoards. It was a place of gems ensorcelled, gems in which
+imprisoned hosts of the Jinns of Light beat sparkling against their
+crystal walls to escape.
+
+I thrust the fantasies from me. Fantastic enough was this reality--globe
+and pyramid and cube of the Metal People opening wide, bathing in,
+drinking from the radiant maelstrom that faster and ever faster swirled
+about them.
+
+“Feeding!” It was Drake's awed voice. “Feeding on the sun!”
+
+The circling shields were raising themselves, lifting themselves higher
+above the crater-lip. Into the crowded cylinder came now only the rays
+from the high circlets, the streams from the huge wheel above the still
+growing cones.
+
+Up and up the shields rose, but by what mechanism raised I could not
+see. Their motion ceased; in all their thousands they turned. Over the
+City's top and out into the oval valley they poured their torrents of
+light; flooding it, deluging it even as they had this pit that was the
+City's heart. Feeding, I knew, those other Metal Hordes without.
+
+And as though in answer, sweeping down upon us through the circles of
+open sky, a clamor poured.
+
+“If we'd but known!” Drake's voice came to me, thin and unreal through
+the tumult. “It's what Ventnor meant! If we had got down there when they
+were so weak--if we could have handled the Keeper--we could have smashed
+that plate that works the Cones! We could have killed them!”
+
+“There are other Cones,” I cried back to him.
+
+“No,” he shook his head. “This is the master machine. It's what Ventnor
+meant when he said to strike through the sun. And we've lost the
+chance--”
+
+Louder grew the hurricane without; and now within began its mate.
+Through the mists flashed linked tempests of lightnings. Bolt upon
+javelin bolt, and ever more thickly; lightnings green as the mists
+themselves; lightning bolts of destroying violets, searing scarlets;
+tearing chains of withering yellows, globes of exploding multicolored
+electric incandescences.
+
+The crater was threaded with the lightnings of the Metal People; was
+broidered with them; was a Pit woven with vast and changing patterns of
+electric flame.
+
+What was it that Drake had said? That if but we could have known we
+could have destroyed these--Things--Destroyed--Them? Things that could
+thrust their will and power up through ninety million miles of space and
+suck from the sun the honey of power! Drain it and hive it within these
+great mountains of the cones!
+
+Destroy Things that could feed their own life into a machine to draw
+back from the sun a greater life--Things that could forge of their
+strength a spear which, piercing the side of the sun, sent gushing back
+upon them a tenfold, nay, a thousandfold strength!
+
+Destroy this City that was one vast and living dynamo feeding upon the
+magnetic life of earth and sun!
+
+The clamor had grown stupendous, destroying--like armored Gods roaring
+at sword play in a hundred Valhallas; like the war drums of battling
+universe; like the smitings of warring suns.
+
+And all the City was throbbing, beating with a gigantic pulse of
+life--was fed and drunken with life. I felt that pulsing become my own;
+I echoed to it; throbbed in unison. I saw Drake outlined in flame; that
+around me a radiant nimbus was growing.
+
+I thought I saw Norhala floating, clothed in shouting, flailing fires. I
+strove to call out to her. By me slipped the body of Drake; lay flaming
+at my feet upon the narrow ledge.
+
+There was a roaring within my head--louder, far louder, than that which
+beat against my ears. Something was drawing me forth; drawing me out of
+my body into unimaginable depths of blackness. Something was hurling me
+out into those cold depths of space that alone could darken the fires
+that encircled me--the fires of which I was becoming a part.
+
+I felt myself leap outward--outward and outward--into--oblivion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI. PHANTASMAGORIA METALLIQUE.
+
+Wearily I opened my eyes. Stiffly, painfully, I stirred. High above
+me was the tremendous circle of sky, ringed with the hosts of feeding
+shields. But the shields were now wanly gleaming and the sky was the sky
+of night.
+
+Night? How long had I lain here? And where was Drake? I struggled to
+rise.
+
+“Steady, old man,” his voice came from beside me. “Steady--and quiet.
+How are you feeling?”
+
+“Badly battered,” I groaned. “What happened?”
+
+“We weren't used to the show,” he said. “We got all fed up at the orgy.
+Too much magnetism--we had a sudden and violent attack of electrical
+indigestion. Sh-h--look ahead of you.”
+
+Gingerly I turned. I had been lying, I now saw, head toward and prone
+at the base of one of the crater's walls. As my gaze swept away I noted
+with a curious relief that the tiny eye-points were no longer sparkling
+with their enigmatic life, that they were dulled and dim once more.
+
+Before me, glimmering pallidly, bristled the mount of the Cones. Around
+its crystal base glittered immense egg-shaped diamond incandescences.
+They were both rayless and strangely--lightless; they threw no shadows
+nor did their lambency lessen the dimness. Beside each of these curious
+luminosities stood one of the sullen-fired, cruciform shapes--the Things
+that now I knew for the opened cubes.
+
+They were smaller than the Keeper, indeed less than half his height.
+They were ranged in an almost unbroken crescent around the visible arc
+of the immense pedestal--and now I saw that the lights were a few feet
+closer to that pedestal than they. Egg-shaped as I have said, the wider
+end was undermost, resting in a broad cup upheld by a slender pedicle
+silvery-gray and metallic.
+
+“They're building out the base,” whispered Drake. “The Cones got so big
+they have to give them more room.”
+
+“Magnetism,” I whispered in return. “Electricity--they drew down from
+the sun spot. And it was more than that--I saw the Cones grow under it.
+It fed them as it fed the Hordes--but the Cones grew. It was as though
+the shields and the Cones turned pure energy into substance.”
+
+“And if we hadn't been pretty thoroughly magnetized to start with it
+would have done for us,” he said.
+
+We watched the operation going on in front of us. The cross shapes had
+bent, hinging above the transverse arms. They bowed in absolute unison
+as at some signal. Down from the horizontal plane of each whipped the
+long and writhing tentacles.
+
+At the foot of every one I could now perceive a heap of some faintly
+glistening material. The tendrils coiled among this, then drew up
+something that looked like a thick rod of crystal. The bent planes
+straightened; simultaneously they thrust the crystalline bars toward the
+incandescences.
+
+There came a curious, brittle hissing. The ends of the rods began to
+dissolve into dazzling, diamond rain, atomically minute, that passing
+through the egg-shaped lights poured upon the periphery of the pedestal.
+Rapidly the bars melted. Heat there must be in these lights, terrific
+heat--yet the Keeper's workers seemed impervious to it.
+
+As the ends of the bars radiated into the annealing mist I saw the
+tentacles creep closer and ever closer to the rayless flame through
+which the mist flew. And at the last, as the ultimate atoms drove
+through, the holding tendrils were thrust almost within it; touched it,
+certainly.
+
+A score of times they repeated this process while we watched. Unaware of
+us they seemed, or--if aware, then indifferent. More rapid became their
+movements, the glassy ingots streaming through the floating braziers
+with hardly a pause in their passing. Abruptly, as though switched, the
+incandescences lessened into candle-points; instantly, as at a signal,
+the crescent of crosses closed into a crescent of cubes.
+
+Motionless they stood, huge blocks blackened against the dim glowing
+of the cones--sentient monoliths; a Druid curve; an arc of a metal
+Stonehenge. And as at dusk and dawn the great menhirs of Stonehenge fill
+with a mysterious, granitic life, seem to be praying priests of stone,
+so about these gathered hierophantic illusion.
+
+
+They quivered; the slender pedicles cupping, the waned lights swayed;
+the lights lifted and soared, upright, to their backs.
+
+Two by two with measured pace, solemnly the cubes glided off into the
+encircling darkness. As they swept away there streamed behind them other
+scores not until then visible to us, joining pair by pair from hidden
+arcs.
+
+Into the secret shadows they flowed, two by two, each bearing over it
+the slim shaft holding the serene flame.
+
+Grotesquely were they like a column of monks marching with dimmed
+flambeau of their worship. Angled metal monks of some god of metal,
+carrying tapers of electric fire, withdrawing slowly from a Holy of
+Holies whose metallically divine Occupant knew nothing of man--nor cared
+to know.
+
+Grotesque--yes. But would that I had the power to crystallize in words
+the underlying, alien terror every movement of the Metal Monster
+when disintegrate, its every manifestation when combined, evoked; the
+incredulous, amazed lurking always close behind the threshold of the
+mind; the never lifting, thin-shuddering shadow.
+
+Smaller, dimmer waned the lights--they were gone.
+
+We crouched, motionless. Nothing stirred; there was no sound. Without
+speaking we arose; crept together over the smooth floor toward the
+cones.
+
+As we crossed I saw that the pave, like the walls, was built of the
+bodies of the Metal People; and, like the walls, they were dormant,
+filmed eyes oblivious to our passing. Closer we crept--were only a scant
+score of rods from that colossal mechanism. I noted that the crystal
+foundation was set low; was not more than four feet above the floor.
+The sturdy, dwarfed pilasters supporting it thrust up in crowded copses,
+merging through distance into apparent solidity.
+
+Now, too, I realized, as I had not when looking down from above, how
+stupendous the structure rising from the crystal foundation was.
+
+I began to wonder how so thin a support could bear the mount bristling
+above it--then remembered what it was that at first had flown from them,
+shrinking them, and at last had fed and swelled them.
+
+Light! Weightless magnetic ions; swarms of electric ions; the misty
+breath of the infinite energy breathing upon, condensing upon, them.
+Could it be that the Cones for all their apparent mass had little,
+if any, weight? Like ringed Saturn, thousands of times Earth's bulk,
+flaunting itself in the Heavens--yet if transported to our world so
+light that rings and all it would float like a bubble upon our oceans.
+The Cones towered above me--close, so close.
+
+The Cones were weightless. How I knew I cannot say--but now, almost
+touching them, I did know. Nebulous, yet solid, were they; compact, yet
+tenuous, dense and unsubstantial.
+
+Again the thought came to me--they were force made visible; energy made
+concentrate into matter.
+
+We skirted, seeking for the tablet over which the Keeper had hovered;
+the mechanism which, under his tentacles, had shifted the circling
+shields, thrust the spear of green fire into the side of the wounded
+sun. Hesitantly I touched the crystal base; the edge was warm, but
+whether this warmth came from the dazzling rain which we had just
+watched build it outward or whether it was a property inherent with the
+substance itself I do not know.
+
+Certainly there was no mark upon it to show where the molten mists had
+fallen. It was diamond hard and smooth. The nearest cones were but a
+scant nine feet from its rim.
+
+Suddenly we saw the tablet; stood beside it. The shape of a great T,
+glimmering with a faint and limpid violet phosphorescence, it might have
+been, in shape and size, the palely shining shadow of the Keeper. It was
+a foot above the floor, and had apparently no connection with the cones.
+
+It was made of thousands of close-packed tiny octagonal rods the tops of
+some of which were cupped, of others pointed; none was more than half
+an inch in width. There was about it a suggestion of wedded crystal
+and metal--as about its burden was the suggestion of mated energy and
+matter.
+
+The rods were movable; they formed a keyboard unimaginably complex;
+a keyboard whose infinite combinations were like a Fourth Dimensional
+chess game. I saw that only the swarms of tentacles that were the
+Keeper's hands and these only could be masters of its incredible
+intricacies. No Disk--not even the Emperor, no Star shape could play on
+it, draw out its chords of power.
+
+But why? Why had it been so made that sullen flaming Cross alone could
+release its hidden meanings, made articulate its interwoven octaves?
+And how were its messages conveyed? Up to its bases pressed the dormant
+cubes--that under it they lay as well I did not doubt.
+
+There was no visible copula of the tablet with cones; no antennae
+between it and the circled shields. Could it be that the impulses
+released by the Keeper's coilings passed through the Metal People of
+the pave on the upthrust Metal People of the crater rim who held the
+shields?
+
+That WAS unthinkable--unthinkable because if so this mechanism was
+superfluous.
+
+The swift response to the communal will that we had observed showed that
+the Metal Monster needed nothing of this kind for transmission of the
+thought of any of its units.
+
+There was some gap here--a gap that the grouped consciousness could not
+bridge without other means. Clearly that was true--else why the tablet,
+why the Keeper's travail?
+
+Was each of these tiny rods a mechanism akin, in a fashion, to the
+sending keys of the wireless; were they transmitters of subtle energy
+in which was enfolded command? Spellers-out of a super-Morse carrying
+to each responsive cell of the Metal Monster the bidding of those higher
+units which were to It as the brain cells are to us? That, advanced
+as the knowledge it implied might be, was closer to the heart of the
+possible.
+
+I bent, determined, despite the well-nigh unconquerable shrinking I
+felt, to touch the tablet's rods.
+
+A flickering shadow fell upon me; a flock of pulsating ochreous and
+scarlet shadows--
+
+The Keeper glowed above us!
+
+In a life that has had its share of dangers, its need for quick
+decisions, I recognize that few indeed of my reactions to peril have
+been more than purely instinctive; no more consciously courageous
+nor intellectually dissociate from the activating stimulus than the
+shrinking of the burned hand from the brand, the will-to-live dictated
+rush of the cornered animal upon the thing menacing it.
+
+One such higher functioning was when I followed Larry O'Keefe and Lakla,
+the Handmaiden, out to what we believed soul-destroying death in a place
+almost as strange as this *; another was now. Deliberately, detachedly, I
+studied the angrily flaming Shape.
+
+     * See “The Moon Pool” and “The Conquest of the Moon Pool.”
+
+Compared to it we were as a pair of Hop-o'-my-Thumbs to the Giant; had
+it been man-shaped we would have come less than a third way up to its
+knees. I focussed my attention upon the twenty-foot-wide square that was
+the Keeper's foot. Its surface was jewel smooth, hyaline--yet beneath
+it was a suggestion of granulation, of close-packed, innumerable,
+microscopic crystals.
+
+Within these grains whose existence was more sensed than seen glowed
+dull red light, smoky and sullen. At each end of the square, close to
+the bottom, was a diamond-shaped lozenge, cabochon, perhaps a yard in
+width. These were dim yellow, translucent, with no suggestion of the
+underlying crystallization. Sense organs I set them down to be--similar
+to the great ovals within the Emperor's golden zone.
+
+
+My gaze traveled up to the transverse arms. They stretched sixty feet
+from tip to tip. At each tip were two more of the diamond figures, not
+dull but burning angrily with orange-and-scarlet luster. In the center
+of the beam was something that might have been a smoldering rubrous
+reflection of the Emperor's pulsing multicolored rose had each of the
+petals of the latter been clipped and squared.
+
+It deepened toward its heart into a singular pattern of vermilion
+latticings. Into the entire figure ran numerous tiny rivulets of angry
+crimson and orange light, angling in interwoven patterns with never a
+curve nor arching.
+
+Set at intervals between them were what looked like octagonal rosettes
+filled with slender silvery flutings, wan striations--like--it came to
+me--immense chrysanthemum buds, half opened, and carved in gray jade.
+
+Above towered the gigantic vertical beam. Toward its top I glimpsed a
+huge square of flaring crimsons and bright topaz; two other diamonds
+stared down upon us from just beneath it--like eyes. And over all its
+height the striated octagons clustered.
+
+I felt myself lifted, floated upward. Drake's hand shot out, clung to me
+as together we drifted up the living wall. Opposite the latticed heart
+of the square-petaled rose our flight was checked. There for an instant
+we hung. Then the octagonal symbols stirred, unfolded like buds--
+
+They were the nests of the Keeper's tentacles, and out from them the
+whiplike tendrils uncoiled, shot out and writhed toward us.
+
+My skin flinched from their touch; my body, held in the unseen grip, was
+motionless. Yet when they touched their contact was not unpleasant. They
+were like flexible strands of glass; their smooth tips questioned
+us, passing through our hair, searching our faces, writhing over our
+clothing.
+
+There was a pulse in the great clipped rose, a rhythmic throbbing of
+vermilion fire that ran into it from the angled veins, beat through the
+latticed nucleus and throbbed back whence it had come. The huge, high
+square of scarlet and yellow was liquid flame; the diamond organs
+beneath it seemed to smoke, to send out swirls of orange red vapor.
+
+Holding us so the Keeper studied us.
+
+The rhythm of the square rose, became the rhythm of my own mind. But
+here was none of the vast, serene and elemental calm that Ruth had
+described as emanating from the Metal Emperor. Powerful it was, without
+doubt, but in it were undertones of rage, of impatience, overtones of
+revolt, something incomplete and struggling. Within the disharmonies I
+seemed to sense a fettered force striving for freedom; energy battling
+against itself.
+
+Greater grew the swarms of the tentacles winding about us like slender
+strands of glass, covering our faces, making breathing more and
+more difficult. There was a coil of them around my throat and
+tightening--tightening.
+
+I heard Drake gasping, laboring for breath. I could not turn my head
+toward him, could not speak. Was this then to be our end?
+
+The strangling clutch relaxed, the mass of the tentacles lessened. I was
+conscious of a surge of anger through the cruciform Thing that held us.
+
+Its sullen fires blazed. I was aware of another light beating past
+us--beating down the Keeper's. The hosts of tendrils drew back from me.
+I felt myself picked from the unseen grasp, whirled in the air and drawn
+away.
+
+Drake beside me, I hung now before the Shining Disk--the Metal Emperor!
+
+He it was who had plucked us from the Keeper--and even as I swung I saw
+the Keeper's multitudinous, serpentine arms surge out toward us angrily
+and then sullenly, slowly, draw back into their nests.
+
+And out of the Disk, clothing me, permeating me, came an immense
+tranquillity, a muting of all human thought, all human endeavor, an
+unthinkable, cosmic calm into which all that was human of me seemed to
+be sinking, drowning as in a fathomless abyss. I struggled against
+it, desperately, striving in study of the Disk to erect a barrier of
+preoccupation against the power pouring from it.
+
+A dozen feet away from us the sapphire ovals centered upon us their
+regard. They were limpid, pellucid as gems whose giant replicas they
+seemed to be. The surface of the Disk ringed about by the aureate zodiac
+in which the nine ovals shone was a maze of geometric symbols traced
+in the lines of living gem fires; infinitely complex those patterns and
+infinitely beautiful; an infinite number of symmetric forms in which I
+seemed to trace all the ordered crystalline wonders of the snowflakes,
+the groupings of all crystalline patternings, the soul of ordered beauty
+that are the marvels of the Radiolaria, Nature's own miraculous book of
+the soul of mathematical beauty.
+
+The flashing, petaled heart was woven of living rainbows of cold flame.
+
+Silently we floated there while the Disk--LOOKED--at us.
+
+And as though I had been not an actor but an observer, the weird picture
+of it all came to me--two men swinging like motes in mid air, on one
+side the flickering scarlet and orange Cruciform shape, on the other
+side the radiant Disk, behind the two manikins the pallid mount of the
+bristling cones; and high above the wan circle of the shields.
+
+There was a ringing about us--an elfin chiming, sweet and crystalline.
+It came from the cones--and strangely was it their vocal synthesis,
+their voice. Into the vast circle of sky pierced a lance of green fire;
+swift in its wake uprose others.
+
+We slid gently down, stood swaying at the Disk's base. The Keeper bent;
+angled. Again the planes above the supporting square hovered over the
+tablet. The tendrils swept down, pushed here and there, playing upon the
+rods some unknown symphony of power.
+
+Thicker pulsed the lances of the aurora; changed to vast billowing
+curtains. The faceted wheel at the top of the central spire of the cones
+swung upward; a light began to stream from the cones themselves--no
+pillar now, but a vast circle that shot whirling into the heavens like a
+noose.
+
+And like a noose it caught the aurora, snared it!
+
+Into it the coruscating mists of mysterious flame swirled; lost their
+colors, became a torrent of light flying down through the ring as though
+through a funnel top.
+
+Down poured the radiant corpuscles, bathing the cones. They did not glow
+as they had beneath the flood from the shields, and if they grew it was
+too slowly for me to see; the shields were motionless. Now here, now
+there, I saw the other rings whirl up--smaller mouths of lesser cones
+hidden within the body of the Metal Monster, I knew, sucking down this
+magnetic flux, these countless ions gushing forth from the sun.
+
+Then as when first we had seen the phenomenon in the valley of the blue
+poppies, the ring vanished, hidden by a fog of coruscations--as though
+the force streaming through the rings became diffused after it had been
+caught.
+
+Crouching, forgetful of our juxtaposition to these two unhuman,
+anomalous Things, we watched the play of the tentacles upon the upthrust
+rods.
+
+But if we forgot, we were not forgotten!
+
+The Emperor slipped nearer; seemed to contemplate us--quizzically,
+AMUSED; as a man would look down upon some curious and interesting
+insect, a puppy, a kitten. I sensed this amusement in the Disk's regard
+even as I had sensed its soul of awful tranquillity; as we had sensed
+the playful malice in the eye stars of the living corridor, the
+curiosity in the column that had dropped us into the valley.
+
+I felt a push--a push that was filled with a colossal, GLITTERING
+playfulness.
+
+Under it I went spinning away for yards--Drake twirling close behind me.
+The force, whatever it was, swept out from the Emperor, but in it was
+no slightest hint of anger or of malice, no slightest shadow of the
+sinister.
+
+Rather it was as though one would blow away a feather; urge gently some
+little lesser thing away.
+
+The Disk watched our whirlings--with a sparkling, jeweled LAUGHTER in
+its pulsing radiance.
+
+Again came the push--farther yet we spun. Suddenly before us, across the
+pave, shone out a twinkling trail--the wakened eyes of the cubes that
+formed it, marking out a pathway for us to follow.
+
+Immediately upon their gleaming forth I saw the Emperor turn--his
+immense, oval, metallic back now black against the radiance of the
+cones.
