The Metal Monster - Abraham Merritt
The Metal Monster - Abraham Merritt
The Metal Monster - Abraham Merritt
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Author: A. Merritt
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE METAL MONSTER ***
By A. Merritt
Contents
PROLOGUE
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
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.
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.
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.
B
" ut Martin did not see his face,"she went on. A
" nd 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.
"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?"
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!"
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.
"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 band 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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—"
"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."
"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."
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
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 dead 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?
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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—
"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.
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
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
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!"
"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."
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
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
"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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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