+
+Up from the narrow gleaming path--a path opened I knew by some
+command--lifted the hosts of tiny unseen hands; the sentient currents of
+magnetic force that were the fingers and arms of the Metal Hordes. They
+held us, thrust us along, passed us forward. Faster and faster we moved,
+speeding on the wake of the long-vanished metal monks.
+
+I turned my head--the cones were already far away. Over the tablet of
+limpid violet phosphorescence still hovered the planes of the Keeper;
+and still was the oval of the Emperor black against the radiance.
+
+But the twinkling, sparkling path between us and them was gone--was
+fading out close behind us as we swept onward.
+
+Faster and faster grew our pace. The cylindrical wall loomed close. A
+high oblong portal showed within it. Into this we were carried. Before
+us stretched a corridor precisely similar to that which, closing upon
+us, had forced us completely out into the hall.
+
+Unlike that passage, its floor lifted steeply--a smooth and shining
+slide up which no man could climb. A shaft, indeed, which thrust upward
+straight as an arrow at an angle of at least thirty degrees and whose
+end or turning we could not see. Up and up it cleared its way through
+the City--through the Metal Monster--closed only by the inability of
+the eye to pierce the faint luminosity that thickened by distance became
+impenetrable.
+
+For an instant we hovered upon its threshold. But the impulse, the
+command, that had carried us thus far was not to stop here. Into it and
+up it we were thrust, our feet barely touching the glimmering surface;
+lifted by the force that emanated from its floor, carried on by the
+force that pressed out from the sides.
+
+Up and up we went--scores of feet--hundreds--
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII. THE ENSORCELLED CHAMBER
+
+“Goodwin!” Drake broke the silence; desperately he was striving to keep
+his fear out of his voice. “Goodwin--this isn't the way to get out.
+We're going up--farther away all the time from the--the gates!”
+
+“What can we do?” My anxiety was no less than his, but my realization of
+our helplessness was complete.
+
+“If we only knew how to talk to these Things,” he said. “If we could
+only have let the Disk know we wanted to get out--damn it, Goodwin, it
+would have helped us.”
+
+Grotesque as the idea sounded, I felt that he spoke the truth. The
+Emperor meant no harm to us; in fact in speeding us away I was not at
+all sure that he had not deliberately wished us well--there was that
+about the Keeper--
+
+Still up we sped along the shaft. I knew we must now be above the level
+of the valley.
+
+“We've got to get back to Ruth! Goodwin--NIGHT! And what may have
+HAPPENED to her?”
+
+“Drake, boy”--I dropped into his own colloquialism--“we're up against
+it. We can't help it. And remember--she's there in Norhala's home. I
+don't believe, I honestly don't believe, Dick, that there's any danger
+as long as she remains there. And Ventnor ties her fast.”
+
+“That's true,” he said, more hopefully. “That's true--and probably
+Norhala is with her by now.”
+
+“I don't doubt it,” I said cheerfully. An idea came to me--I half
+believed it myself. “And another thing. There's not an action here
+that's purposeless. We're being driven on by the command of that Thing
+we call the Metal Emperor. It means us no harm. Maybe--maybe this IS the
+way out.”
+
+“Maybe so,” he shook his head doubtfully. “But I'm not sure. Maybe that
+long push was just to get us away from THERE. And it strikes me that the
+impulse has begun to weaken. We're not going anywhere near as fast as we
+were.”
+
+I had not realized it, but our speed was slackening. I looked
+back--hundreds of feet behind us fell the slide. An unpleasant chill
+went through me--should the magnetic grip upon us relax, withdraw,
+nothing could stop us from falling back along that incline to be broken
+like eggs at its end; that our breaths would be snuffed out by the
+terrific descent long before we reached that end was scant comfort.
+
+“There are other passages opening up along this shaft,” Drake said.
+“I'm not for trusting the Emperor too far--he has other things on his
+metallic mind, you know. The next one we get to, let's try to slip
+into--if we can.”
+
+I had noticed; there had been openings along the ascending shaft;
+corridors running apparently transversely to its angled way.
+
+Slower and slower became our pace. A hundred yards above I glimpsed one
+of the apertures. Could we reach it? Slower and slower we arose. Now the
+gap was but a yard off--but we were motionless--were tottering!
+
+Drake's arms wrapped round me. With a tremendous effort he hurled me
+into the portal. I dropped at its edge, writhed swiftly around, saw him
+slipping, slipping down--thrust my hands out to him.
+
+He caught them. There came a wrench that tortured my arm sockets as
+though racked. But he held!
+
+Slowly--I writhed back into the passage, dragging up his almost dead
+weight. His head appeared, his shoulders; there was a convulsion of the
+long body and he lay before me.
+
+
+For a minute or two we lay, flat upon our backs resting. I sat up. The
+passage was broad, silent; apparently as endless as that from which we
+had just escaped.
+
+Along it, above us, under us, the crystalline eyes were dim. It showed
+no sign of movement--yet had it done so there was nothing we could do
+save drop down the annihilating slant. Drake arose.
+
+“I'm hungry,” he said, “and I'm thirsty. I move that we eat and drink
+and approximately be merry.”
+
+He slung aside the haversack. From it we took food; from the canteens
+we drank. We did not talk. Each knew what the other was thinking;
+infrequently, and thank the eternal law that some call God for that,
+come crises in which speech seems not only petty but when against it the
+mind rebels as a nauseous thing.
+
+This was such a time. At last I drew myself to my feet.
+
+“Let's be going,” I said.
+
+The corridor stretched straight before us; along it we paced. How far we
+walked I do not know; mile upon mile, it seemed. It broadened abruptly
+into a vast hall.
+
+And this hall was filled with the Metal Hordes--was a gigantic workshop
+of them. In every shape, in every form, they seethed and toiled about
+it. Upon its floor were heaps of shining ores, mounds of flashing gems,
+piles of ingots, metallic and crystalline. High and low throughout
+flamed the egg-shaped incandescences; floating furnaces both great and
+small.
+
+Before one of these forges, close to us, stood a Metal Thing. Its body
+was a twelve-foot column of smaller cubes. Upon the top was a hollow
+square formed of even lesser blocks--blocks hardly larger than the
+Little Things themselves. In the center of the open rectangle was
+another shaft, its top a two-foot square plate formed of a single cube.
+
+From the sides of the hollow square sprang long arms of spheres, each
+tipped by a tetrahedron. They moved freely, slipping about upon their
+curved points of contact and like a dozen little thinking hammers,
+the pyramid points at their ends beat down upon as many thimble shaped
+objects which they thrust alternately into the unwinking brazier then
+laid upon the central block to shape.
+
+A goblin workman the Thing seemed, standing there, so intent upon and so
+busy with its forgings.
+
+There were scores of these animate machines; they paid no slightest
+heed to us as we slipped by them, clinging as closely to the wall of the
+immense workshop as we could.
+
+We passed a company of other Shapes which stood two by two and close
+together, their tops wide spinning wheels through which the tendrils
+of an opened globe fed translucent, colorless ingots--the substance it
+seemed to me of which Norhala's shadowy walls were made, the crystal of
+which the bars that built out the base of the Cones were formed.
+
+The ingots passed between the whirling faces; emerged from them as
+slender, long cylinders; were seized as they slipped down by a crouching
+block, whose place as it glided away was instantly taken by another. In
+many bewildering forms, intent upon unknown activities directed toward
+unguessable ends, the composite, animate mechanisms labored. And all the
+place was filled with a goblin bustle, trollish racketings, ringing of
+gnomish anvils, clanging of kobold forges--a clamorous cavern filled
+with metal Nibelungens.
+
+We came to the opening of another passage, a doorway piercing the walls
+of the workshop. Its incline, though steep, was not dangerous.
+
+Into it we stepped; climbed onward it seemed interminably. Far ahead
+of us at last appeared the outline of its further entrance, silhouetted
+against and filled with a brighter luminosity. We drew near; stopped
+cautiously at its threshold, peering out.
+
+Well it was that we had hesitated. Before us was open space--an abyss in
+the body of the Metal Monster.
+
+The corridor opened into it like a window. Thrusting out our heads,
+we saw an unbroken wall both above and below. Half a mile away was
+its opposite side. Over this pit was a misty sky and not more than a
+thousand feet above and black against the heavens was the lip of it--the
+cornices of this chasm within the City.
+
+Far, far beneath us we watched the Hordes throw themselves across the
+abyss in webs of curving arches and girder-straight bridges; gigantic
+we knew these spans must be yet dwarfed to slender footways by
+distance. Over them moved hurrying companies; from them came flashings,
+glitterings--prismatic, sun golden; plutonic scarlets, molten blues;
+javelins of colored light piercing upward from unfolded cubes and globes
+and pyramids crossing them or from busy bearers of the shining fruits of
+the mysterious workshops.
+
+And as they passed the bridges swung up, coiled and thrust themselves
+from sight through openings that closed behind them. Ever, as they
+passed, close on their going whipped out other spans so that always
+across that abyss a sentient, shifting web was hung.
+
+We drew back, stared into each other's white face. Panic swept through
+me, in quick, alternate pulse of ice and fire. For crushingly, no longer
+to be denied, came certainty that we were lost within the mazes of this
+incredible City--lost in the body of the Metal Monster which that City
+was. There was a sick despair in my heart as we turned and slowly made
+our way back along the sloping corridor.
+
+A hundred yards, perhaps, we had gone in silence before we stopped,
+gazing stupidly at an opening in the wall beside us. The portal had not
+been there when we had passed--of that I was certain.
+
+“It's opened since we went by,” whispered Drake.
+
+We peered through it. The passage was narrow; its pave led downward.
+For a moment we hesitated, the same foreboding in both our minds. And
+yet--among the perils that crowded in upon us what choice had we? There
+could be no more danger there than here.
+
+Both ways were--ALIVE, both obedient to impulses over which we had
+no more control and no more way of predetermining than mice in some
+complex, man-made trap. Furthermore, this shaft also ran downward, and
+although its pitch was less and it did not therefore drop as quickly
+toward that level we sought and wherein lay the openings of escape into
+the outer valley, it fell at right angles to the corridor through which
+we had come.
+
+We knew that to retrace our steps now would but take us back to the
+forges and thence to the hall of the Cones and the certain peril waiting
+for us there.
+
+We stepped into this opened way. For a little distance it ran
+straightly, then turned and sloped gently upward; and a little distance
+more we climbed. Then suddenly, not a hundred yards from us, gushed out
+a flood of soft radiance, opalescent, filled with pearly glimmerings and
+rosy shadows of light.
+
+It was as though a door had opened into some world of luminescence. From
+it the lambent torrent poured; billowed down upon us. In its wake
+came music--if music the mighty harmonies, the sonorous chords, the
+crystalline themes and the linked chaplet of notes that were like
+spiralings of tiny golden star bells could be named.
+
+Toward source of light and sound we moved, nor could we have halted nor
+withdrawn had we willed; the radiance drew us to it as the sun the water
+drop, and irresistibly the sweet, unearthly music called. Closer we
+came--it was a narrow alcove from which sound and light poured--into it
+we crept--and went no further.
+
+We peered into a vast and columnless vault, a limitless temple of light.
+High up in it, strewn manifold, danced and shone soft orbs like tender
+suns. No pale gilt luminaries of frozen rays were these. Effulgent,
+jubilant, they flamed--orbs red as wine of rubies that Djinns of Al
+Shiraz press from his enchanted vineyards of jewels; twin orbs
+rosy white as breasts of pampered Babylonian maids; orbs of pulsing
+opalescences and orbs of the murmuring green of bursting buds of spring,
+crocused orbs and orbs of royal coral; suns that throbbed with singing
+rays of wedded rose and pearl and of sapphires and topazes amorous; orbs
+born of cool virginal dawns and of imperial sunsets and orbs that were
+the tuliped fruit of mating rainbows of fire.
+
+They danced, these countless aureoles; they swung and threaded in
+radiant choral patterns, in linked harmonies of light. And as they
+danced their gay rays caressed and bathed myriads of the Metal Folk open
+beneath them. Under the rays the jewel fires of disk and star and cross
+leaped and pulsed and danced to the same bright rhythm.
+
+We sought the source of the music--a tremendous thing of shimmering
+crystal pipes like some colossal organ. Out of the radiance around it
+great flames gathered, shook into sight with streamings and pennonings,
+in bannerets and bandrols, leaped upon the crystal pipes, and merged
+within them.
+
+And as the pipes drank them the flames changed into sound!
+
+Throbbing bass viols of roaring vernal winds, diapasons of waterfall
+and torrents--these had been flames of emerald; flaming trumpetings of
+desire that had been great streamers of scarlet--rose flames that had
+dissolved into echoes of fulfillment; diamond burgeonings that melted
+into silver symphonies like mist entangled Pleiades transmuted into
+melodies; chameleon harmonies to which the strange suns danced.
+
+And now I saw--realizing with a clutch of indescribable awe, with
+a sense of inexplicable profanation the secret of this ensorcelled
+chamber.
+
+Within every pulsing rose of irised fire that was the heart of a disk,
+from every rubrous, clipped rose of a cross, and from every rayed purple
+petaling of a star there nestled a tiny disk, a tiny cross, a tiny star,
+luminous and symboled even as those that cradled them.
+
+The Metal Babes building like crystals from hearts of radiance beneath
+the play of jocund orbs!
+
+Incredible blossomings of crystal and of metal whose lullabies and
+cradle songs were singing symphonies of flame.
+
+It was the birth chamber of the City!
+
+The womb of the Metal Monster!
+
+Abruptly the walls of the niche sparkled out, the glittering eye points
+regarding us with a most disquieting suggestion of sentinels who,
+slumbering, had been caught unaware, and now awakening challenged us.
+Swiftly the niche closed--so swiftly that barely had we time to spring
+over its threshold into the corridor.
+
+The corridor was awake--alive!
+
+The power darted out; gripped us. Up it swept us and on. Far away a
+square of light appeared, grew quickly larger. Framed in it was the
+amethystine burning of the great ring that girdled the encircling
+cliffs.
+
+I turned my head--behind us the corridor was closing!
+
+Now the opening was so close that through it I could see the vast
+panorama of the valley. The wall behind us touched us; pushed us on.
+We thrust ourselves against it, despairingly. As well might flies have
+tried to press back a moving mountain.
+
+Resistingly, inexorably we were pressed forward. Now we cowered within a
+yard-deep niche; now we trembled upon a foot-wide ledge.
+
+Shuddering, gasping, we glared down the sheer drop of the City's wall.
+The smooth and glimmering scarp fell thousands of feet straight to the
+valley floor. And there were no merciful mists to hide what awaited us
+there; no mists anywhere. In that brief, agonized glance every detail of
+the Pit was disclosed with an abnormal clarity.
+
+We tottered on the brink. The ledge melted.
+
+Down, down we plunged, locked in each other's arms, hurtling to the
+shattering death so far below!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII. THE TREACHERY OF YURUK
+
+Was it true that Time is within ourselves--that like Space, its twin, it
+is only a self-created illusion of the human mind? There are hours that
+flash by on hummingbird wings; there are seconds that shuffle on shod in
+leaden shoes.
+
+Was it true that when death faces us the consciousness finds power
+through its will to live to conquer the illusion--to prolong Time? That,
+recoiling from oblivion, we can recreate in a fractional moment whole
+years gone past, years yet to come--striving to lengthen our existence,
+stretching out our apperception beyond the phantom boundaries,
+overdrawing upon a Barmecide deposit of minutes, staking fresh claims
+upon a mirage?
+
+How else explain the seeming slowness with which we were falling--the
+seeming leisureness with which the wall drifted up past us?
+
+And was this punishment--a sentence meted out for profaning with our
+eyes a forbidden place; a penalty for touching with our gaze the ark of
+the Metal Tribes--their holy of holies--the budding place of the Metal
+Babes?
+
+The valley was swinging--swinging in slow broad curves; was oscillating
+dizzily.
+
+Slowly the colossal wall slipped upward.
+
+Realization swept me; left me amazed; only half believing. This was no
+illusion. After that first swift plunge our fall had been checked. We
+were swinging--not the valley.
+
+Deliberately, in wide arcs like pendulums, we were swinging across the
+City's scarp; three feet out from it, and as we swung, slowly sinking.
+
+And now I saw the countless eyes of the watching wall again were
+twinkling, regarding us with impish mockery.
+
+It was the grip of the living wall that held us; that rocked us from
+side to side as though giving greater breadths of it chance to behold
+us; that was dropping us gently, carefully, to the valley floor now a
+scant two thousand feet below.
+
+A storm of rage, of intensest resentment swept me; as once before any
+gratitude I should have felt for escape was submerged in the utter
+humiliation with which it was charged.
+
+I shook my fists at the twinkling wall, strove to kick and smite it like
+an angry child, cursed it--not childishly. Dared it to hurl me down to
+death.
+
+I felt Drake's hand touch mine.
+
+“Steady,” he said. “Steady, old boy. It's no use. Steady. Look down.”
+
+Hot with shame for my outburst, weak from its violence, I obeyed. The
+valley floor was not more than a thousand feet away. Thronging about
+where we must at last touch, clustered and seething, was a multitude of
+the Metal Things. They seemed to be looking up at us, watching, waiting
+for us.
+
+“Reception committee,” grinned Drake.
+
+I glanced away; over the valley. It was luminously clear; yet the sky
+was overcast, no stars showing. The light was no stronger than that of
+the moon at full, but it held a quality unfamiliar to me. It cast no
+shadows; though soft, it was piercing, revealing all it bathed with the
+distinctness of bright sunshine. The illumination came, I thought, from
+the encircling veils falling from the band of amethyst.
+
+And, as I peered, out of the veils and far away sped a violet spark.
+With meteor speed it flew toward us. Close to the base of the vast
+facade it landed with a flashing of blue incandescence. I knew it
+for one of the Flying Things, the Mark Makers--one of the incredible
+messengers.
+
+Close upon its fall came increase in the turmoil of the crowding throng
+awaiting us. Came, too, an abrupt change in our own motion. The long
+arcs lessened. We were dropped more swiftly.
+
+Far away in the direction from which the Flying Thing had flown I
+sensed another movement; something coming that carried with it subtle
+suggestion of unlikeness to all the other incessant, linked movement
+over the pit. Closer it drew.
+
+“Norhala!” gasped Drake.
+
+Robed in her silken amber swathings, red-copper hair streaming, woven
+with elfin sparklings, she was racing toward the City like some lovely
+witch, riding upon the back of a steed of huge cubes.
+
+Nearer she raced. More direct became our fall. Now we were dropping as
+though at the end of an unreeling plummet cord; the floor of the valley
+was no more than two hundred feet below.
+
+“Norhala!” we shouted; and again and again--again “Norhala!”
+
+Before our cries could have reached her the cubes swerved; came to a
+halt beneath us. Through the hundred feet of space between I caught the
+brilliancy of the weird constellations in Norhala's great eyes--saw with
+a vague but no less dire foreboding that on her face dwelt a terrifying,
+a blasting wrath.
+
+As softly as though by the hand of a giant of cloud we were lifted out
+from the wall, and were set with no perceptible shock beside her on the
+back of the cubes.
+
+“Norhala--” I stopped. For this was no Norhala whom we had known. Gone
+was all calm, vanished every trace of unearthly tranquillity. It was a
+Norhala awakened at last--all human.
+
+Yet in the still rage that filled her I sensed a force, an intensity,
+more than human. Over the blazing eyes the brows were knit in a rigid,
+golden bar; the delicate nostrils were pinched; the sweet red mouth was
+white and merciless. It was as though in its long sleep her human
+self had gathered more than human strength, and that now, awakened and
+unleashed, the violence of its rage touched the vibrant zenith of that
+sphere of which her quiet had been the nadir.
+
+
+She was like an urn filled and flaming with the fires of the Gods of
+wrath.
+
+What was it that had awakened her--what in awakening had changed the
+inpouring human consciousness into this flood of fury? Foreboding
+gripped me.
+
+“Norhala!” My voice was shaking. “Those we left--”
+
+“They are gone!” The golden voice was octaves deeper, vibrant, throbbing
+with that muffled, menacing note that must have pulsed from the
+golden tambours that summoned to battle Timur's fierce hordes. “They
+were--taken.”
+
+“Taken!” I gasped. “Taken by what--these?” I swept my hands out toward
+the Metal Things milling around us.
+
+“No! THESE are mine. These are they who obey me.” The golden voice now
+shrilled with her passion. “Taken by--men!”
+
+Drake had read my face although he could not understand our words.
+
+“Ruth--”
+
+“Taken,” I said. “Both Ruth and Ventnor. Taken by the armored men--the
+men of Cherkis!”
+
+“Cherkis!” She had caught the word. “Yes--Cherkis! And now he and all
+his men--and all his women--and every living thing he rules shall pay.
+And fear not--you two. For I, Norhala, will bring back my own.
+
+“Woe, woe to you, Cherkis, and to all of yours! For I, Norhala, am
+awake, and I, Norhala, remember. Woe to you, Cherkis, woe--for now all
+ends for you!
+
+“Not by the gods of my mother who turned their strength against her do
+I promise this. I, Norhala, have no need for them--I, Norhala, who have
+strength greater than they. And would I could crush those gods as I
+shall crush you, Cherkis--and every living thing of yours! Yea--and
+every UNLIVING thing as well!”
+
+Not halting now was Norhala's speech; it poured from the ruthless
+lips--flamingly.
+
+“We go,” she cried. “And something of vengeance I have saved for you--as
+is your right.”
+
+She tossed her arms high; stamped upon the back of the Metal Thing that
+held us.
+
+It quivered and sped away. Swiftly dwindled the City's bulk; fast faded
+its glimmering watchful face.
+
+Not toward the veils of light but out over the plain we flew. Above us,
+crouching against the blast of our going, streamed like a silken banner
+Norhala's hair, gemmed with the witch lights.
+
+We were far out now, the City far away. The cube slowed. Norhala threw
+high her head. From the arched, exquisite throat pealed a trumpet
+call--golden, summoning, imperious. Thrice it rang forth--and all the
+surrounding valley seemed to halt and listen.
+
+Followed upon its ending, a chanting as goldenly sonorous. Wild,
+peremptory, triumphant. It was like a mustering shouting to adventurous
+stars, buglings to buccaneering winds, cadenced beckonings to restless
+ranks of viking waves, signaling to all the corsairs and picaroons of
+the elemental.
+
+A cosmic call to slay!
+
+The gigantic block upon which we rode quivered; I myself felt a thousand
+needle-pointed roving arrows prick me, urging me on to some jubilant,
+reckless orgy of destruction.
+
+Obeying that summoning there swirled to us cube and globe and pyramid
+by the score--by the hundreds. They swept into our wake and
+followed--lifting up behind us, an ever-rising sea.
+
+Higher and higher arose the metal wave--mounting, ever mounting as other
+score upon score leaped upon it, rushed up it and swelled its crest. And
+soon so great it was that it shadowed us, hung over us.
+
+The cubes we rode angled in their course; raced now with ever-increasing
+speed toward the spangled curtains.
+
+And still Norhala's golden chant lured; higher and even higher reached
+the following wave. Now we were rising upon a steep slope; now the
+amethystine, gleaming ring was almost overheard.
+
+Norhala's song ceased. One breathless, soundless moment and we had
+pierced the veils. A globule of sapphire shone afar, the elfin bubble of
+her home. We neared it.
+
+
+Heart leaping, I saw three ponies, high and empty saddles turquoise
+studded, lift their heads from their roadway browsing. For a moment they
+stood, stiff with terror; then whimpering raced away.
+
+We were at Norhala's door; were lifted down; stood close to its
+threshold. Slaves to a single thought, Drake and I sprang to enter.
+
+“Wait!” Norhala's white hands caught us. “There is peril there--without
+me! Me you must--follow!”
+
+Upon the exquisite face was no unshadowing of wrath, no diminishing of
+rage, no weakening of dreadful determination. The star-flecked eyes were
+not upon us; they looked over and beyond--coldly, calculatingly.
+
+“Not enough,” I heard her whisper. “Not enough--for that which I will
+do.”
+
+We turned, following her gaze. A hundred feet on high, stretching nearly
+across the gorge, an incredible curtain was flung. Over its folds was
+movement--arms of spinning globes that thrust forth like paws and down
+upon which leaped pyramid upon pyramid stiffening as they clung like
+bristling spikes of hair; great bars of clicking cubes that threw
+themselves from the shuttering--shook and withdrew. The curtain was a
+ferment--shifting, mercurial; it throbbed with desire, palpitated with
+eagerness.
+
+“Not enough!” murmured Norhala.
+
+Her lips parted; from them came another trumpeting--tyrannic, arrogant
+and clangorous. Under it the curtaining writhed--out from it spurted
+thin cascades of cubes. They swarmed up into tall pillars that shook and
+swayed and gyrated.
+
+With blinding flash upon flash the sapphire incandescences struck forth
+at their feet. A score of flaming columned shapes leaped up and curved
+in meteor flight over the tumultuous curtain. Streaming with violet
+fires they shot back to the valley of the City.
+
+“Hai!” shouted Norhala as they flew. “Hai!”
+
+Up darted her arms; the starry galaxies of her eyes danced madly, shot
+forth visible rays. The mighty curtain of the Metal Things pulsed and
+throbbed; its units interweaving--block and globe and pyramid of which
+it was woven, each seeming to strain at leash.
+
+“Come!” cried Norhala--and led the way through the portal.
+
+Close behind her we pressed. I stumbled, nearly fell, over a
+brown-faced, leather-cuirassed body that lay half over, legs barring the
+threshold.
+
+Contemptuously Norhala stepped over it. We were within that chamber of
+the pool. About it lay a fair dozen of the armored men. Ruth's defense,
+I thought with a grim delight, had been most excellent--those who had
+taken her and Ventnor had not done so without paying full toll.
+
+A violet flashing drew my eyes away. Close to the pool wherein we had
+first seen the white miracle of Norhala's body, two immense, purple
+fired stars blazed. Between them, like a suppliant cast from black iron,
+was Yuruk.
+
+Poised upon their nether tips the stars guarded him. Head touching his
+knees, eyes hidden within his folded arms, the black eunuch crouched.
+
+“Yuruk!”
+
+There was an unearthly mercilessness in Norhala's voice.
+
+The eunuch raised his head; slowly, fearfully.
+
+“Goddess!” he whispered. “Goddess! Mercy!”
+
+“I saved him,” she turned to us, “for you to slay. He it was who brought
+those who took the maid who was mine and the helpless one she loved.
+Slay him.”
+
+Drake understood--his hand twitched down to his pistol, drew it. He
+leveled the gun at the black eunuch. Yuruk saw it--shrieked and cowered.
+Norhala laughed--sweetly, ruthlessly.
+
+“He dies before the stroke falls,” she said. “He dies doubly
+therefore--and that is well.”
+
+Drake slowly lowered the automatic; turned to me.
+
+“I can't,” he said. “I can't--do it--”
+
+“Masters!” Upon his knees the eunuch writhed toward us. “Masters--I
+meant no wrong. What I did was for love of the Goddess. Years upon years
+I have served her. And her mother before her.
+
+“I thought if the maid and the blasted one were gone, that you would
+follow. Then I would be alone with the Goddess once more. Cherkis will
+not slay them--and Cherkis will welcome you and give the maid and the
+blasted one back to you for the arts that you can teach him.
+
+“Mercy, Masters, I meant no harm--bid the Goddess be merciful!”
+
+
+The ebon pools of eyes were clarified of their ancient shadows by his
+terror; age was wiped from them by fear, even as it was wiped from his
+face. The wrinkles were gone. Appallingly youthful, the face of Yuruk
+prayed to us.
+
+“Why do you wait?” she asked us. “Time presses, and even now we should
+be on the way. When so many are so soon to die, why tarry over one? Slay
+him!”
+
+“Norhala,” I answered, “we cannot slay him so. When we kill, we kill in
+fair fight--hand to hand. The maid we both love has gone, taken with her
+brother. It will not bring her back if we kill him through whom she was
+taken. We would punish him--yes, but slay him we cannot. And we would be
+after the maid and her brother quickly.”
+
+A moment she looked at us, perplexity shading the high and steady anger.
+
+“As you will,” she said at last; then added, half sarcastically,
+“Perhaps it is because I who am now awake have slept so long that I
+cannot understand you. But Yuruk has disobeyed ME. That of MINE which
+I committed to his care he has given to the enemies of me and those who
+were mine. It matters nothing to me what YOU would do. Matters to me
+only what I will to do.”
+
+She pointed to the dead.
+
+“Yuruk”--the golden voice was cold--“gather up these carrion and pile
+them together.”
+
+The eunuch arose, stole out fearfully from between the two stars. He
+slithered to body after body, dragging them one after the other to the
+center of the chamber, lifting them and forming of them a heap. One
+there was who was not dead. His eyes opened as the eunuch seized him,
+the blackened mouth opened.
+
+“Water!” he begged. “Give me drink. I burn!”
+
+I felt a thrill of pity; lifted my canteen and walked toward him.
+
+“You of the beard,” the merciless chime rang out, “he shall have no
+water. But drink he shall have, and soon--drink of fire!”
+
+The soldier's fevered eyes rolled toward her, saw and read aright the
+ruthlessness in the beautiful face.
+
+“Sorceress!” he groaned. “Cursed spawn of Ahriman!” He spat at her.
+
+The black talons of Yuruk stretched around his throat
+
+“Son of unclean dogs!” he whined. “You dare blaspheme the Goddess!”
+
+He snapped the soldier's neck as though it had been a rotten twig.
+
+At the callous cruelty I stood for an instant petrified; I heard Drake
+swear wildly, saw his pistol flash up.
+
+Norhala struck down his arm.
+
+“Your chance has passed,” she said, “and not for THAT shall you slay
+him.”
+
+And now Yuruk had cast that body upon the others; the pile was complete.
+
+“Mount!” commanded Norhala, and pointed. He cast himself at her feet,
+writhing, moaning, imploring. She looked at one of the great Shapes;
+something of command passed from her, something it understood plainly.
+
+The star slipped forward--there was an almost imperceptible movement of
+its side points. The twitching form of the black seemed to leap up from
+the floor, to throw itself like a bag upon the mound of the dead.
+
+Norhala threw up her hands. Out of the violet ovals beneath the upper
+tips of the Things spurted streams of blue flame. They fell upon Yuruk
+and splashed over him upon the heap of the slain. In the mound was a
+dreadful movement, a contortion; the bodies stiffened, seemed to try to
+rise, to push away--dead nerves and muscles responding to the blasting
+energy passing through them.
+
+Out from the stars rained bolt upon bolt. In the chamber was the sound
+of thunder, crackling like broken glass. The bodies flamed, crumbled.
+There was a little smoke--nauseous, feebly protesting, beaten out by the
+consuming fires almost before it could rise.
+
+Where had been the heap of slain capped by the black eunuch there was
+but a little whirling cloud of sad gray dust. Caught by a passing
+draft, it eddied, slipped over the floor, vanished through the doorway.
+Motionless stood the blasting stars, contemplating us. Motionless
+stood Norhala, her wrath no whit abated by the ghastly sacrifice. And
+paralyzed by what we had beheld, motionless stood we.
+
+“Listen,” she said. “You two who love the maid. What you have seen is
+nothing to that which you SHALL see--a wisp of mist to the storm cloud.”
+
+“Norhala”--I found speech--“can you tell us when it was that the maid
+was captured?”
+
+Perhaps there was still time to overtake the abductors before Ruth was
+thrust into the worse peril waiting where she was being carried. Crossed
+this thought another--puzzling, baffling. The cliffs Yuruk had pointed
+out to me as those through which the hidden way passed were, I had
+estimated then, at least twenty miles away. And how long was the pass,
+the tunnel, through them? And then how far this place of the armored
+men? It had been past dawn when Drake had frightened the black eunuch
+with his pistol. It was not yet dawn now. How could Yuruk have made his
+way to the Persians so swiftly--how could they so swiftly have returned?
+
+Amazingly she answered the spoken question and the unspoken.
+
+“They came long before dusk,” she said. “By the night before Yuruk had
+won to Ruszark, the city of Cherkis; and long before dawn they were on
+their way hither. This the black dog I slew told me.”
+
+“But Yuruk was with us here at dawn yesterday,” I gasped.
+
+“A night has passed since then,” she said, “and another night is almost
+gone.”
+
+Stunned, I considered this. If this were true--and not for an instant
+did I doubt her--then not for a few hours had we lain there at the foot
+of the living wall in the Hall of the Cones--but for the balance of that
+day and that night, and another day and part of still another night.
+
+“What does she say?” Drake stared anxiously into my whitened face. I
+told him.
+
+“Yes.” Norhala spoke again. “The dusk before the last dusk that has
+passed I returned to my house. The maid was there and sorrowing. She
+told me you had gone into the valley, prayed me to help you and to bring
+you back. I comforted her, and something of--the peace--I gave her; but
+not all, for she fought against it. A little we played together, and I
+left her sleeping. I sought you and found you also sleeping. I knew no
+harm would come to you, and I went my ways--and forgot you. Then I came
+here again--and found Yuruk and these the maid had slain.”
+
+The great eyes flashed.
+
+“Now do I honor the maid for the battle that she did,” she said, “though
+how she slew so many strong men I do not know. My heart goes out to her.
+And therefore when I bring her back she shall no more be plaything to
+Norhala, but sister. And with you it shall be as she wills. And woe to
+those who have taken her!”
+
+She paused, listening. From without came a rising storm of thin
+wailings, insistent and eager.
+
+“But I have an older vengeance than this to take,” the golden voice
+tolled somberly. “Long have I forgotten--and shame I feel that I
+had forgot. So long have I forgotten all hatreds, all lusts, all
+cruelty--among--these--” She thrust a hand forth toward the hidden
+valley. “Forgot--dwelling in the great harmonies. Save for you and what
+has befallen I would never have stirred from them, I think. But now
+awakened, I take that vengeance. After it is done”--she paused--“after
+it is over I shall go back again. For this awakening has in it nothing
+of the ordered joy I love--it is a fierce and slaying fire. I shall go
+back--”
+
+The shadow of her far dreaming flitted over, softened the angry
+brilliancy of her eyes.
+
+“Listen, you two!” The shadow of dream fled. “Those that I am about to
+slay are evil--evil are they all, men and women. Long have they been
+so--yea, for cycles of suns. And their children grow like them--or
+if they be gentle and with love for peace they are slain or die of
+heartbreak. All this my mother told me long ago. So no more children
+shall be born from them either to suffer or to grow evil.”
+
+Again she paused, nor did we interrupt her musing.
+
+“My father ruled Ruszark,” she said at last. “Rustum he was named, of
+the seed of Rustum the Hero even as was my mother. They were gentle and
+good, and it was their ancestors who built Ruszark when, fleeing from
+the might of Iskander, they were sealed in the hidden valley by the
+falling mountain.
+
+“Then there sprang from one of the families of the nobles--Cherkis.
+Evil, evil was he, and as he grew he lusted for rule. On a night of
+terror he fell upon those who loved my father and slew; and barely had
+my father time to fly from the city with my mother, still but a bride,
+and a handful of those loyal to him.
+
+“They found by chance the way to this place, hiding in the cleft which
+is its portal. They came, and they were taken by--Those who are now my
+people. Then my mother, who was very beautiful, was lifted before him
+who rules here and she found favor in his sight and he had built for her
+this house, which now is mine.
+
+“And in time I was born--but not in this house. Nay--in a secret place
+of light where, too, are born my people.”
+
+She was silent. I shot a glance at Drake. The secret place of light--was
+it not that vast vault of mystery, of dancing orbs and flames transmuted
+into music into which we had peered and for which sacrilege, I had
+thought, had been thrust from the City? And did in this lie the
+explanation of her strangeness? Had she there sucked in with her
+mother's milk the enigmatic life of the Metal Hordes, been transformed
+into half human changeling, become true kin to them? What else could
+explain--
+
+
+“My mother showed me Ruszark,” her voice, taking up once more her tale,
+checked my thoughts. “Once when I was little she and my father bore me
+through the forest and through the hidden way. I looked upon Ruszark--a
+great city it is and populous, and a caldron of cruelty and of evil.
+
+“Not like me were my father and mother. They longed for their kind and
+sought ever for means to regain their place among them. There came a
+time when my father, driven by his longing, ventured forth to Ruszark,
+seeking friends to help him regain that place--for these who obey me
+obeyed not him as they obey me; nor would he have marched them--as I
+shall--upon Ruszark if they had obeyed him.
+
+“Cherkis caught him. And Cherkis waited, knowing well that my mother
+would follow. For Cherkis knew not where to seek her, nor where they
+had lain hid, for between his city and here the mountains are great,
+unscalable, and the way through them is cunningly hidden; by chance
+alone did my mother's mother and those who fled with her discover it:
+And though they tortured him, my father would not tell. And after a
+while forthwith those who still remained of hers stole out with my
+mother to find him. They left me here with Yuruk. And Cherkis caught my
+mother.”
+
+The proud breasts heaved, the eyes shot forth visible flames.
+
+“My father was flayed alive and crucified,” she said. “His skin they
+nailed to the City's gates. And when Cherkis had had his will with my
+mother he threw her to his soldiers for their sport.
+
+“All of those who went with them he tortured and slew--and he and his
+laughed at their torment. But one there was who escaped and told me--me
+who was little more than a budding maid. He called on me to bring
+vengeance--and he died. A year passed--and I am not like my mother and
+my father--and I forgot--dwelling here in the great tranquillities,
+barred from and having no thought for men and their way.
+
+“AIE, AIE!” she cried; “woe to me that I could forget! But now I shall
+take my vengeance--I, Norhala, will stamp them flat--Cherkis and his
+city of Ruszark and everything it holds! I, Norhala, and my servants
+shall stamp them into the rock of their valley so that none shall know
+that they have been! And would that I could meet their gods with all
+their powers that I might break them, too, and stamp them into the rock
+under the feet of my servants!”
+
+She threw out white arms.
+
+Why had Yuruk lied to me? I wondered as I watched her. The Disk had not
+slain her mother. Of course! He had lied to play upon our terrors; had
+lied to frighten us away.
+
+The wailings were rising in a sustained crescendo. One of the slaying
+stars slipped over the chamber floor, folded its points and glided out
+the door.
+
+“Come!” commanded Norhala, and led the way. The second star closed,
+followed us. We stepped over the threshold.
+
+For one astounded, breathless moment we paused. In front of us reared a
+monster--a colossal, headless Sphinx. Like forelegs and paws, a ridge of
+pointed cubes, and globes thrust against each side of the canyon walls.
+Between them for two hundred feet on high stretched the breast.
+
+And this was a shifting, weaving mass of the Metal Things; they formed
+into gigantic cuirasses, giant bucklers, corselets of living mail. From
+them as they moved--nay, from all the monster--came the wailings. Like a
+headless Sphinx it crouched--and as we stood it surged forward as though
+it sprang a step to greet us.
+
+“HAI!” shouted Norhala, battle buglings ringing through the golden
+voice. “HAI! my companies!”
+
+Out from the summit of the breast shot a tremendous trunk of cubes and
+spinning globes. And like a trunk it nuzzled us, caught us up, swept
+us to the crest. An instant I tottered dizzily; was held; stood beside
+Norhala upon a little, level twinkling eyed platform; upon her other
+side swayed Drake.
+
+Now through the monster I felt a throbbing, an eager and impatient
+pulse. I turned my head. Still like some huge and grotesque beast
+the back of the clustered Things ran for half a mile at least behind,
+tapering to a dragon tail that coiled and twisted another full mile
+toward the Pit. And from this back uprose and fell immense spiked and
+fan-shaped ruffs, thickets of spikes, whipping knouts of bristling
+tentacles, fanged crests. They thrust and waved, whipped and fell
+constantly; and constantly the great tail lashed and snapped, fantastic,
+long and living.
+
+“HAI!” shouted Norhala once more. From her lifted throat came again the
+golden chanting--but now a relentless, ruthless song of slaughter.
+
+Up reared the monstrous bulk. Into it ran the dragon tail. Into it
+poured the fanged and bristling back.
+
+Up, up we were thrust--three hundred feet, four hundred, five hundred.
+Over the blue globe of Norhala's house bent a gigantic leg. Spiderlike
+out from each side of the monster thrust half a score of others.
+
+Overhead the dawn began to break. Through it with ever increasing speed
+we moved, straight to the line of the cliffs behind which lay the city
+of the armored men--and Ruth and Ventnor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV. RUSZARK
+
+Smoothly moved the colossal shape; on it we rode as easily as though
+cradled. It did not glide--it strode.
+
+The columned legs raised themselves, bending from a thousand joints. The
+pedestals of the feet, huge and massive as foundations for sixteen-inch
+guns, fell with machinelike precision, stamping gigantically.
+
+Under their tread the trees of the forest snapped, were crushed like
+reeds beneath the pads of a mastodon. From far below came the sound of
+their crashing. The thick forest checked the progress of the Shape less
+than tall grass would that of a man.
+
+Behind us our trail was marked by deep, black pits in the forest's
+green, clean cut and great as the Mark upon the poppied valley. They
+were the footprints of the Thing that carried us.
+
+The wind streamed and whistled. A flock of the willow warblers arose,
+sworled about us with manifold beating of little frightened wings.
+Norhala's face softened, her eyes smiled.
+
+“Go--foolish little ones,” she cried, and waved her arms. They flew
+away, scolding.
+
+A lammergeier swooped down on wide funereal wings; it peered at us;
+darted away toward the cliffs.
+
+“There will be no carrion there for you, black eater of the dead, when I
+am through,” I heard Norhala whisper, eyes again somber.
+
+Steadily grew the dawn light; from Norhala's lips came again the
+chanting. And now that paean, the reckless pulse of the monster we rode,
+began to creep through my own veins. Into Drake's too, I knew, for his
+head was held high and his eyes were clear and bright as hers who sang.
+
+The jubilant pulse streamed through the hands that held us, throbbed
+through us. The pulse of the Thing--sang!
+
+Closer and closer grew the cliffs. Down and crashing down fell the
+trees, the noise of their fall accompanying the battle chant of the
+Valkyr beside me like wild harp chords of storm-lashed surf. Up to the
+precipices the forest rolled, unbroken. Now the cliffs loomed overhead.
+The dawn had passed. It was full day.
+
+Cutting up through the towering granite scarps was a rift. In it the
+black shadows clustered thickly. Straight toward that cleft we sped.
+As we drew near, the crest of the Shape began swiftly to lower. Down we
+sank and down--a hundred feet, two hundred; now we were two score yards
+above the tree tops.
+
+Out shot a neck, a tremendous serpent body. Crested it was with
+pyramids; crested with them, too, was its immense head. Thickly the head
+bristled with them, poised motionless upon spinning globes as huge as
+they. For hundreds of feet that incredible neck stretched ahead of us
+and for twice as far behind a monstrous, lizard-shaped body writhed.
+
+We rode now upon a serpent, a glittering blue metal dragon, spiked
+and knobbed and scaled. It was the weird steed of Norhala flattening,
+thrusting out to pierce the rift.
+
+And still as when it had reared on high beat through it the wild,
+triumphant, questing pulse. Still rang out Norhala's chanting.
+
+The trees parted and fell upon each side of us as though we were some
+monster of the sea and they the waves we cleft.
+
+The rift enclosed us. Lower we dropped; were not more than fifty feet
+above its floor. The Thing upon which we rode was a torrent roaring
+through it.
+
+A deeper blackness enclosed us--a tunneling.
+
+Through that we flowed. Out of it we darted into a widening filled with
+wan light drifting down through a pinnacle fanged mouth miles on high.
+Again the cleft shrunk. A thousand feet ahead was a crack, a narrowing
+of the cleft so small that hardly could a man pass through it.
+
+Abruptly the metal dragon halted.
+
+Norhala's chanting changed; became again the arrogant clarioning. And
+close below us the huge neck split. It came to me then that it was as
+though Norhala were the overspirit of this chimera--as though it caught
+and understood and obeyed each quick thought of hers.
+
+As though, indeed, she was a PART of it--as IT was in reality a part
+of that infinitely greater Thing, crouching there in its lair of the
+Pit--the Metal Monster that had lent this living part of itself to her
+for a steed, a champion. Little time had I to consider such matters.
+
+Up thrust the Shape before us. Into it raced and spun Things angled,
+Things curved and Things squared. It gathered itself into a Titanic
+pillar out of which, instantly, thrust scores of arms.
+
+Over them great globes raced; after these flew other scores of huge
+pyramids, none less than ten feet in height, the mass of them twenty
+and thirty. The manifold arms grew rigid. Quiet for a moment, a Titanic
+metal Briareous, it stood.
+
+Then at the tips of the arms the globes began to spin--faster, faster.
+Upon them I saw the hosts of the pyramids open--as one into a host of
+stars. The cleft leaped out in a flood of violet light.
+
+Now for another instant the stars which had been motionless, poised upon
+the whirling spheres, joined in their mad spinning. Cyclopean pin wheels
+they turned; again as one they ceased. More brilliant now was their
+light, dazzling; as though in their whirling they had gathered greater
+force.
+
+Under me I felt the split Thing quiver with eagerness.
+
+From the stars came a hurricane of lightning! A cataract of electric
+flame poured into the crack, splashed and guttered down the granite
+walls. We were blinded by it; were deafened with thunders.
+
+The face of the precipice smoked and split; was whirled away in clouds
+of dust.
+
+The crack widened--widened as a gulley in a sand bank does when a
+swift stream rushes through it. Lightnings these were--and more than
+lightnings; lightnings keyed up to an invincible annihilating weapon
+that could rend and split and crumble to atoms the living granite.
+
+
+Steadily the cleft expanded. As its walls melted away the Blasting Thing
+advanced, spurting into it the flaming torrents. Behind it we crept.
+The dust of the shattered rocks swirled up toward us like angry
+ghosts--before they reached us they were blown away as though by strong
+winds streaming from beneath us.
+
+On we went, blinded, deafened. Interminably, it seemed, poured forth the
+hurricane of blue fire; interminably the thunder bellowed.
+
+There came a louder clamor--volcanic, chaotic, dulling the thunders.
+The sides of the cleft quivered, bent outward. They split; crashed down.
+Bright daylight poured in upon us, a flood of light toward which the
+billows of dust rushed as though seeking escape; out it poured like the
+smoke of ten thousand cannon.
+
+And the Blasting Thing shook--as though with laughter!
+
+The stars closed. Back into the Shape ran globe and pyramid. It slid
+toward us--joined the body from which it had broken away. Through
+all the mass ran a wave of jubilation, a pulse of mirth--a colossal,
+metallic--SILENT--roar of laughter.
+
+We glided forward--out of the cleft. I felt a shifting movement.
+
+Up and up we were thrust. Dazed I looked behind me. In the face of a
+sky climbing wall of rock, smoked a wide chasm. Out of it the billowing
+clouds of dust still streamed, pursuing, threatening us. The whole
+granite barrier seemed to quiver with agony. Higher we rose and higher.
+
+“Look,” whispered Drake, and whirled me around.
+
+Less than five miles away was Ruszark, the City of Cherkis. And it was
+like some ancient city come into life out of long dead centuries. A
+page restored from once conquering Persia's crumbled book. A city of the
+Chosroes transported by Jinns into our own time.
+
+Built around and upon a low mount, it stood within a valley but little
+larger than the Pit. The plain was level, as though once it had been
+the floor of some primeval lake; the hill of the City was its only
+elevation.
+
+Beyond, I caught the glinting of a narrow stream, meandering. The valley
+was ringed with precipitous cliffs falling sheer to its floor.
+
+Slowly we advanced.
+
+The city was almost square, guarded by double walls of hewn stone. The
+first raised itself a hundred feet on high, turreted and parapeted and
+pierced with gates. Perhaps a quarter of a mile behind it the second
+fortification thrust up.
+
+The city itself I estimated covered about ten square miles. It ran
+upward in broad terraces. It was very fair, decked with blossoming
+gardens and green groves. Among the clustering granite houses, red and
+yellow roofed, thrust skyward tall spires and towers. Upon the mount's
+top was a broad, flat plaza on which were great buildings, marble white
+and golden roofed; temples I thought, or palaces, or both.
+
+Running to the city out of the grain fields and steads that surrounded
+it, were scores of little figures, rat-like. Here and there among them
+I glimpsed horsemen, arms and armor glittering. All were racing to the
+gates and the shelter of the battlements.
+
+Nearer we drew. From the walls came now a faint sound of gongs, of
+drums, of shrill, flutelike pipings. Upon them I could see hosts
+gathering; hosts of swarming little figures whose bodies glistened, from
+above whom came gleamings--the light striking upon their helms, their
+spear and javelin tips.
+
+“Ruszark!” breathed Norhala, eyes wide, red lips cruelly smiling. “Lo--I
+am before your gates. Lo--I am here--and was there ever joy like this!”
+
+The constellations in her eyes blazed. Beautiful, beautiful was
+Norhala--as Isis punishing Typhon for the murder of Osiris; as avenging
+Diana; shining from her something of the spirit of all wrathful
+Goddesses.
+
+The flaming hair whirled and snapped. From all her sweet body came
+white-hot furious force, a withering perfume of destruction. She pressed
+against me, and I trembled at the contact.
+
+
+Lawless, wild imaginings ran through me. Life, human life, dwindled. The
+City seemed but a thing of toys.
+
+On--let us crush it! On--on!
+
+Again the monster shook beneath us. Faster we moved. Louder grew the
+clangor of the drums, the gongs, the pipes. Nearer came the walls; and
+ever more crowded with the swarming human ants that manned them.
+
+We were close upon the heels of the last fleeing stragglers. The Thing
+slackened in its stride; waited patiently until they were close to the
+gates. Before they could reach them I heard the brazen clanging of their
+valves. Those shut out beat frenziedly upon them; dragged themselves
+close to the base of the battlements, cowered there or crept along them
+seeking some hole in which to hide.
+
+With a slow lowering of its height the Thing advanced. Now its form was
+that of a spindle a full mile in length on whose bulging center we three
+stood.
+
+A hundred feet from the outer wall we halted. We looked down upon it not
+more than fifty feet above its broad top. Hundreds of the soldiers were
+crouching behind the parapets, companies of archers with great bows
+poised, arrows at their cheeks, scores of leather jerkined men with
+stands of javelins at their right hands, spearsmen and men with long,
+thonged slings.
+
+Set at intervals were squat, powerful engines of wood and metal beside
+which were heaps of huge, rounded boulders. Catapults I knew them to be
+and around each swarmed a knot of soldiers, fixing the great stones in
+place, drawing back the thick ropes that, loosened, would hurl forth
+the projectiles. From each side came other men, dragging more of these
+balisters; assembling a battery against the prodigious, gleaming monster
+that menaced their city.
+
+Between outer wall and inner battlements galloped squadrons of mounted
+men. Upon this inner wall the soldiers clustered as thickly as on the
+outer, preparing as actively for its defense.
+
+The city seethed. Up from it arose a humming, a buzzing, as of some
+immense angry hive.
+
+Involuntarily I visualized the spectacle we must present to those
+who looked upon us--this huge incredible Shape of metal alive with
+quicksilver shifting. This--as it must have seemed to them--hellish
+mechanism of war captained by a sorceress and two familiars in form of
+men. There came to me dreadful visions of such a monster looking
+down upon the peace-reared battlements of New York--the panic rush of
+thousands away from it.
+
+There was a blaring of trumpets. Up on the parapet leaped a man clad all
+in gleaming red armor. From head to feet the close linked scales covered
+him. Within a hood shaped somewhat like the tight-fitting head coverings
+of the Crusaders a pallid, cruel face looked out upon us; in the fierce
+black eyes was no trace of fear.
+
+Evil as Norhala had said these people of Ruszark were, wicked and
+cruel--they were no cowards, no!
+
+The red armored man threw up a hand.
+
+“Who are you?” he shouted. “Who are you three, you three who come
+driving down upon Ruszark through the rocks? We have no quarrel with
+you?”
+
+“I seek a man and a maid,” cried Norhala. “A maid and a sick man your
+thieves took from me. Bring him forth!”
+
+“Seek elsewhere for them then,” he answered. “They are not here. Turn
+now and seek elsewhere. Go quickly, lest I loose our might upon you and
+you go never.”
+
+Mockingly rang her laughter--and under its lash the black eyes grew
+fiercer, the cruelty on the white face darkened.
+
+“Little man whose words are so big! Fly who thunders! What are you
+called, little man?”
+
+Her raillery bit deep--but its menace passed unheeded in the rage it
+called forth.
+
+“I am Kulun,” shouted the man in scarlet armor. “Kulun, the son of
+Cherkis the Mighty, and captain of his hosts. Kulun--who will cast your
+skin under my mares in stall for them to trample and thrust your red
+flayed body upon a pole in the grain fields to frighten away the crows!
+Does that answer you?”
+
+Her laughter ceased; her eyes dwelt upon him--filled with an infernal
+joy.
+
+“The son of Cherkis!” I heard her murmur. “He has a son--”
+
+There was a sneer on the cruel face; clearly he thought her awed. Quick
+was his disillusionment.
+
+“Listen, Kulun,” she cried. “I am Norhala--daughter of another Norhala
+and of Rustum, whom Cherkis tortured and slew. Now go, you lying spawn
+of unclean toads--go and tell your father that I, Norhala, am at his
+gates. And bring back with you the maid and the man. Go, I say!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV. CHERKIS
+
+There was stark amazement on Kulun's face; and fear now enough. He
+dropped from the parapet among his men. There came one loud trumpet
+blast.
+
+Out from the battlements poured a storm of arrows, a cloud of javelins.
+The squat catapults leaped forward. From them came a hail of boulders.
+Before that onrushing tempest of death I flinched.
+
+I heard Norhala's golden laughter and before they could reach us arrow
+and javelin and boulder were checked as though myriads of hands reached
+out from the Thing under us and caught them. Down they dropped.
+
+Forth from the great spindle shot a gigantic arm, hammer tipped with
+cubes. It struck the wall close to where the scarlet armored Kulun had
+vanished.
+
+Under its blow the stones crumbled. With the fragments fell the
+soldiers; were buried beneath them.
+
+A hundred feet in width a breach gaped in the battlements. Out shot the
+arm again; hooked its hammer tip over the parapet, tore away a stretch
+of the breastwork as though it had been cardboard. Beside the breach an
+expanse of the broad flat top lay open like a wide platform.
+
+The arm withdrew, and out from the whole length of the spindle thrust
+other arms, hammer tipped, held high aloft, menacing.
+
+From all the length of the wall arose panic outcry. Abruptly the storm
+of arrows ended; the catapults were still. Again the trumpets sounded;
+the crying ceased. Down fell a silence, terrified, stifling.
+
+Kulun stepped forth again, both hands held high. Gone was his arrogance.
+
+“A parley,” he shouted. “A parley, Norhala. If we give you the maid and
+man, will you go?”
+
+“Go get them,” she answered. “And take with you this my command to
+Cherkis--that HE return with the two!”
+
+For an instant Kulun hesitated. Up thrust the dreadful arms, poised
+themselves to strike.
+
+“It shall be so,” he shouted. “I carry your command.”
+
+He leaped back, his red mail flashed toward a turret that held, I
+supposed, a stairway. He was lost to sight. In silence we waited.
+
+On the further side of the city I glimpsed movement. Little troops of
+mounted men, pony drawn wains, knots of running figures were fleeing
+from the city through the opposite gates.
+
+Norhala saw them too. With that incomprehensible, instant obedience
+to her unspoken thought a mass of the Metal Things separated from us;
+whirled up into a dozen of those obelisked forms I had seen march from
+the cat eyes of the City of the Pit.
+
+In but a breath, it seemed, their columns were far off, herding back the
+fugitives.
+
+They did not touch them, did not offer to harm--only, grotesquely,
+like dogs heading off and corraling frightened sheep, they circled and
+darted. Rushing back came those they herded.
+
+From the watching terraces and walls arose shrill cries of terror, a
+wailing. Far away the obelisks met, pirouetted, melted into one thick
+column. Towering, motionless as we, it stood, guarding the further
+gates.
+
+There was a stir upon the wall, a flashing of spears, of drawn blades.
+Two litters closed with curtainings, surrounded by triple rows of
+swordsmen fully armored, carrying small shields and led by Kulun were
+being borne to the torn battlement.
+
+Their bearers stopped well within the platform and gently lowered their
+burdens. The leader of those around the second litter drew aside its
+covering, spoke.
+
+Out stepped Ruth and after her--Ventnor!
+
+“Martin!” I could not keep back the cry; heard mingled with it Drake's
+own cry to Ruth. Ventnor raised his hand in greeting; I thought he
+smiled.
+
+The cubes on which we stood shot forward; stopped within fifty feet of
+them. Instantly the guard of swordsmen raised their blades, held them
+over the pair as though waiting the signal to strike.
+
+And now I saw that Ruth was not clad as she had been when we had left
+her. She stood in scanty kirtle that came scarcely to her knees, her
+shoulders were bare, her curly brown hair unbound and tangled. Her face
+was set with wrath hardly less than that which beat from Norhala. On
+Ventnor's forehead was a blood red scar, a line that ran from temple to
+temple like a brand.
+
+The curtains of the first litter quivered; behind them someone spoke.
+That in which Ruth and Ventnor had ridden was drawn swiftly away. The
+knot of swordsmen drew back.
+
+Into their places sprang and knelt a dozen archers. They ringed in the
+two, bows drawn taut, arrows in place and pointing straight to their
+hearts.
+
+Out of the litter rolled a giant of a man. Seven feet he must have been
+in height; over the huge shoulders, the barreled chest and the bloated
+abdomen hung a purple cloak glittering with gems; through the thick and
+grizzled hair passed a flashing circlet of jewels.
+
+The scarlet armored Kulun beside him, swordsmen guarding them, he walked
+to the verge of the torn gap in the wall. He peered down it, glancing
+imperturbably at the upraised, hammer-banded arms still threatening;
+examined again the breach. Then still with Kulun he strode over to
+the very edge of the broken battlement and stood, head thrust a little
+forward, studying us in silence.
+
+
+“Cherkis!” whispered Norhala--the whisper was a hymn to Nemesis. I felt
+her body quiver from head to foot.
+
+A wave of hatred, a hot desire to kill, passed through me as I scanned
+the face staring at us. It was a great gross mask of evil, of cold
+cruelty and callous lusts. Unwinking, icily malignant, black slits of
+eyes glared at us between pouches that held them half closed. Heavy
+jowls hung pendulous, dragging down the corners of the thick lipped,
+brutal mouth into a deep graven, unchanging sneer.
+
+As he gazed at Norhala a flicker of lust shot like a licking tongue
+through his eyes.
+
+Yet from him pulsed power; sinister, instinct with evil, concentrate
+with cruelty--but power indomitable. Such was Cherkis, descendant
+perhaps of that Xerxes the Conqueror who three millenniums gone ruled
+most of the known world.
+
+It was Norhala who broke the silence.
+
+“Tcherak! Greeting--Cherkis!” There was merciless mirth in the buglings
+of her voice. “Lo, I did but knock so gently at your gates and you
+hastened to welcome me. Greetings--gross swine, spittle of the toads,
+fat slug beneath my sandals.”
+
+He passed the insults by, unmoved--although I heard a murmuring go up
+from those near and Kulun's hard eyes blazed.
+
+“We will bargain, Norhala,” he answered calmly; the voice was deep,
+filled with sinister strength.
+
+“Bargain?” she laughed. “What have you with which to bargain, Cherkis?
+Does the rat bargain with the tigress? And you, toad, have nothing.”
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“I have these,” he waved a hand toward Ruth and her brother. “Me you may
+slay--and mayhap many of mine. But before you can move my archers will
+feather their hearts.”
+
+She considered him, no longer mocking.
+
+“Two of mine you slew long since, Cherkis,” she said, slowly. “Therefore
+it is I am here.”
+
+“I know,” he nodded heavily. “Yet now that is neither here nor there,
+Norhala. It was long since, and I have learned much during the years.
+I would have killed you too, Norhala, could I have found you. But now I
+would not do as then--quite differently would I do, Norhala; for I have
+learned much. I am sorry that those that you loved died as they did. I
+am in truth sorry!”
+
+There was a curious lurking sardonicism in the words, an undertone of
+mockery. Was what he really meant that in those years he had learned
+to inflict greater agonies, more exquisite tortures? If so, Norhala
+apparently did not sense that interpretation. Indeed, she seemed to be
+interested, her wrath abating.
+
+“No,” the hoarse voice rumbled dispassionately. “None of that is
+important--now. YOU would have this man and girl. I hold them. They die
+if you stir a hand's breadth toward me. If they die, I prevail against
+you--for I have cheated you of what you desire. I win, Norhala, even
+though you slay me. That is all that is now important.”
+
+There was doubt upon Norhala's face and I caught a quick gleam of
+contemptuous triumph glint through the depths of the evil eyes.
+
+“Empty will be your victory over me, Norhala,” he said; then waited.
+
+“What is your bargain?” she spoke hesitatingly; with a sinking of my
+heart I heard the doubt tremble in her throat.
+
+“If you will go without further knocking upon my gates”--there was a
+satiric grimness in the phrase--“go when you have been given them, and
+pledge yourself never to return--you shall have them. If you will not,
+then they die.”
+
+“But what security, what hostages, do you ask?” Her eyes were troubled.
+“I cannot swear by your gods, Cherkis, for they are not my gods--in
+truth I, Norhala, have no gods. Why should I not say yes and take the
+two, then fall upon you and destroy--as you would do in my place, old
+wolf?”
+
+“Norhala,” he answered, “I ask nothing but your word. Do I not know
+those who bore you and the line from which they sprung? Was not always
+the word they gave kept till death--unbroken, inviolable? No need
+for vows to gods between you and me. Your word is holier than they--O
+glorious daughter of kings, princess royal!”
+
+
+The great voice was harshly caressing; not obsequious, but as though
+he gave her as an equal her rightful honor. Her face softened; she
+considered him from eyes far less hostile.
+
+A wholesome respect for this gross tyrant's mentality came to me; it
+did not temper, it heightened, the hatred I felt for him. But now I
+recognized the subtlety of his attack; realized that unerringly he
+had taken the only means by which he could have gained a hearing; have
+temporized. Could he win her with his guile?
+
+“Is it not true?” There was a leonine purring in the question.
+
+“It IS true!” she answered proudly. “Though why YOU should dwell upon
+this, Cherkis, whose word is steadfast as the running stream and whose
+promises are as lasting as its bubbles--why YOU should dwell on this I
+do not know.”
+
+“I have changed greatly, Princess, in the years since my great
+wickedness; I have learned much. He who speaks to you now is not he you
+were taught--and taught justly then--to hate.”
+
+“You may speak truth! Certainly you are not as I have pictured you.” It
+was as though she were more than half convinced. “In this at least you
+do speak truth--that IF I promise I will go and molest you no more.”
+
+“Why go at all, Princess?” Quietly he asked the amazing question--then
+drew himself to his full height, threw wide his arms.
+
+“Princess?” the great voice rumbled forth. “Nay--Queen! Why leave us
+again--Norhala the Queen? Are we not of your people? Am I not of your
+kin? Join your power with ours. What that war engine you ride may be,
+how built, I know not. But this I do know--that with our strengths
+joined we two can go forth from where I have dwelt so long, go forth
+into the forgotten world, eat its cities and rule.
+
+“You shall teach our people to make these engines, Norhala, and we will
+make many of them. Queen Norhala--you shall wed my son Kulun, he who
+stands beside me. And while I live you shall rule with me, rule equally.
+And when I die you and Kulun shall rule.
+
+“Thus shall our two royal lines be made one, the old feud wiped out, the
+long score be settled. Queen--wherever it is you dwell it comes to
+me that you have few men. Queen--you need men, many men and strong to
+follow you, men to gather the harvests of your power, men to bring to
+you the fruit of your smallest wish--young men and vigorous to amuse
+you.
+
+“Let the past be forgotten--I too have wrongs to forget, O Queen. Come
+to us, Great One, with your power and your beauty. Teach us. Lead us.
+Return, and throned above your people rule the world!”
+
+He ceased. Over the battlements, over the city, dropped a vast expectant
+silence--as though the city knew its fate was hanging upon the balance.
+
+“No! No!” It was Ruth crying. “Do not trust him, Norhala! It's a trap!
+He shamed me--he tortured--”
+
+Cherkis half turned; before he swung about I saw a hell shadow darken
+his face. Ventnor's hand thrust out, covered Ruth's mouth, choking her
+crying.
+
+“Your son”--Norhala spoke swiftly; and back flashed the cruel face of
+Cherkis, devouring her with his eyes. “Your son--and Queenship here--and
+Empire of the World.” Her voice was rapt, thrilled. “All this you offer?
+Me--Norhala?”
+
+“This and more!” The huge bulk of his body quivered with eagerness. “If
+it be your wish, O Queen, I, Cherkis, will step down from the throne for
+you and sit beneath your right hand, eager to do your bidding.”
+
+A moment she studied him.
+
+“Norhala,” I whispered, “do not do this thing. He thinks to gain your
+secrets.”
+
+“Let my bridegroom stand forth that I may look upon him,” called
+Norhala.
+
+Visibly Cherkis relaxed, as though a strain had been withdrawn. Between
+him and his crimson-clad son flashed a glance; it was as though a
+triumphant devil sped from them into each other's eyes.
+
+I saw Ruth shrink into Ventnor's arms. Up from the wall rose a jubilant
+shouting, was caught by the inner battlements, passed on to the crowded
+terraces.
+
+“Take Kulun,” it was Drake, pistol drawn and whispering across to me.
+“I'll handle Cherkis. And shoot straight.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI. THE VENGEANCE OF NORHALA
+
+Norhala's hand that had gone from my wrist dropped down again; the other
+fell upon Drake's.
+
+Kulun loosed his hood, let it fall about his shoulders.
+
+He stepped forward, held out his arms to Norhala.
+
+“A strong man!” she cried approvingly. “Hail--my bridegroom! But
+stay--stand back a moment. Stand beside that man for whom I came to
+Ruszark. I would see you together!”
+
+Kulun's face darkened. But Cherkis smiled with evil understanding,
+shrugged his shoulders and whispered to him. Sullenly Kulun stepped
+back. The ring of the archers lowered their bows; they leaped to their
+feet and stood aside to let him pass.
+
+Quick as a serpent's tongue a pyramid tipped tentacle flicked out
+beneath us. It darted through the broken circle of the bowmen.
+
+It LICKED up Ruth and Ventnor and--Kulun!
+
+Swiftly as it had swept forth it returned, coiled and dropped those two
+I loved at Norhala's feet.
+
+It flashed back on high with the scarlet length of Cherkis's son
+sprawled along its angled end.
+
+The great body of Cherkis seemed to wither.
+
+Up from all the wall went a tempestuous sigh of horror.
+
+Out rang the merciless chimes of Norhala's laughter.
+
+“Tchai!” she cried. “Tchai! Fat fool there. Tchai--you Cherkis! Toad
+whose wits have sickened with your years!
+
+“Did you think to catch me, Norhala, in your filthy web? Princess!
+Queen! Empress of Earth! Ho--old fox I have outplayed and beaten, what
+now have you to trade with Norhala?”
+
+Mouth sagging open, eyes glaring, the tyrant slowly raised his arms--a
+suppliant.
+
+“You would have back the bridegroom you gave me?” she laughed. “Take
+him, then.”
+
+Down swept the metal arm that held Kulun. The arm dropped Cherkis's son
+at Cherkis's feet; and as though Kulun had been a grape--it crushed him!
+
+Before those who had seen could stir from their stupor the tentacle
+hovered over Cherkis, glaring down at the horror that had been his son.
+
+It did not strike him--it drew him up to it as a magnet draws a pin.
+
+And as the pin swings from the magnet when held suspended by the head,
+so swung the great body of Cherkis from the under side of the pyramid
+that held him. Hanging so he was carried toward us, came to a stop not
+ten feet from us--
+
+Weird, weird beyond all telling was that scene--and would I had the
+power to make you who read see it as we did.
+
+The animate, living Shape of metal on which we stood, with its forest of
+hammer-handed arms raised menacingly along its mile of spindled length;
+the great walls glistening with the armored hosts; the terraces of that
+fair and ancient city, their gardens and green groves and clustering
+red and yellow-roofed houses and temples and palaces; the swinging gross
+body of Cherkis in the clutch of the unseen grip of the tentacle, his
+grizzled hair touching the side of the pyramid that held him, his arms
+half outstretched, the gemmed cloak flapping like the wings of a jeweled
+bat, his white, malignant face in which the evil eyes were burning slits
+flaming hell's own blackest hatred; and beyond the city, from which
+pulsed almost visibly a vast and hopeless horror, the watching
+column--and over all this the palely radiant white sky under whose light
+the encircling cliffs were tremendous stony palettes splashed with a
+hundred pigments.
+
+Norhala's laughter had ceased. Somberly she looked upon Cherkis, into
+the devil fires of his eyes.
+
+“Cherkis!” she half whispered. “Now comes the end for you--and for all
+that is yours! But until the end's end you shall see.”
+
+The hanging body was thrust forward; was thrust up; was brought down
+upon its feet on the upper plane of the prostrate pyramid tipping the
+metal arm that held him. For an instant he struggled to escape; I
+think he meant to hurl himself down upon Norhala, to kill her before he
+himself was slain.
+
+If so, after one frenzied effort he realized the futility, for with
+a certain dignity he drew himself upright, turned his eyes toward the
+city.
+
+Over that city a dreadful silence hung. It was as though it cowered, hid
+its face, was afraid to breathe.
+
+“The end!” murmured Norhala.
+
+There was a quick trembling through the Metal Thing. Down swung its
+forest of sledges. Beneath the blow down fell the smitten walls,
+shattered, crumbling, and with it glittering like shining flies in a
+dust storm fell the armored men.
+
+Through that mile-wide breach and up to the inner barrier I glimpsed
+confusion chaotic. And again I say it--they were no cowards, those men
+of Cherkis. From the inner battlements flew clouds of arrows, of huge
+stones--as uselessly as before.
+
+Then out from the opened gates poured regiments of horsemen, brandishing
+javelins and great maces, and shouting fiercely as they drove down upon
+each end of the Metal Shape. Under cover of their attack I saw cloaked
+riders spurring their ponies across the plain to shelter of the cliff
+walls, to the chance of hiding places within them. Women and men of
+the rich, the powerful, flying for safety; after them ran and scattered
+through the fields of grain a multitude on foot.
+
+
+The ends of the spindle drew back before the horsemen's charge,
+broadening as they went--like the heads of monstrous cobras withdrawing
+into their hoods. Abruptly, with a lightning velocity, these broadenings
+expanded into immense lunettes, two tremendous curving and crablike
+claws. Their tips flung themselves past the racing troops; then like
+gigantic pincers began to contract.
+
+Of no avail now was it for the horsemen to halt dragging their mounts on
+their haunches, or to turn to fly. The ends of the lunettes had met,
+the pincer tips had closed. The mounted men were trapped within
+half-mile-wide circles. And in upon man and horse their living
+walls marched. Within those enclosures of the doomed began a frantic
+milling--I shut my eyes--
+
+There was a dreadful screaming of horses, a shrieking of men. Then
+silence.
+
+Shuddering, I looked. Where the mounted men had been was--nothing.
+
+Nothing? There were two great circular spaces whose floors were
+glistening, wetly red. Fragments of man or horse--there was none.
+They had been crushed into--what was it Norhala had promised--had been
+stamped into the rock beneath the feet of her--servants.
+
+Sick, I looked away and stared at a Thing that writhed and undulated
+over the plain; a prodigious serpentine Shape of cubes and spheres
+linked and studded thick with the spikes of the pyramid. Through the
+fields, over the plain its coils flashed.
+
+Playfully it sped and twisted among the fugitives, crushing them,
+tossing them aside broken, gliding over them. Some there were who
+hurled themselves upon it in impotent despair, some who knelt before it,
+praying. On rolled the metal convolutions, inexorable.
+
+Within my vision's range there were no more fugitives. Around a corner
+of the broken battlements raced the serpent Shape. Where it had writhed
+was now no waving grain, no trees, no green thing. There was only smooth
+rock upon which here and there red smears glistened wetly.
+
+Afar there was a crying, in its wake a rumbling. It was the column, it
+came to me, at work upon the further battlements. As though the sound
+had been a signal the spindle trembled; up we were thrust another
+hundred feet or more. Back dropped the host of brandished arms, threaded
+themselves into the parent bulk.
+
+Right and left of us the spindle split into scores of fissures. Between
+these fissures the Metal Things that made up each now dissociate and
+shapeless mass geysered; block and sphere and tetrahedron spike spun and
+swirled. There was an instant of formlessness.
+
+Then right and left of us stood scores of giant, grotesque warriors.
+Their crests were fully fifty feet below our living platform. They
+stood upon six immense, columnar stilts. These sextuple legs supported
+a hundred feet above their bases a huge and globular body formed of
+clusters of the spheres. Out from each of these bodies that were at one
+and the same time trunks and heads, sprang half a score of colossal arms
+shaped like flails; like spike-studded girders, Titanic battle maces,
+Cyclopean sledges.
+
+From legs and trunks and arms the tiny eyes of the Metal Hordes flashed,
+exulting.
+
+There came from them, from the Thing we rode as well, a chorus of thin
+and eager wailings and pulsed through all that battle-line, a jubilant
+throbbing.
+
+Then with a rhythmic, JOCUND stride they leaped upon the city.
+
+Under the mallets of the smiting arms the inner battlements fell as
+under the hammers of a thousand metal Thors. Over their fragments and
+the armored men who fell with them strode the Things, grinding stone and
+man together as we passed.
+
+All of the terraced city except the side hidden by the mount lay open to
+my gaze. In that brief moment of pause I saw crazed crowds battling
+in narrow streets, trampling over mounds of the fallen, surging over
+barricades of bodies, clawing and tearing at each other in their flight.
+
+There was a wide, stepped street of gleaming white stone that climbed
+like an immense stairway straight up the slope to that broad plaza at
+the top where clustered the great temples and palaces--the Acropolis of
+the city. Into it the streets of the terraces flowed, each pouring out
+upon it a living torrent, tumultuous with tuliped, sparkling little
+waves, the gay coverings and the arms and armor of Ruszark's desperate
+thousands seeking safety at the shrines of their gods.
+
+Here great carven arches arose; there slender, exquisite towers capped
+with red gold--there was a street of colossal statues, another over
+which dozens of graceful, fretted bridges threw their spans from
+feathery billows of flowering trees; there were gardens gay with
+blossoms in which fountains sparkled, green groves; thousands upon
+thousands of bright multicolored pennants, banners, fluttered.
+
+A fair, a lovely city was Cherkis's stronghold of Ruszark.
+
+Its beauty filled the eyes; out from it streamed the fragrance of its
+gardens--the voice of its agony was that of the souls in Dis.
+
+The row of destroying shapes lengthened, each huge warrior of metal
+drawing far apart from its mates. They flexed their manifold arms,
+shadow boxed--grotesquely, dreadfully.
+
+Down struck the flails, the sledges. Beneath the blows the buildings
+burst like eggshells, their fragments burying the throngs fighting for
+escape in the thoroughfares that threaded them. Over their ruins we
+moved.
+
+Down and ever down crashed the awful sledges. And ever under them the
+city crumbled.
+
+There was a spider Shape that crawled up the wide stairway hammering
+into the stone those who tried to flee before it.
+
+Stride by stride the Destroying Things ate up the city.
+
+
+I felt neither wrath nor pity. Through me beat a jubilant roaring
+pulse--as though I were a shouting corpuscle of the rushing hurricane,
+as though I were one of the hosts of smiting spirits of the bellowing
+typhoon.
+
+Through this stole another thought--vague, unfamiliar, yet seemingly
+of truth's own essence. Why, I wondered, had I never recognized this
+before? Why had I never known that these green forms called trees were
+but ugly, unsymmetrical excrescences? That these high projections of
+towers, these buildings were deformities?
+
+That these four-pronged, moving little shapes that screamed and ran
+were--hideous?
+
+They must be wiped out! All this misshapen, jumbled, inharmonious
+ugliness must be wiped out! It must be ground down to smooth unbroken
+planes, harmonious curvings, shapeliness--harmonies of arc and line and
+angle!
+
+Something deep within me fought to speak--fought to tell me that this
+thought was not human thought, not my thought--that it was the reflected
+thought of the Metal Things!
+
+It told me--and fiercely it struggled to make me realize what it was
+that it told. Its insistence was borne upon little despairing, rhythmic
+beatings--throbbings that were like the muffled sobbings of the drums of
+grief. Louder, closer came the throbbing; clearer with it my perception
+of the inhumanness of my thought.
+
+The drum beat tapped at my humanity, became a dolorous knocking at my
+heart.
+
+It was the sobbing of Cherkis!
+
+The gross face was shrunken, the cheeks sagging in folds of woe; cruelty
+and wickedness were wiped from it; the evil in the eyes had been washed
+out by tears. Eyes streaming, bull throat and barrel chest racked by his
+sobbing, he watched the passing of his people and his city.
+
+And relentlessly, coldly, Norhala watched him--as though loath to lose
+the faintest shadow of his agony.
+
+Now I saw we were close to the top of the mount. Packed between us
+and the immense white structures that crowned it were thousands of the
+people. They fell on their knees before us, prayed to us. They tore at
+each other, striving to hide themselves from us in the mass that was
+themselves. They beat against the barred doors of the sanctuaries; they
+climbed the pillars; they swarmed over the golden roofs.
+
+There was a moment of chaos--a chaos of which we were the heart.
+Then temple and palace cracked, burst; were shattered; fell. I caught
+glimpses of gleaming sculptures, glitterings of gold and of silver,
+flashing of gems, shimmering of gorgeous draperies--under them a
+weltering of men and women.
+
+We closed down upon them--over them!
+
+The dreadful sobbing ceased. I saw the head of Cherkis swing heavily
+upon a shoulder; the eyes closed.
+
+The Destroying Things touched. Their flailing arms coiled back, withdrew
+into their bodies. They joined, forming for an instant a tremendous
+hollow pillar far down in whose center we stood. They parted; shifted
+in shape? rolled down the mount over the ruins like a widening
+wave--crushing into the stone all over which they passed.
+
+Afar away I saw the gleaming serpent still at play--still writhing
+along, still obliterating the few score scattered fugitives that some
+way, somehow, had slipped by the Destroying Things.
+
+We halted. For one long moment Norhala looked upon the drooping body of
+him upon whom she had let fall this mighty vengeance.
+
+Then the metal arm that held Cherkis whirled. Thrown from it, the
+cloaked form flew like a great blue bat. It fell upon the flattened
+mound that had once been the proud crown of his city. A blue blot upon
+desolation the broken body of Cherkis lay.
+
+A black speck appeared high in the sky; grew fast--the lammergeier.
+
+“I have left carrion for you--after all!” cried Norhala.
+
+With an ebon swirling of wings the vulture dropped beside the blue
+heap--thrust in it its beak.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII. “THE DRUMS OF DESTINY”
+
+Slowly we descended that mount of desolation; lingeringly, as though the
+brooding eyes of Norhala were not yet sated with destruction. Of human
+life, of green life, of life of any kind there was none.
+
+Man and tree, woman and flower, babe and bud, palace, temple and
+home--Norhala had stamped flat. She had crushed them within the
+rock--even as she had promised.
+
+The tremendous tragedy had absorbed my every faculty; I had had no time
+to think of my companions; I had forgotten them. Now in the painful
+surges of awakening realization, of full human understanding of that
+inhuman annihilation, I turned to them for strength. Faintly I wondered
+again at Ruth's scantiness of garb, her more than half nudity; dwelt
+curiously upon the red brand across Ventnor's forehead.
+
+In his eyes and in Drake's I saw reflected the horror I knew was in
+my own. But in the eyes of Ruth was none of this--sternly, coldly
+triumphant, indifferent to its piteousness as Norhala herself, she
+scanned the waste that less than an hour since had been a place of
+living beauty.
+
+I felt a shock of repulsion. After all, those who had been destroyed
+so ruthlessly could not ALL have been wholly evil. Yet mother and
+blossoming maid, youth and oldster, all the pageant of humanity within
+the great walls were now but lines within the stone. According to their
+different lights, it came to me, there had been in Ruszark no greater
+number of the wicked than one could find in any great city of our own
+civilization.
+
+From Norhala, of course, I looked for no perception of any of this. But
+from Ruth--
+
+My reaction grew; the pity long withheld racing through me linked with
+a burning anger, a hatred for this woman who had been the directing soul
+of that catastrophe.
+
+My gaze fell again upon the red brand. I saw that it was a deep
+indentation as though a thong had been twisted around Ventnor's head
+biting the bone. There was dried blood on the edges, a double ring of
+swollen white flesh rimming the cincture. It was the mark of--torture!
+
+“Martin,” I cried. “That ring? What did they do to you?”
+
+“They waked me with that,” he answered quietly. “I suppose I ought to be
+grateful--although their intentions were not exactly--therapeutic--”
+
+“They tortured him,” Ruth's voice was tense, bitter; she spoke in
+Persian--for Norhala's benefit I thought then, not guessing a deeper
+reason. “They tortured him. They gave him agony until he--returned. And
+they promised him other agonies that would make him pray long for death.
+
+“And me--me”--she raised little clenched hands--“me they stripped like a
+slave. They led me through the city and the people mocked me. They
+took me before that swine Norhala has punished--and stripped me
+before him--like a slave. Before my eyes they tortured my brother.
+Norhala--they were evil, all evil! Norhala--you did well to slay them!”
+
+She caught the woman's hands, pressed close to her. Norhala gazed at her
+from great gray eyes in which the wrath was dying, into which the old
+tranquillity, the old serenity was flowing. And when she spoke the
+golden voice held more than returning echoes of the far-away, faint
+chimings.
+
+“It is done,” she said. “And it was well done--sister. Now you and I
+shall dwell together in peace--sister. Or if there be those in the world
+from which you came that you would have slain, then you and I shall go
+forth with our companies and stamp them out--even as I did these.”
+
+My heart stopped beating--for from the depths of Ruth's eyes shining
+shadows were rising, wraiths answering Norhala's calling; and, as they
+rose, steadily they drew life from the clear radiance summoning--drew
+closer to the semblance of that tranquil spirit which her vengeance
+had banished but that had now returned to its twin thrones of Norhala's
+eyes.
+
+And at last it was twin sister of Norhala who looked upon her from the
+face of Ruth!
+
+The white arms of the woman encircled her; the glorious head bent over
+her; flaming tresses mingled with tender brown curls.
+
+“Sister!” she whispered. “Little sister! These men you shall have as
+long as it pleases you--to do with as you will. Or if it is your wish
+they shall go back to their world and I will guard them to its gates.
+
+“But you and I, little sister, will dwell together--in the
+vastnesses--in the peace. Shall it not be so?”
+
+With no faltering, with no glance toward us three--lover, brother, old
+friend--Ruth crept closer to her, rested her head upon the virginal,
+royal breasts.
+
+“It shall be so!” she murmured. “Sister--it shall be so. Norhala--I am
+tired. Norhala--I have seen enough of men.”
+
+An ecstasy of tenderness, a flame of unearthly rapture, trembled over
+the woman's wondrous face. Hungrily, defiantly, she pressed the girl to
+her; the stars in the lucid heavens of her eyes were soft and gentle and
+caressing.
+
+“Ruth!” cried Drake--and sprang toward them. She paid no heed; and even
+as he leaped he was caught, whirled back against us.
+
+“Wait,” said Ventnor, and caught him by the arm as wrathfully,
+blindedly, he strove against the force that held him. “Wait. No
+use--now.”
+
+There was a curious understanding in his voice--a curious sympathy,
+too, in the patient, untroubled gaze that dwelt upon his sister and this
+weirdly exquisite woman who held her.
+
+“Wait!” exclaimed Drake. “Wait--hell! The damned witch is stealing her
+away from us!”
+
+Again he threw himself forward; recoiled as though swept back by an
+invisible arm; fell against us and was clasped and held by Ventnor. And
+as he struggled the Thing we rode halted. Like metal waves back into it
+rushed the enigmatic billows that had washed over the fragments of the
+city.
+
+We were lifted; between us and the woman and girl a cleft appeared; it
+widened into a rift. It was as though Norhala had decreed it as a symbol
+of this her second victory--or had set it between us as a barrier.
+
+
+Wider grew the rift. Save for the bridge of our voices it separated us
+from Ruth as though she stood upon another world.
+
+Higher we rose; the three of us now upon the flat top of a tower upon
+whose counterpart fifty feet away and facing the homeward path, Ruth and
+Norhala stood with white arms interlaced.
+
+The serpent shape flashed toward us; it vanished beneath, merging into
+the waiting Thing.
+
+Then slowly the Thing began to move; quietly it glided to the chasm it
+had blasted in the cliff wall. The shadow of those walls fell upon us.
+As one we looked back; as one we searched out the patch of blue with the
+black blot at its breast.
+
+We found it; then the precipices hid it. Silently we streamed through
+the chasm, through the canyon and the tunnel--speaking no word, Drake's
+eyes fixed with bitter hatred upon Norhala, Ventnor brooding upon her
+always with that enigmatic sympathy. We passed between the walls of the
+further cleft; stood for an instant at the brink of the green forest.
+
+There came to us as though from immeasurable distances, a faint,
+sustained thrumming--like the beating of countless muffled drums. The
+Thing that carried us trembled--the sound died away. The Thing quieted;
+it began its steady, effortless striding through the crowding trees--but
+now with none of that speed with which it had come, spurred forward by
+Norhala's awakened hate.
+
+Ventnor stirred; broke the silence. And now I saw how wasted was his
+body, how sharpened his face; almost ethereal; purged not only by
+suffering but by, it came to me, some strange knowledge.
+
+“No use, Drake,” he said dreamily. “All this is now on the knees of the
+gods. And whether those gods are humanity's or whether they are--Gods of
+Metal--I do not know.
+
+“But this I do know--only one way or another can the balance fall; and
+if it be one way, then you and we shall have Ruth back. And if it falls
+the other way--then there will be little need for us to care. For man
+will be done!”
+
+“Martin! What do you mean?”
+
+“It is the crisis,” he answered. “We can do nothing, Goodwin--nothing.
+Whatever is to be steps forth now from the womb of Destiny.”
+
+Again there came that distant rolling--louder, now. Again the Thing
+trembled.
+
+“The drums,” whispered Ventnor. “The drums of destiny. What is it they
+are heralding? A new birth of Earth and the passing of man? A new child
+to whom shall be given dominion--nay, to whom has been given dominion?
+Or is it--taps--for Them?”
+
+The drumming died as I listened--fearfully. About us was only the
+swishing, the sighing of the falling trees beneath the tread of the
+Thing. Motionless stood Norhala; and as motionless Ruth.
+
+“Martin,” I cried once more, a dreadful doubt upon me. “Martin--what do
+you mean?”
+
+“Whence did--They--come?” His voice was clear and calm, the eyes beneath
+the red brand clear and quiet, too. “Whence did They come--these Things
+that carry us? That strode like destroying angels over Cherkis's
+city? Are they spawn of Earth--as we are? Or are they foster
+children--changelings from another star?
+
+“These creatures that when many still are one--that when one still are
+many. Whence did They come? What are They?”
+
+He looked down upon the cubes that held us; their hosts of tiny eyes
+shone up at him, enigmatically--as though they heard and understood.
+
+“I do not forget,” he said. “At least not all do I forget of what I saw
+during that time when I seemed an atom outside space--as I told you,
+or think I told you, speaking with unthinkable effort through lips that
+seemed eternities away from me, the atom, who strove to open them.
+
+“There were three--visions, revelations--I know not what to call them.
+And though each seemed equally real, of two of them, only one, I think,
+can be true; and of the third--that may some time be true but surely is
+not yet.”
+
+
+Through the air came a louder drum roll--in it something ominous,
+something sinister. It swelled to a crescendo; abruptly ceased. And now
+I saw Norhala raise her head; listen.
+
+“I saw a world, a vast world, Goodwin, marching stately through space.
+It was no globe--it was a world of many facets, of smooth and polished
+planes; a huge blue jewel world, dimly luminous; a crystal world cut
+out from Aether. A geometric thought of the Great Cause, of God, if you
+will, made material. It was airless, waterless, sunless.
+
+“I seemed to draw closer to it. And then I saw that over every facet
+patterns were traced; gigantic symmetrical designs; mathematical
+hieroglyphs. In them I read unthinkable calculations, formulas of
+interwoven universes, arithmetical progressions of armies of stars,
+pandects of the motions of the suns. In the patterns was an appalling
+harmony--as though all the laws from those which guide the atom to those
+which direct the cosmos were there resolved into completeness--totalled.
+
+“The faceted world was like a cosmic abacist, tallying as it marched the
+errors of the infinite.
+
+“The patterned symbols constantly changed form. I drew nearer--the
+symbols were alive. They were, in untold numbers--These!”
+
+He pointed to the Thing that bore us.
+
+“I was swept back; looked again upon it from afar. And a fantastic
+notion came to me--fantasy it was, of course, yet built I know around
+a nucleus of strange truth. It was”--his tone was half whimsical,
+half apologetic--“it was that this jeweled world was ridden by some
+mathematical god, driving it through space, noting occasionally with
+amused tolerance the very bad arithmetic of another Deity the reverse
+of mathematical--a more or less haphazard Deity, the god, in fact, of us
+and the things we call living.
+
+“It had no mission; it wasn't at all out to do any reforming; it wasn't
+in the least concerned in rectifying any of the inaccuracies of the
+Other. Only now and then it took note of the deplorable differences
+between the worlds it saw and its own impeccably ordered and tidy temple
+with its equally tidy servitors.
+
+“Just an itinerant demiurge of supergeometry riding along through space
+on its perfectly summed-up world; master of all celestial mechanics;
+its people independent of all that complex chemistry and labor for
+equilibrium by which we live; needing neither air nor water, heeding
+neither heat nor cold; fed with the magnetism of interstellar space and
+stopping now and then to banquet off the energy of some great sun.”
+
+A thrill of amazement passed through me; fantasy all this might be
+but--how, if so, had he gotten that last thought? He had not seen, as
+we had, the orgy in the Hall of the Cones, the prodigious feeding of the
+Metal Monster upon our sun.
+
+“That passed,” he went on, unnoticing. “I saw vast caverns filled with
+the Things; working, growing, multiplying. In caverns of our Earth--the
+fruit of some unguessed womb? I do not know.
+
+“But in those caverns, under countless orbs of many colored
+lights”--again the thrill of amaze shook me--“they grew. It came to me
+that they were reaching out toward sunlight and the open. They burst
+into it--into yellow, glowing sunlight. Ours? I do not know. And that
+picture passed.”
+
+His voice deepened.
+
+“There came a third vision. I saw our Earth--I knew, Goodwin,
+indisputably, unmistakably that it was our earth. But its rolling
+hills were leveled, its mountains were ground and shaped into cold and
+polished symbols--geometric, fashioned.
+
+“The seas were fettered, gleaming like immense jewels in patterned
+settings of crystal shores. The very Polar ice was chiseled. On the
+ordered plains were traced the hieroglyphs of the faceted world. And on
+all Earth, Goodwin, there was no green life, no city, no trace of man.
+On this Earth that had been ours were only--These.
+
+“Visioning!” he said. “Don't think that I accept them in their entirety.
+Part truth, part illusion--the groping mind dazzled with light of
+unfamiliar truths and making pictures from half light and half shadow to
+help it understand.
+
+“But still--SOME truth in them. How much I do not know. But this I
+do know--that last vision was of a cataclysm whose beginnings we face
+now--this very instant.”
+
+The picture flashed behind my own eyes--of the walled city, its
+thronging people, its groves and gardens, its science and its art; of
+the Destroying Shapes trampling it flat--and then the dreadful, desolate
+mount.
+
+And suddenly I saw that mount as Earth--the city as Earth's cities--its
+gardens and groves as Earth's fields and forests--and the vanished
+people of Cherkis seemed to expand into all humanity.
+
+“But Martin,” I stammered, fighting against choking, intolerable terror,
+“there was something else. Something of the Keeper of the Cones and of
+our striking through the sun to destroy the Things--something of them
+being governed by the same laws that govern us and that if they broke
+them they must fall. A hope--a PROMISE, that they would NOT conquer.”
+
+“I remember,” he replied, “but not clearly. There WAS something--a
+shadow upon them, a menace. It was a shadow that seemed to be born of
+our own world--some threatening spirit of earth hovering over them.
+
+“I cannot remember; it eludes me. Yet it is because I remember but a
+little of it that I say those drums may not be--taps--for us.”
+
+
+As though his words had been a cue, the sounds again burst forth--no
+longer muffled nor faint. They roared; they seemed to pelt through air
+and drop upon us; they beat about our ears with thunderous tattoo like
+covered caverns drummed upon by Titans with trunks of great trees.
+
+The drumming did not die; it grew louder, more vehement; defiant and
+deafening. Within the Thing under us a mighty pulse began to throb,
+accelerating rapidly to the rhythm of that clamorous roll.
+
+I saw Norhala draw herself up, sharply; stand listening and alert. Under
+me, the throbbing turned to an uneasy churning, a ferment.
+
+“Drums?” muttered Drake. “THEY'RE no drums. It's drum fire. It's like a
+dozen Marnes, a dozen Verduns. But where could batteries like those come
+from?”
+
+“Drums,” whispered Ventnor. “They ARE drums. The drums of Destiny!”
+
+Louder the roaring grew. Now it was a tremendous rhythmic cannonading.
+The Thing halted. The tower that upheld Ruth and Norhala swayed, bent
+over the gap between us, touched the top on which we rode.
+
+Gently the two were plucked up; swiftly they were set beside us.
+
+Came a shrill, keen wailing--louder than ever I had heard before. There
+was an earthquake trembling; a maelstrom swirling in which we spun; a
+swift sinking.
+
+The Thing split in two. Up before us rose a stupendous, stepped pyramid;
+little smaller it was than that which Cheops built to throw its shadows
+across holy Nile. Into it streamed, over it clicked, score upon score of
+cubes, building it higher and higher. It lurched forward--away from us.
+
+From Norhala came a single cry--resonant, blaring like a wrathful,
+golden trumpet.
+
+The speeding shape halted, hesitated; it seemed about to return. Crashed
+down upon us an abrupt crescendo of the distant drumming; peremptory,
+commanding. The shape darted forward; raced away crushing to straw the
+trees beneath it in a full quarter-mile-wide swath.
+
+Great gray eyes wide, filled with incredulous wonder, stunned disbelief,
+Norhala for an instant faltered. Then out of her white throat, through
+her red lips pelted a tempest of staccato buglings.
+
+Under them what was left of the Thing leaped, tore on. Norhala's flaming
+hair crackled and streamed; about her body of milk and pearl--about
+Ruth's creamy skin--a radiant nimbus began to glow.
+
+In the distance I saw a sapphire spark; knew it for Norhala's home. Not
+far from it now was the rushing pyramid--and it came to me that within
+that shape was strangely neither globe nor pyramid. Nor except for
+the trembling cubes that made the platform on which we stood, did the
+shrunken Thing carrying us hold any unit of the Metal Monster except its
+spheres and tetrahedrons--at least within its visible bulk.
+
+The sapphire spark had grown to a glimmering azure marble. Steadily we
+gained upon the pyramid. Never for an instant ceased that scourging hail
+of notes from Norhala--never for an instant lessened the drumming clamor
+that seemed to try to smother them.
+
+The sapphire marble became a sapphire ball, a great globe. I saw the
+Thing we sought to join lift itself into a prodigious pillar; the
+pillar's base thrust forth stilts; upon them the Thing stepped over the
+blue dome of Norhala's house.
+
+The blue bubble was close; now it curved below us. Gently we were lifted
+down; were set before its portal. I looked up at the bulk that had
+carried us.
+
+I had been right--built it was only of globe and pyramid; an
+inconceivably grotesque shape, it hung over us.
+
+Throughout the towering Shape was awful movement; its units writhed
+within it. Then it was lost to sight in the mists through which the
+Thing we had pursued had gone.
+
+In Norhala's face as she watched it go was a dismay, a poignant
+uncertainty, that held in it something indescribably pitiful.
+
+“I am afraid!” I heard her whisper.
+
+She tightened her grasp upon dreaming Ruth; motioned us to go within.
+We passed, silently; behind us she came, followed by three of the great
+globes, by a pair of her tetrahedrons.
+
+Beside a pile of the silken stuffs she halted. The girl's eyes dwelt
+upon hers trustingly.
+
+“I am afraid!” whispered Norhala again. “Afraid--for you!”
+
+Tenderly she looked down upon her, the galaxies of stars in her eyes
+soft and tremulous.
+
+“I am afraid, little sister,” she whispered for the third time. “Not yet
+can you go as I do--among the fires.” She hesitated. “Rest here until I
+return. I shall leave these to guard you and obey you.”
+
+She motioned to the five shapes. They ranged themselves about Ruth.
+Norhala kissed her upon both brown eyes.
+
+“Sleep till I return,” she murmured.
+
+She swept from the chamber--with never a glance for us three. I heard a
+little wailing chorus without, fast dying into silence.
+
+Spheres and pyramids twinkled at us, guarding the silken pile whereon
+Ruth lay asleep--like some enchanted princess.
+
+Beat down upon the blue globe like hollow metal worlds, beaten and
+shrieking.
+
+The drums of Destiny!
+
+The drums of Doom!
+
+Beating taps for the world of men?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII. THE FRENZY OF RUTH
+
+For many minutes we stood silent, in the shadowy chamber, listening,
+each absorbed in his own thoughts. The thunderous drumming was
+continuous; sometimes it faded into a background for clattering storms
+as of thousands of machine guns, thousands of riveters at work at once
+upon a thousand metal frameworks; sometimes it was nearly submerged
+beneath splitting crashes as of meeting meteors of hollow steel.
+
+But always the drumming persisted, rhythmic, thunderous. Through it
+all Ruth slept, undisturbed, cheek pillowed in one rounded arm, the two
+great pyramids erect behind her, watchful; a globe at her feet, a globe
+at her head, the third sphere poised between her and us, and, like the
+pyramids--watchful.
+
+What was happening out there--over the edge of the canyon, beyond the
+portal of the cliffs, behind the veils, in the Pit of the Metal Monster?
+What was the message of the roaring drums? What the rede of their
+clamorous runes?
+
+Ventnor stepped by the sentinel globe, bent over the tranced girl.
+Sphere nor pointed pair stirred; only they watched him--like a palpable
+thing one felt their watchfulness. He listened to her heart, caught up
+a wrist, took note of her pulse of life. He drew a deep breath, stood
+upright, nodded reassuringly.
+
+Abruptly Drake turned, walked out through the open portal, his strain
+and a very deep anxiety written plainly in deep lines that ran from
+nostrils to firm young mouth.
+
+“Just went out to look for the pony,” he muttered when he returned.
+“It's safe. I was afraid it had been stepped on. It's getting dusk.
+There's a big light down the canyon--over in the valley.”
+
+Ventnor drew back past the globe; rejoined us.
+
+The blue bower trembled under a gust of sound. Ruth stirred; her brows
+knitted; her hands clenched. The sphere that stood before her spun on
+its axis, swept up to the globe at her head, glided from it to the globe
+at her feet--as though whispering. Ruth moaned--her body bent upright,
+swayed rigidly. Her eyes opened; they stared through us as though upon
+some dreadful vision; and strangely was it as though she were seeing
+with another's eyes, were reflecting another's sufferings.
+
+The globes at her feet and at her head swirled out, clustering against
+the third sphere--three weird shapes in silent consultation. On
+Ventnor's face I saw pity--and a vast relief. With shocked amaze I
+realized that Ruth's agony--for in agony she clearly was--was calling
+forth in him elation. He spoke--and I knew why.
+
+“Norhala!” he whispered. “She is seeing with Norhala's eyes--feeling
+what Norhala feels. It's not going well with--That--out there. If we
+dared leave Ruth--could only, see--”
+
+Ruth leaped to her feet; cried out--a golden bugling that might have
+been Norhala's own wrathful trumpet notes. Instantly the two pyramids
+flamed open, became two gleaming stars that bathed her in violet
+radiance. Beneath their upper tips I saw the blasting ovals
+glitter--menacingly.
+
+The girl glared at us--more brilliant grew the glittering ovals as
+though their lightnings trembled on their lips.
+
+“Ruth!” called Ventnor softly.
+
+A shadow softened the intolerable, hard brilliancy of the brown eyes. In
+them something struggled to arise, fighting its way to the surface like
+some drowning human thing.
+
+It sank back--upon her face dropped a cloud of heartbreak, appalling
+woe; the despair of a soul that, having withdrawn all faith in its
+own kind to rest all faith, as it thought, on angels--sees that faith
+betrayed.
+
+There stared upon us a stripped spirit, naked and hopeless and terrible.
+
+Despairing, raging, she screamed once more. The central globe swam to
+her; it raised her upon its back; glided to the doorway. Upon it she
+stood poised like some youthful, anguished Victory--a Victory who faced
+and knew she faced destroying defeat; poised upon that enigmatic orb
+on bare slender feet, one sweet breast bare, hands upraised, virginally
+archaic, nothing about her of the Ruth we knew.
+
+“Ruth!” cried Drake; despair as great as that upon her face was in his
+voice. He sprang before the globe that held her; barred its way.
+
+For an instant the Thing paused--and in that instant the human soul of
+the girl rushed back.
+
+“No!” she cried. “No!”
+
+A weird call issued from the white lips--stumbling, uncertain, as though
+she who sent it forth herself wondered whence it sprang. Abruptly the
+angry stars closed. The three globes spun--doubting, puzzled! Again she
+called--now a tremulous, halting cadence. She was lifted; dropped gently
+to her feet.
+
+For an instant the globes and pyramids whirled and danced before
+her--then sped away through the portal.
+
+Ruth swayed, sobbing. Then as though drawn, she ran to the doorway,
+fled through it. As one we sprang after her. Rods ahead her white
+body flashed, speeding toward the Pit. Like fleet-footed Atalanta she
+fled--and far, far behind us was the blue bower, the misty barrier of
+the veils close, when Drake with a last desperate burst reached her
+side, gripped her. Down the two fell, rolling upon the smooth roadway.
+Silently she fought, biting, tearing at Drake, struggling to escape.
+
+“Quick!” gasped Ventnor, stretching out to me an arm. “Cut off the
+sleeve. Quick!”
+
+Unquestioningly, I drew my knife, ripped the garment at the shoulder. He
+snatched the sleeve, knelt at Ruth's head; rapidly he crumpled an end,
+thrust it roughly into her mouth; tied it fast, gagging her.
+
+“Hold her!” he ordered Drake; and with a sob of relief sprang up. The
+girl's eyes blazed at him, filled with hate.
+
+“Cut that other sleeve,” he said; and when I had done so, he knelt
+again, pinned Ruth down with a knee at her throat, turned her over and
+knotted her hands behind her. She ceased struggling; gently now he drew
+up the curly head; swung her upon her back.
+
+“Hold her feet.” He nodded to Drake, who caught the slender bare ankles
+in his hands.
+
+
+She lay there, helpless, being unable to use her hands or feet.
+
+“Too little Ruth, and too much Norhala,” said Ventnor, looking up at me.
+“If she'd only thought to cry out! She could have brought a regiment of
+those Things down to blast us. And would--if she HAD thought. You don't
+think THAT is Ruth, do you?”
+
+He pointed to the pallid face glaring at him, the eyes from which cold
+fires flamed.
+
+“No, you don't!” He caught Drake by the shoulder, sent him spinning a
+dozen feet away. “Damn it, Drake--don't you understand!”
+
+For suddenly Ruth's eyes softened; she had turned them on Dick
+pitifully, appealingly--and he had loosed her ankles, had leaned forward
+as though to draw away the band that covered her lips.
+
+“Your gun,” whispered Ventnor to me; before I had moved he had snatched
+the automatic from my holster; had covered Drake with it.
+
+“Drake,” he said, “stand where you are. If you take another step toward
+this girl I'll shoot you--by God, I will!”
+
+Drake halted, shocked amazement in his face; I myself felt resentful,
+wondering at his outburst.
+
+“But it's hurting her,” he muttered, Ruth's eyes, soft and pleading,
+still dwelt upon him.
+
+“Hurting her!” exclaimed Ventnor. “Man--she's my sister! I know what I'm
+doing. Can't you see? Can't you see how little of Ruth is in that body
+there--how little of the girl you love? How or why I don't know--but
+that it is so I DO know. Drake--have you forgotten how Norhala beguiled
+Cherkis? I want my sister back. I'm helping her to get back. Now let be.
+I know what I'm doing. Look at her!”
+
+We looked. In the face that glared up at Ventnor was nothing of
+Ruth--even as he had said. There was the same cold, awesome wrath that
+had rested upon Norhala's as she watched Cherkis weep over the eating up
+of his city. Swiftly came a change--like the sudden smoothing out of the
+rushing waves of a hill-locked, wind-lashed lake.
+
+The face was again Ruth's face--and Ruth's alone; the eyes were Ruth's
+eyes--supplicating, adjuring.
+
+“Ruth!” Ventnor cried. “While you can hear--am I not right?”
+
+She nodded vigorously, sternly; she was lost, hidden once more.
+
+“You see.” He turned to us grimly.
+
+A shattering shaft of light flashed upon the veils; almost pierced them.
+An avalanche of sound passed high above us. Yet now I noted that where
+we stood the clamor was lessened, muffled. Of course, it came to me, it
+was the veils.
+
+I wondered why--for whatever the quality of the radiant mists, their
+purpose certainly had to do with concentration of the magnetic flux. The
+deadening of the noise must be accidental, could have nothing to do with
+their actual use; for sound is an air vibration solely. No--it must be a
+secondary effect. The Metal Monster was as heedless of clamor as it was
+of heat or cold--
+
+“We've got to see,” Ventnor broke the chain of thought. “We've got to
+get through and see what's happening. Win or lose--we've got to KNOW.”
+
+“Cut off your sleeve, as I did,” he motioned to Drake. “Tie her ankles.
+We'll carry her.”
+
+Quickly it was done. Ruth's light body swinging between brother and
+lover, we moved forward into the mists; we crept cautiously through
+their dead silences.
+
+Passed out and fell back into them from a searing chaos of light,
+chaotic tumult.
+
+From the slackened grip of Ventnor and Drake the body of Ruth dropped
+while we three stood blinded, deafened, fighting for recovery. Ruth
+twisted, rolled toward the brink; Ventnor threw himself upon her, held
+her fast.
+
+
+Dragging her, crawling on our knees, we crept forward; we stopped when
+the thinning of the mists permitted us to see through them yet still
+interposed a curtaining which, though tenuous, dimmed the intolerable
+brilliancy that filled the Pit, muffled its din to a degree we could
+bear.
+
+I peered through them--and nerve and muscle were locked in the grip of
+a paralyzing awe. I felt then as one would feel set close to warring
+regiments of stars, made witness to the death-throes of a universe, or
+swept through space and held above the whirling coils of Andromeda's
+nebula to watch its birth agonies of nascent suns.
+
+These are no figures of speech, no hyperboles--speck as our whole
+planet would be in Andromeda's vast loom, pinprick as was the Pit to
+the cyclone craters of our own sun, within the cliff-cupped walls of the
+valley was a tangible, struggling living force akin to that which
+dwells within the nebula and the star; a cosmic spirit transcending all
+dimensions and thrusting its confines out into the infinite; a sentient
+emanation of the infinite itself.
+
+Nor was its voice less unearthly. It used the shell of the earth valley
+for its trumpetings, its clangors--but as one hears in the murmurings
+of the fluted conch the great voice of ocean, its whispering and
+its roarings, so here in the clamorous shell of the Pit echoed the
+tremendous voices of that illimitable sea which laps the shores of the
+countless suns.
+
+I looked upon a mighty whirlpool miles and miles wide. It whirled with
+surges whose racing crests were smiting incandescences; it was threaded
+with a spindrift of lightnings; it was trodden by dervish mists of
+molten flame thrust through with forests of lances of living light. It
+cast a cadent spray high to the heavens.
+
+Over it the heavens glittered as though they were a shield held by
+fearful gods. Through the maelstrom staggered a mountainous bulk; a
+gleaming leviathan of pale blue metal caught in the swirling tide of
+some incredible volcano; a huge ark of metal breasting a deluge of
+flame.
+
+And the drumming we heard as of hollow beaten metal worlds, the shouting
+tempests of cannonading stars, was the breaking of these incandescent
+crests, the falling of the lightning spindrift, the rhythmic impact of
+the lanced rays upon the glimmering mountain that reeled and trembled as
+they struck it.
+
+The reeling mountain, the struggling leviathan, was--the City!
+
+It was the mass of the Metal Monster itself, guarded by, stormed by,
+its own legions that though separate from it were still as much of it as
+were the cells that formed the skin of its walls, its carapace.
+
+It was the Metal Monster tearing, rending, fighting for, battling
+against--itself.
+
+Mile high as when I had first beheld it was the inexplicable body that
+held the great heart of the cones into which had been drawn the magnetic
+cataracts from our sun; that held too the smaller hearts of the lesser
+cones, the workshops, the birth chamber and manifold other mysteries
+unguessed and unseen. By a full fourth had its base been shrunken.
+
+Ranged in double line along the side turned toward us were hundreds of
+dread forms--Shapes that in their intensity bore down upon, oppressed
+with a nightmare weight, the consciousness.
+
+Rectangular, upon their outlines no spike of pyramid, no curve of globe
+showing, uncompromisingly ponderous, they upthrust. Upon the tops of the
+first rank were enormous masses, sledge shaped--like those metal fists
+that had battered down the walls of Cherkis's city but to them as the
+human hand is to the paw of the dinosaur.
+
+Conceive this--conceive these Shapes as animate and flexible; beating
+down with the prodigious mallets, smashing from side to side as though
+the tremendous pillars that held them were thousand jointed upright
+pistons; that as closely as I can present it in images of things we know
+is the picture of the Hammering Things.
+
+
+Behind them stood a second row, high as they and as angular. From them
+extended scores of girdered arms. These were thickly studded with the
+flaming cruciform shapes, the opened cubes gleaming with their angry
+flares of reds and smoky yellows. From the tentacles of many swung
+immense shields like those which ringed the hall of the great cones.
+
+And as the sledges beat, ever over their bent heads poured from the
+crosses a flood of crimson lightnings. Out of the concave depths of
+the shields whipped lashes of blinding flame. With ropes of fire
+they knouted the Things the sledges struck, the sullen crimson levins
+blasted.
+
+Now I could see the Shapes that attacked. Grotesque; spined and tusked,
+spiked and antlered, wenned and breasted; as chimerically angled, cusped
+and cornute as though they were the superangled, supercornute gods of
+the cusped and angled gods of the Javanese, they strove against the
+sledge-headed and smiting, the multiarmed and blasting square towers.
+
+High as them, as huge as they, incomparably fantastic, in dozens of
+shifting forms they battled.
+
+More than a mile from the stumbling City stood ranged like sharpshooters
+a host of solid, bristling-legged towers. Upon their tops spun gigantic
+wheels. Out of the centers of these wheels shot the radiant lances,
+hosts of spears of intensest violet light. The radiance they volleyed
+was not continuous; it was broken, so that the javelin rays shot out in
+rhythmic flights, each flying fast upon the shafts of the others.
+
+It was their impact that sent forth the thunderous drumming. They struck
+and splintered against the walls, dropping from them in great gouts of
+molten flame. It was as though before they broke they pierced the wall,
+the Monster's side, bled fire.
+
+With the crashing of broadsides of massed batteries the sledges smashed
+down upon the bristling attackers. Under the awful impact globes and
+pyramids were shattered into hundreds of fragments, rocket bursts of
+blue and azure and violet flame, flames rainbowed and irised.
+
+The hammer ends split, flew apart, were scattered, were falling showers
+of sulphurous yellow and scarlet meteors. But ever other cubes swarmed
+out and repaired the broken smiting tips. And always where a tusked and
+cornute shape had been battered down, disintegrated, another arose
+as huge and as formidable pouring forth upon the squared tower its
+lightnings, tearing at it with colossal spiked and hooked claws, beating
+it with incredible spiked and globular fists that were like the clenched
+hands of some metal Atlas.
+
+As the striving Shapes swayed and wrestled, gave way or thrust forward,
+staggered or fell, the bulk of the Monster stumbled and swayed, advanced
+and retreated--an unearthly motion wedded to an amorphous immensity that
+flooded the watching consciousness with a deathly nausea.
+
+Unceasingly the hail of radiant lances poured from the spinning wheels,
+falling upon Towered Shapes and City's wall alike. There arose a
+prodigious wailing, an unearthly thin screaming. About the bases of the
+defenders flashed blinding bursts of incandescence--like those which had
+heralded the flight of the Flying Thing dropping before Norhala's house.
+
+Unlike them they held no dazzling sapphire brilliancies; they were
+ochreous, suffused with raging vermilion. Nevertheless they were factors
+of that same inexplicable action--for from thousands of gushing lights
+leaped thousands of gigantic square pillars; unimaginable projectiles
+hurled from the flaming mouths of earth-hidden, titanic mortars.
+
+They soared high, swerved and swooped upon the lance-throwers. Beneath
+their onslaught those chimerae tottered, I saw living projectiles and
+living target fuse where they met--melt and weld in jets of lightnings.
+
+But not all. There were those that tore great gaps in the horned
+giants--wounds that instantly were healed with globes and pyramids
+seething out from the Cyclopean trunk. Ever the incredible projectiles
+flashed and flew as though from some inexhaustible store; ever uprose
+that prodigious barrage against the smiting rays.
+
+Now to check them soared from the ranks of the besiegers clouds of
+countless horned dragons, immense cylinders of clustered cubes studded
+with the clinging tetrahedrons. They struck the cubed projectiles head
+on; aimed themselves to meet them.
+
+Bristling dragon and hurtling pillar stuck and fused or burst with
+intolerable blazing. They fell--cube and sphere and pyramid--some half
+opened, some fully, in a rain of disks, of stars, huge flaming crosses;
+a storm of unimaginable pyrotechnics.
+
+Now I became conscious that within the City--within the body of the
+Metal Monster--there raged a strife colossal as this without. From it
+came a vast volcanic roaring. Up from its top shot tortured flames,
+cascades and fountains of frenzied Things that looped and struggled,
+writhed over its edge, hurled themselves back; battling chimerae which
+against the glittering heavens traced luminous symbols of agony.
+
+Shrilled a stronger wailing. Up from behind the ray hurling Towers shot
+hosts of globes. Thousands of palely azure, metal moons they soared;
+warrior moons charging in meteor rush and streaming with fluttering
+battle pennons of violet flame. High they flew; they curved over the
+mile high back of the Monster; they dropped upon it.
+
+Arose to meet them immense columns of the cubes; battered against
+the spheres; swept them over and down into the depths. Hundreds fell,
+broken--but thousands held their place. I saw them twine about the
+pillars--writhing columns of interlaced cubes and globes straining
+like monstrous serpents while all along their coils the open disks and
+crosses smote with the scimitars of their lightnings.
+
+In the wall of the City appeared a shining crack; from top to bottom it
+ran; it widened into a rift from which a flood of radiance gushed. Out
+of this rift poured a thousand-foot-high torrent of horned globes.
+
+Only for an instant they flowed. The rift closed upon them, catching
+those still emerging in a colossal vise. It CRUNCHED them. Plain through
+the turmoil came a dreadful--bursting roar.
+
+Down from the closing jaws of the vise dripped a stream of fragments
+that flashed and flickered--and died. And now in the wall was no trace
+of the breach.
+
+A hurricane of radiant lances swept it. Under them a mile wide section
+of the living scarp split away; dropped like an avalanche. Its fall
+revealed great spaces, huge vaults and chambers filled with warring
+lightnings--out from them came roaring, bellowing thunders. Swiftly from
+each side of the gap a metal curtaining of the cubes joined. Again the
+wall was whole.
+
+I turned my stunned gaze from the City--swept over the valley.
+Everywhere, in towers, in writhing coils, in whipping flails, in waves
+that smote and crashed, in countless forms and combinations the Metal
+Hordes battled. Here were pillars against which metal billows rushed
+and were broken; there were metal comets that crashed high above the mad
+turmoil.
+
+From streaming silent veil to veil--north and south, east and west the
+Monster slew itself beneath its racing, flaming banners, the tempests of
+its lightnings.
+
+The tortured hulk of the City lurched; it swept toward us. Before it
+blotted out from our eyes the Pit I saw that the crystal spans upon the
+river of jade were gone; that the wondrous jeweled ribbons of its banks
+were broken.
+
+Closer came the reeling City.
+
+I fumbled for my lenses, focussed them upon it. Now I saw that where
+the radiant lances struck they--killed the blocks blackened under them,
+became lustreless; the sparkling of the tiny eyes--went out; the metal
+carapaces crumbled.
+
+Closer to the City--came the Monster; shuddering I lowered the glasses
+that it might not seem so near.
+
+Down dropped the bristling Shapes that wrestled with the squared Towers.
+They rose again in a single monstrous wave that rushed to overwhelm
+them. Before they could strike the City swept closer; had hidden them
+from me.
+
+Again I raised the glasses. They brought the metal scarp not fifty feet
+away--within it the hosts of tiny eyes glittered, no longer mocking nor
+malicious, but insane.
+
+Nearer drew the Monster--nearer.
+
+A thousand feet away it checked its movement, seemed to draw itself
+together. Then like the roar of a falling world that whole side facing
+us slid down to the valley's floor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX. THE PASSING OF NORHALA
+
+Hundreds of feet through must have been the fallen mass--within it who
+knows what chambers filled with mysteries? Yes, thousands of feet thick
+it must have been, for the debris of it splintered and lashed to the
+very edge of the ledge on which we crouched; heaped it with the dimming
+fragments of the bodies that had formed it.
+
+We looked into a thousand vaults, a thousand spaces. There came another
+avalanche roaring--before us opened the crater of the cones.
+
+Through the torn gap I saw them, clustering undisturbed about the base
+of that one slender, coroneted and star pointing spire, rising serene
+and unshaken from a hell of lightnings. But the shields that had rimmed
+the crater were gone.
+
+Ventnor snatched the glasses from my hand, leveled and held them long to
+his eyes.
+
+He thrust them back to me. “Look!”
+
+Through the lenses the great hall leaped into full view apparently only
+a few yards away. It was a cauldron of chameleon flame. It seethed with
+the Hordes battling over the remaining walls and floor. But around the
+crystal base of the cones was an open zone into which none broke.
+
+In that wide ring, girdling the shimmering fantasy like a circled
+sanctuary, were but three forms. One was the wondrous Disk of jeweled
+fires I have called the Metal Emperor; the second was the sullen fired
+cruciform of the Keeper.
+
+The third was Norhala!
+
+She stood at the side of that weird master of hers--or was it after all
+the servant? Between them and the Keeper's planes gleamed the gigantic
+T-shaped tablet of countless rods which controlled the activities of the
+cones; that had controlled the shifting of the vanished shields; that
+manipulated too, perhaps, the energies of whatever similar but smaller
+cornute ganglia were scattered throughout the City and one of which we
+had beheld when the Emperor's guards had blasted Ventnor.
+
+Close was Norhala in the lenses--so close that almost, it seemed, I
+could reach out and touch her. The flaming hair streamed and billowed
+above her glorious head like a banner of molten floss of coppery gold;
+her face was a mask of wrath and despair; her great eyes blazed upon the
+Keeper; her exquisite body was bare, stripped of every shred of silken
+covering.
+
+From streaming tresses to white feet an oval of pulsing, golden light
+nimbused her. Maiden Isis, virgin Astarte she stood there, held in the
+grip of the Disk--like a goddess betrayed and hopeless yet thirsting for
+vengeance.
+
+For all their stillness, their immobility, it came to me that Emperor
+and Keeper were at grapple, locked in death grip; the realization was as
+definite as though, like Ruth, I thought with Norhala's mind, saw with
+her eyes.
+
+Clearly too it came to me that in this contest between the two was
+epitomized all the vast conflict that raged around them; that in it was
+fast ripening that fruit of destiny of which Ventnor had spoken, and
+that here in the Hall of the Cones would be settled--and soon--the fate
+not only of Disk and Cross, but it might be of humanity.
+
+But with what unknown powers was that duel being fought? They cast no
+lightnings, they battled with no visible weapons. Only the great planes
+of the inverted cruciform Shape smoked and smoldered with their sullen
+flares of ochres and of scarlets; while over all the face of the
+Disk its cold and irised fires raced and shone, beating with a rhythm
+incredibly rapid; its core of incandescent ruby blazed, its sapphire
+ovals were cabochoned pools of living, lucent radiance.
+
+There was a splitting roar that arose above all the clamor, deafening
+us even in the shelter of the silent veils. On each side of the crater
+whole masses of the City dropped away. Fleetingly I was aware of scores
+of smaller pits in which uprose lesser replicas of the Coned Mount,
+lesser reservoirs of the Monster's force.
+
+Neither the Emperor nor the Keeper moved, both seemingly indifferent to
+the catastrophe fast developing around them.
+
+Now I strained forward to the very thinnest edge of the curtainings.
+For between the Disk and Cross began to form fine black mist. It was
+transparent. It seemed spun of minute translucent ebon corpuscles. It
+hung like a black shroud suspended by unseen hands. It shook and wavered
+now toward the Disk, now toward the Cross.
+
+I sensed a keying up of force within the two; knew that each was
+striving to cast like a net that hanging mist upon the other.
+
+Abruptly the Emperor flashed forth, blindingly. As though caught upon a
+blast, the black shroud flew toward the Keeper--enveloped it. And as the
+mist covered and clung I saw the sulphurous and crimson flares dim. They
+were snuffed out.
+
+The Keeper fell!
+
+
+Upon Norhala's face flamed a wild triumph, banishing despair. The
+outstretched planes of the Cross swept up as though in torment. For an
+instant its fires flared and licked through the clinging blackness; it
+writhed half upright, threw itself forward, crashed down prostrate upon
+the enigmatic tablet which only its tentacles could manipulate.
+
+From Norhala's face the triumph fled. On its heels rushed stark,
+incredulous horror.
+
+The Mount of Cones shuddered. From it came a single mighty throb of
+force--like a prodigious heart-beat. Under that pulse of power the
+Emperor staggered, spun--and spinning, swept Norhala from her feet,
+swung her close to its flashing rose.
+
+A second throb pulsed from the cones, and mightier.
+
+A spasm shook the Disk--a paroxysm.
+
+Its fires faded; they flared out again, bathing the floating, unearthly
+figure of Norhala with their iridescences.
+
+I saw her body writhe--as though it shared the agony of the Shape that
+held her. Her head twisted; the great eyes, pools of uncomprehending,
+unbelieving horror, stared into mine.
+
+With a spasmodic, infinitely dreadful movement the Disk closed--
+
+And closed upon her!
+
+Norhala was gone--was shut within it. Crushed to the pent fires of its
+crystal heart.
+
+I heard a sobbing, agonized choking--knew it was I who sobbed. Against
+me I felt Ruth's body strike, bend in convulsive arc, drop inert.
+
+The slender steeple of the cones drooped sending its faceted coronet
+shattering to the floor. The Mount melted. Beneath the flooding radiance
+sprawled Keeper and the great inert Globe that was the Goddess woman's
+sepulcher.
+
+The crater filled with the pallid luminescence. Faster and ever faster
+it poured down into the Pit. And from all the lesser craters of the
+smaller cones swept silent cataracts of the same pale radiance.
+
+The City began to crumble--the Monster to fall.
+
+Like pent-up waters rushing through a broken dam the gleaming deluge
+swept over the valley; gushing in steady torrents from the breaking
+mass. Over the valley fell a vast silence. The lightnings ceased. The
+Metal Hordes stood rigid, the shining flood lapping at their bases,
+rising swiftly ever higher.
+
+Now from the sinking City swarmed multitudes of its weird luminaries.
+
+Out they trooped, swirling from every rent and gap--orbs scarlet and
+sapphire, ruby orbs, orbs tuliped and irised--the jocund suns of the
+birth chamber and side by side with them hosts of the frozen, pale gilt,
+stiff rayed suns.
+
+Thousands upon thousands they marched forth and poised themselves
+solemnly over all the Pit that now was a fast rising lake of yellow
+froth of sun flame.
+
+They swept forth in squadrons, in companies, in regiments, those
+mysterious orbs. They floated over all the valley; they separated and
+swung motionless above it as though they were mysterious multiple souls
+of fire brooding over the dying shell that had held them.
+
+Beneath, thrusting up from the lambent lake like grotesque towers of
+some drowned fantastic metropolis, the great Shapes stood, black against
+its glowing.
+
+What had been the City--that which had been the bulk of the Monster--was
+now only a vast and shapeless hill from which streamed the silent
+torrents of that released, unknown force which, concentrate and bound,
+had been the cones.
+
+As though it was the Monster's shining life-blood it poured, raising
+ever higher in its swift flooding the level radiant lake.
+
+Lower and lower sank the immense bulk; squattered and spread, ever
+lowering--about its helpless, patient crouching something ineffably
+piteous, something indescribably, COSMICALLY tragic.
+
+Abruptly the watching orbs shook under a hail of sparkling atoms
+streaming down from the glittering sky; raining upon the lambent lake.
+So thick they fell that now the brooding luminaries were dim aureoles
+within them.
+
+From the Pit came a blinding, insupportable brilliancy. From every
+rigid tower gleamed out jeweled fires; their clinging units opened into
+blazing star and disk and cross. The City was a hill of living gems over
+which flowed torrents of pale molten gold.
+
+The Pit blazed.
+
+
+There followed an appalling tensity; a prodigious gathering of force;
+a panic stirring concentration of energy. Thicker fell the clouds of
+sparkling atoms--higher rose the yellow flood.
+
+Ventnor cried out. I could not hear him, but I read his purpose--and
+so did Drake. Up on his broad shoulders he swung Ruth as though she had
+been a child. Back through the throbbing veils we ran; passed out of
+them.
+
+“Back!” shouted Ventnor. “Back as far as you can!”
+
+On we raced; we reached the gateway of the cliffs; we dashed on and
+on--up the shining roadway toward the blue globe now a scant mile before
+us; ran sobbing, panting--ran, we knew, for our lives.
+
+Out of the Pit came a sound--I cannot describe it!
+
+An unutterably desolate, dreadful wail of despair, it shuddered past us
+like the groaning of a broken-hearted star--anguished and awesome.
+
+It died. There rushed upon us a sea of that incredible loneliness, that
+longing for extinction that had assailed us in the haunted hollow where
+first we had seen Norhala. But its billows were resistless, invincible.
+Beneath them we fell; were torn by desire for swift death.
+
+Dimly, through fainting eyes, I saw a dazzling brilliancy fill the sky;
+heard with dying ears a chaotic, blasting roar. A wave of air thicker
+than water caught us up, hurled us hundreds of yards forward. It dropped
+us; in its wake rushed another wave, withering, scorching.
+
+It raced over us. Scorching though it was, within its heat was
+energizing, revivifying force; something that slew the deadly despair
+and fed the fading fires of life.
+
+I staggered to my feet; looked back. The veils were gone. The precipice
+walled gateway they had curtained was filled with a Plutonic glare as
+though it opened into the incandescent heart of a volcano.
+
+Ventnor clutched my shoulder, spun me around. He pointed to the sapphire
+house, started to run to it. Far ahead I saw Drake, the body of the girl
+clasped to his breast. The heat became blasting, insupportable; my lungs
+burned.
+
+Over the sky above the canyon streaked a serpentine chain of lightnings.
+A sudden cyclonic gust swept the cleft, whirling us like leaves toward
+the Pit.
+
+I threw myself upon my face, clutching at the smooth rock. A volley of
+thunder burst--but not the thunder of the Metal Monster or its Hordes;
+no, the bellowing of the levins of our own earth.
+
+And the wind was cold; it bathed the burning skin; laved the fevered
+lungs.
+
+Again the sky was split by the lightnings. And roaring down from it in
+solid sheets came the rain.
+
+From the Pit arose a hissing as though within it raged Babylonian
+Tiamat, Mother of Chaos, serpent dweller in the void; Midgard-snake of
+the ancient Norse holding in her coils the world.
+
+Buffeted by wind, beaten down by rain, clinging to each other like
+drowning men, Ventnor and I pushed on to the elfin globe. The light was
+dying fast. By it we saw Drake pass within the portal with his burden.
+The light became embers; it went out; blackness clasped us. Guided by
+the lightnings, we beat our way to the door; passed through it.
+
+In the electric glare we saw Drake bending over Ruth. In it I saw
+a slide draw over the open portal through which shrieked the wind,
+streamed the rain.
+
+As though its crystal panel was moved by unseen, gentle hands, the
+portal closed; the tempest shut out.
+
+We dropped beside Ruth upon a pile of silken stuffs--awed, marveling,
+trembling with pity and--thanksgiving.
+
+For we knew--each of us knew with an absolute definiteness as we
+crouched there among the racing, dancing black and silver shadows with
+which the lightnings filled the blue globe--that the Metal Monster was
+dead.
+
+Slain by itself!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX. BURNED OUT
+
+Ruth sighed and stirred. By the glare of the lightnings, now almost
+continuous, we saw that her rigidity, and in fact all the puzzling
+cataleptic symptoms, had disappeared. Her limbs relaxed, her skin
+faintly flushed, she lay in deepest but natural slumber undisturbed by
+the incessant cannonading of the thunder under which the walls of the
+blue globe shuddered. Ventnor passed through the curtains of the central
+hall; he returned with one of Norhala's cloaks; covered the girl with
+it.
+
+An overwhelming sleepiness took possession of me, a weariness ineffable.
+Nerve and brain and muscle suddenly relaxed, went slack and numb.
+Without a struggle I surrendered to an overpowering stupor and cradled
+deep in its heart ceased consciously to be.
+
+
+When my eyes unclosed the chamber of the moonstone walls was filled
+with a silvery, crepuscular light. I heard the murmuring and laughing of
+running water, the play, I lazily realized, of the fountained pool.
+
+I lay for whole minutes unthinking, luxuriating in the sense of tension
+gone and of security; lay steeped in the aftermath of complete rest.
+Memory flooded me.
+
+Quietly I sat up; Ruth still slept, breathing peacefully beneath the
+cloak, one white arm stretched over the shoulder of Drake--as though in
+her sleep she had drawn close to him.
+
+At her feet lay Ventnor, as deep in slumber as they. I arose and
+tip-toed over to the closed door.
+
+Searching, I found its key; a cupped indentation upon which I pressed.
+
+The crystalline panel slipped back; it was moved, I suppose, by some
+mechanism of counterbalances responding to the weight of the hand.
+It must have been some vibration of the thunder which had loosed that
+mechanism and had closed the panel upon the heels of our entrance--so I
+thought--then seeing again in memory that uncanny, deliberate shutting
+was not at all convinced that it had been the thunder.
+
+I looked out. How many hours the sun had been up there was no means of
+knowing.
+
+The sky was low and slaty gray; a fine rain was falling. I stepped out.
+
+The garden of Norhala was a wreckage of uprooted and splintered trees
+and torn masses of what had been blossoming verdure.
+
+The gateway of the precipices beyond which lay the Pit was hidden in the
+webs of the rain. Long I gazed down the canyon--and longingly; striving
+to picture what the Pit now held; eager to read the riddles of the
+night.
+
+There came from the valley no sound, no movement, no light.
+
+I reentered the blue globe and paused on the threshold--staring into
+the wide and wondering eyes of Ruth bolt upright in her silken bed
+with Norhala's cloak clutched to her chin like a suddenly awakened and
+startled child. As she glimpsed me she stretched out her hand. Drake,
+wide awake on the instant, leaped to his feet, his hand jumping to his
+pistol.
+
+“Dick!” called Ruth, her voice tremulous, sweet.
+
+He swung about, looked deep into the clear and fearless brown eyes in
+which--with leaping heart I realized it--was throned only that spirit
+which was Ruth's and Ruth's alone; Ruth's clear unshadowed eyes glad and
+shy and soft with love.
+
+“Dick!” she whispered, and held soft arms out to him. The cloak fell
+from her. He swung her up. Their lips met.
+
+Upon them, embraced, the wakening eyes of Ventnor dwelt; they filled
+with relief and joy, nor was there lacking in them a certain amusement.
+
+She drew from Drake's arms, pushed him from her, stood for a moment
+shakily, with covered eyes.
+
+“Ruth,” called Ventnor softly.
+
+“Oh!” she cried. “Oh, Martin--I forgot--” She ran to him, held him
+tight, face hidden in his breast. His hand rested on the clustering
+brown curls, tenderly.
+
+“Martin.” She raised her face to him. “Martin, it's GONE! I'm--ME again!
+All ME! What happened? Where's Norhala?”
+
+I started. Did she not know? Of course, lying bound as she had in the
+vanished veils, she could have seen nothing of the stupendous tragedy
+enacted beyond them--but had not Ventnor said that possessed by the
+inexplicable obsession evoked by the weird woman Ruth had seen with her
+eyes, thought with her mind?
+
+And had there not been evidence that in her body had been echoed the
+torments of Norhala's? Had she forgotten? I started to speak--was
+checked by Ventnor's swift, warning glance.
+
+“She's--over in the Pit,” he answered her quietly. “But do you remember
+nothing, little sister?”
+
+“There's something in my mind that's been rubbed out,” she replied.
+“I remember the City of Cherkis--and your torture, Martin--and my
+torture--”
+
+Her face whitened; Ventnor's brow contracted anxiously. I knew for what
+he watched--but Ruth's shamed face was all human; on it was no shadow
+nor trace of that alien soul which so few hours since had threatened us.
+
+“Yes,” she nodded, “I remember that. And I remember how Norhala
+repaid them. I remember that I was glad, fiercely glad, and then I was
+tired--so tired. And then--I come to the rubbed-out place,” she ended
+perplexedly.
+
+Deliberately, almost banally had I not realized his purpose, he changed
+the subject. He held her from him at arm's length.
+
+“Ruth!” he exclaimed, half mockingly, half reprovingly. “Don't you think
+your morning negligee is just a little scanty even for this Godforsaken
+corner of the earth?”
+
+Lips parted in sheer astonishment, she looked at him. Then her eyes
+dropped to her bare feet, her dimpled knees. She clasped her arms across
+her breasts; rosy red turned all her fair skin.
+
+“Oh!” she gasped. “Oh!” And hid from Drake and me behind the tall figure
+of her brother.
+
+I walked over to the pile of silken stuffs, took the cloak and tossed it
+to her. Ventnor pointed to the saddlebags.
+
+“You've another outfit there, Ruth,” he said. “We'll take a turn through
+the place. Call us when you're ready. We'll get something to eat and go
+see what's happening--out there.”
+
+She nodded. We passed through the curtains and out of the hall into the
+chamber that had been Norhala's. There we halted, Drake eyeing Martin
+with a certain embarrassment. The older man thrust out his hand to him.
+
+“I knew it, Drake,” he said. “Ruth told me all about it when Cherkis had
+us. And I'm very glad. It's time she was having a home of her own and
+not running around the lost places with me. I'll miss her--miss her
+damnably, of course. But I'm glad, boy--glad!”
+
+There was a little silence while each looked deep into each other's
+hearts. Then Ventnor dropped Dick's hand.
+
+“And that's all of THAT,” he said. “The problem before us is--how are we
+going to get back home?”
+
+“The--THING--is dead.” I spoke from an absolute conviction that
+surprised me, based as it was upon no really tangible, known evidence.
+
+“I think so,” he said. “No--I KNOW so. Yet even if we can pass over its
+body, how can we climb out of its lair? That slide down which we rode
+with Norhala is unclimbable. The walls are unscalable. And there is that
+chasm--she--spanned for us. How can we cross THAT? The tunnel to the
+ruins was sealed. There remains of possible roads the way through the
+forest to what was the City of Cherkis. Frankly I am loathe to take it.
+
+“I am not at all sure that all the armored men were slain--that some few
+may not have escaped and be lurking there. It would be short shrift for
+us if we fell into their hands now.”
+
+“And I'm not sure of THAT,” objected Drake. “I think their pep and push
+must be pretty thoroughly knocked out--if any do remain. I think if
+they saw us coming they'd beat it so fast that they'd smoke with the
+friction.”
+
+“There's something to that,” Ventnor smiled. “Still I'm not keen on
+taking the chance. At any rate, the first thing to do is to see what
+happened down there in the Pit. Maybe we'll have some other idea after
+that.”
+
+“I know what happened there,” announced Drake, surprisingly. “It was a
+short circuit!”
+
+We gaped at him, mystified.
+
+“Burned out!” said Drake. “Every damned one of them--burned out. What
+were they, after all? A lot of living dynamos. Dynamotors--rather.
+And all of a sudden they had too much juice turned on. Bang went their
+insulations--whatever they were.
+
+“Bang went they. Burned out--short circuited. I don't pretend to know
+why or how. Nonsense! I do know. The cones were some kind of immensely
+concentrated force--electric, magnetic; either or both or more. I myself
+believe that they were probably solid--in a way of speaking--coronium.
+
+“If about twenty of the greatest scientists the world has ever known
+are right, coronium is--well, call it curdled energy. The electric
+potentiality of Niagara in a pin point of dust of yellow fire. All
+right--they or IT lost control. Every pin point swelled out into a
+Niagara. And as it did so, it expanded from a controlled dust dot to
+an uncontrolled cataract--in other words, its energy was unleashed and
+undammed.
+
+“Very well--what followed? What HAD to follow? Every living battery of
+block and globe and spike was supercharged and went--blooey. The valley
+must have been some sweet little volcano while that short circuiting
+was going on. All right--let's go down and see what it did to your
+unclimbable slide and unscalable walls, Ventnor. I'm not sure we won't
+be able to get out that way.”
+
+“Come on; everything's ready,” Ruth was calling; her summoning blocked
+any objection we might have raised to Drake's argument.
+
+It was no dryad, no distressed pagan clad maid we saw as we passed back
+into the room of the pool. In knickerbockers and short skirt, prim and
+self-possessed, rebellious curls held severely in place by close-fitting
+cap and slender feet stoutly shod, Ruth hovered over the steaming kettle
+swung above the spirit lamp.
+
+And she was very silent as we hastily broke fast. Nor when we had
+finished did she go to Drake. She clung close to her brother and beside
+him as we set forth down the roadway, through the rain, toward the ledge
+between the cliffs where the veils had shimmered.
+
+Hotter and hotter it grew as we advanced; the air steamed like a Turkish
+bath. The mists clustered so thickly that at last we groped forward step
+by step, holding to each other.
+
+“No use,” gasped Ventnor. “We couldn't see. We'll have to turn back.”
+
+“Burned out!” said Dick. “Didn't I tell you? The whole valley was a
+volcano. And with that deluge falling in it--why wouldn't there be a
+fog? It's why there IS a fog. We'll have to wait until it clears.”
+
+We trudged back to the blue globe.
+
+All that day the rain fell. Throughout the few remaining hours of
+daylight we wandered over the house of Norhala, examining its most
+interesting contents, or sat theorizing, discussing all phases of the
+phenomena we had witnessed.
+
+We told Ruth what had occurred after she had thrown in her lot with
+Norhala; and of the enigmatic struggle between the glorious Disk and the
+sullenly flaming Thing I have called the Keeper.
+
+We told her of the entombment of Norhala.
+
+When she heard that she wept.
+
+“She was sweet,” she sobbed; “she was lovely. And she was beautiful.
+Dearly she loved me. I KNOW she loved me. Oh, I know that we and ours
+and that which was hers could not share the world together. But it comes
+to me that Earth would have been far less poisonous with those that were
+Norhala's than it is with us and ours!”
+
+Weeping, she passed through the curtainings, going we knew to Norhala's
+chamber.
+
+It was a strange thing indeed that she had said, I thought, watching her
+go. That the garden of the world would be far less poisonous blossoming
+with those Things of wedded crystal and metal and magnetic fires
+than fertile as now with us of flesh and blood and bone. To me came
+appreciations of their harmonies, and mingled with those perceptions
+were others of humanity--disharmonious, incoordinate, ever struggling,
+ever striving to destroy itself--
+
+There was a plaintive whinnying at the open door. A long and hairy face,
+a pair of patient, inquiring eyes looked in. It was a pony. For a moment
+it regarded us--and then trotted trustfully through; ambled up to us;
+poked its head against my side.
+
+It had been ridden by one of the Persians whom Ruth had killed, for
+under it, slipped from the girths, a saddle dangled. And its owner must
+have been kind to it--we knew that from its lack of fear for us. Driven
+by the tempest of the night before, it had been led back by instinct to
+the protection of man.
+
+“Some luck!” breathed Drake.
+
+He busied himself with the pony, stripping away the hanging saddle,
+grooming it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI. SLAG!
+
+That night we slept well. Awakening, we found that the storm had grown
+violent again; the wind roaring and the rain falling in such volume
+that it was impossible to make our way to the Pit. Twice, as a matter of
+fact, we tried; but the smooth roadway was a torrent, and, drenched even
+through our oils to the skin, we at last abandoned the attempt. Ruth and
+Drake drifted away together among the other chambers of the globe; they
+were absorbed in themselves, and we did not thrust ourselves upon them.
+All the day the torrents fell.
+
+We sat down that night to what was well-nigh the last of Ventnor's
+stores. Seemingly Ruth had forgotten Norhala; at least, she spoke no
+more of her.
+
+“Martin,” she said, “can't we start back tomorrow? I want to get away. I
+want to get back to our own world.”
+
+“As soon as the storm ceases, Ruth,” he answered, “we start. Little
+sister--I too want you to get back quickly.”
+
+The next morning the storm had gone. We awakened soon after dawn into
+clear and brilliant light. We had a silent and hurried breakfast. The
+saddlebags were packed and strapped upon the pony. Within them were what
+we could carry of souvenirs from Norhala's home--a suit of lacquered
+armor, a pair of cloaks and sandals, the jeweled combs. Ruth and Drake
+at the side of the pony, Ventnor and I leading, we set forth toward the
+Pit.
+
+“We'll probably have to come back, Walter,” he said. “I don't believe
+the place is passable.”
+
+I pointed--we were then just over the threshold of the elfin globe.
+Where the veils had stretched between the perpendicular pillars of the
+cliffs was now a wide and ragged-edged opening.
+
+The roadway which had run so smoothly through the scarps was blocked
+by a thousand foot barrier. Over it, beyond it, I could see through the
+crystalline clarity of the air the opposing walls.
+
+“We can climb it,” Ventnor said. We passed on and reached the base
+of the barrier. An avalanche had dropped there; the barricade was the
+debris of the torn cliffs, their dust, their pebbles, their boulders. We
+toiled up; we reached the crest; we looked down upon the valley.
+
+When first we had seen it we had gazed upon a sea of radiance pierced
+with lanced forests, swept with gigantic gonfalons of flame; we had seen
+it emptied of its fiery mists--a vast slate covered with the chirography
+of a mathematical god; we had seen it filled with the symboling of the
+Metal Hordes and dominated by the colossal integrate hieroglyph of the
+living City; we had seen it as a radiant lake over which brooded weird
+suns; a lake of yellow flame froth upon which a sparkling hail fell,
+within which reared islanded towers and a drowning mount running with
+cataracts of sun fires; here we had watched a goddess woman, a being
+half of earth, half of the unknown immured within a living tomb--a
+dying tomb--of flaming mysteries; had seen a cross-shaped metal Satan, a
+sullen flaming crystal Judas betray--itself.
+
+Where we had peered into the unfathomable, had glimpsed the infinite,
+had heard and had seen the inexplicable, now was--
+
+Slag!
+
+The amethystine ring from which had been streamed the circling veils was
+cracked and blackened; like a seam of coal it had stretched around the
+Pit--a crown of mourning. The veils were gone. The floor of the valley
+was fissured and blackened; its patterns, its writings burned away. As
+far as we could see stretched a sea of slag--coal black, vitrified and
+dead.
+
+Here and there black hillocks sprawled; huge pillars arose, bent and
+twisted as though they had been jettings of lava cooled into rigidity
+before they could sink back or break. These shapes clustered most
+thickly around an immense calcified mound. They were what were left of
+the battling Hordes, and the mound was what had been the Metal Monster.
+
+Somewhere there were the ashes of Norhala, sealed by fire in the urn of
+the Metal Emperor!
+
+From side to side of the Pit, in broken beaches and waves and hummocks,
+in blackened, distorted tusks and warped towerings, reaching with
+hideous pathos in thousands of forms toward the charred mound, was only
+slag.
+
+From rifts and hollows still filled with water little wreaths of steam
+drifted. In those futile wraiths of vapor was all that remained of the
+might of the Metal Monster.
+
+Catastrophe I had expected, tragedy I knew we would find--but I had
+looked for nothing so filled with the abomination of desolation, so
+frightful as was this.
+
+“Burned out!” muttered Drake. “Short-circuited and burned out! Like a
+dynamo--like an electric light!”
+
+“Destiny!” said Ventnor. “Destiny! Not yet was the hour struck for man
+to relinquish his sovereignty over the world. Destiny!”
+
+We began to pick our way down the heaped debris and out upon the plain.
+For all that day and part of another we searched for an opening out of
+the Pit.
+
+Everywhere was the incredible calcification. The surfaces that had
+been the smooth metallic carapaces with the tiny eyes deep within them,
+crumbled beneath the lightest blow. Not long would it be until under
+wind and rain they dissolved into dust and mud.
+
+And it grew increasingly obvious that Drake's theory of the destruction
+was correct. The Monster had been one prodigious magnet--or, rather, a
+prodigious dynamo. By magnetism, by electricity, it had lived and had
+been activated.
+
+Whatever the force of which the cones were built and that I have likened
+to energy-made material, it was certainly akin to electromagnetic
+energies.
+
+When, in the cataclysm, that force was diffused there had been created
+a magnetic field of incredible intensity; had been concentrated an
+electric charge of inconceivable magnitude.
+
+Discharging, it had blasted the Monster--short-circuited it, and burned
+it out.
+
+But what was it that had led up to the cataclysm? What was it that had
+turned the Metal Monster upon itself? What disharmony had crept into
+that supernal order to set in motion the machinery of disintegration?
+
+
+We could only conjecture. The cruciform Shape I have named the Keeper
+was the agent of destruction--of that there could be no doubt. In the
+enigmatic organism which while many still was one and which, retaining
+its integrity as a whole could dissociate manifold parts yet still as a
+whole maintain an unseen contact and direction over them through miles
+of space, the Keeper had its place, its work, its duties.
+
+So too had that wondrous Disk whose visible and concentrate power, whose
+manifest leadership, had made us name it emperor.
+
+And had not Norhala called the Disk--Ruler?
+
+What were the responsibilities of these twain to the mass of the
+organism of which they were such important units? What were the laws
+they administered, the laws they must obey?
+
+Something certainly of that mysterious law which Maeterlinck has called
+the spirit of the Hive--and something infinitely greater, like that
+which governs the swarming sun bees of Hercules' clustered orbs.
+
+Had there evolved within the Keeper of the Cones--guardian and engineer
+as it seemed to have been--ambition?
+
+Had there risen within it a determination to wrest power from the Disk,
+to take its place as Ruler?
+
+How else explain that conflict I had sensed when the Emperor had plucked
+Drake and me from the Keeper's grip that night following the orgy of the
+feeding?
+
+How else explain that duel in the shattered Hall of the Cones whose end
+had been the signal for the final cataclysm?
+
+How else explain the alinement of the cubes behind the Keeper against
+the globes and pyramids remaining loyal to the will of the Disk?
+
+We discussed this, Ventnor and I.
+
+“This world,” he mused, “is a place of struggle. Air and sea and land
+and all things that dwell within and on them must battle for life. Earth
+not Mars is the planet of war. I have a theory”--he hesitated--“that the
+magnetic currents which are the nerve force of this globe of ours were
+what fed the Metal Things.
+
+“Within those currents is the spirit of earth. And always they have been
+supercharged with strife, with hatreds, warfare. Were these drawn in by
+the Things as they fed? Did it happen that the Keeper became--TUNED--to
+them? That it absorbed and responded to them, growing even more
+sensitive to these forces--until it reflected humanity?”
+
+“Who knows, Goodwin--who can tell?”
+
+Enigma, unless the explanations I have hazarded be accepted, must remain
+that monstrous suicide. Enigma, save for inconclusive theories, must
+remain the question of the Monster's origin.
+
+If answers there were, they were lost forever in the slag we trod.
+
+
+It was afternoon of the second day that we found a rift in the blasted
+wall of the valley. We decided to try it. We had not dared to take the
+road by which Norhala had led us into the City.
+
+The giant slide was broken and climbable. But even if we could have
+passed safely through the tunnel of the abyss there still was left the
+chasm over which we could have thrown no bridge. And if we could have
+bridged it still at that road's end was the cliff whose shaft Norhala
+had sealed with her lightnings.
+
+So we entered the rift.
+
+Of our wanderings thereafter I need not write. From the rift we emerged
+into a maze of the valleys, and after a month in that wilderness, living
+upon what game we could shoot, we found a road that led us into Gyantse.
+
+In another six weeks we were home in America.
+
+My story is finished.
+
+There in the Trans-Himalayan wilderness is the blue globe that was the
+weird home of the lightning witch--and looking back I feel now she could
+not have been all woman.
+
+There is the vast pit with its coronet of fantastic peaks; its
+symboled, calcined floor and the crumbling body of the inexplicable,
+the incredible Thing which, alive, was the shadow of extinction,
+annihilation, hovering to hurl itself upon humanity. That shadow is
+gone; that pall withdrawn.
+
+But to me--to each of us four who saw those phenomena--their lesson
+remains, ineradicable; giving a new strength and purpose to us, teaching
+us a new humility.
+
+For in that vast crucible of life of which we are so small a part, what
+other Shapes may even now be rising to submerge us?
+
+In that vast reservoir of force that is the mystery-filled infinite
+through which we roll, what other shadows may be speeding upon us?
+
+Who knows?
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Metal Monster, by A. Merritt
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