The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Metal Monster, by A. Merritt

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Title: The Metal Monster

Author: A. Merritt

Release Date: September, 2002  [Etext #3479]
Posting Date: October 12, 2009
Last Updated: March 16, 2018

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE METAL MONSTER ***




Produced by Judy Boss





THE METAL MONSTER


By A. Merritt




PROLOGUE

Before the narrative which follows was placed in my hands, I had never
seen Dr. Walter T. Goodwin, its author.

When the manuscript revealing his adventures among the pre-historic
ruins of the Nan-Matal in the Carolines (The Moon Pool) had been given
me by the International Association of Science for editing and revision
to meet the requirements of a popular presentation, Dr. Goodwin had left
America. He had explained that he was still too shaken, too depressed,
to be able to recall experiences that must inevitably carry with them
freshened memories of those whom he loved so well and from whom, he
felt, he was separated in all probability forever.

I had understood that he had gone to some remote part of Asia to pursue
certain botanical studies, and it was therefore with the liveliest
surprise and interest that I received a summons from the President of
the Association to meet Dr. Goodwin at a designated place and hour.

Through my close study of the Moon Pool papers I had formed a mental
image of their writer. I had read, too, those volumes of botanical
research which have set him high above all other American scientists in
this field, gleaning from their curious mingling of extremely
technical observations and minutely accurate but extraordinarily poetic
descriptions, hints to amplify my picture of him. It gratified me to
find I had drawn a pretty good one.

The man to whom the President of the Association introduced me was
sturdy, well-knit, a little under average height. He had a broad but
rather low forehead that reminded me somewhat of the late electrical
wizard Steinmetz. Under level black brows shone eyes of clear hazel,
kindly, shrewd, a little wistful, lightly humorous; the eyes both of a
doer and a dreamer.

Not more than forty I judged him to be. A close-trimmed, pointed beard
did not hide the firm chin and the clean-cut mouth. His hair was thick
and black and oddly sprinkled with white; small streaks and dots of
gleaming silver that shone with a curiously metallic luster.

His right arm was closely bound to his breast. His manner as he greeted
me was tinged with shyness. He extended his left hand in greeting, and
as I clasped the fingers I was struck by their peculiar, pronounced, yet
pleasant warmth; a sensation, indeed, curiously electric.

The Association's President forced him gently back into his chair.

“Dr. Goodwin,” he said, turning to me, “is not entirely recovered as
yet from certain consequences of his adventures. He will explain to you
later what these are. In the meantime, Mr. Merritt, will you read this?”

I took the sheets he handed me, and as I read them felt the gaze of Dr.
Goodwin full upon me, searching, weighing, estimating. When I raised my
eyes from the letter I found in his a new expression. The shyness was
gone; they were filled with complete friendliness. Evidently I had
passed muster.

“You will accept, sir?” It was the president's gravely courteous tone.

“Accept!” I exclaimed. “Why, of course, I accept. It is not only one of
the greatest honors, but to me one of the greatest delights to act as a
collaborator with Dr. Goodwin.”

The president smiled.

“In that case, sir, there is no need for me to remain longer,” he said.
“Dr. Goodwin has with him his manuscript as far as he has progressed
with it. I will leave you two alone for your discussion.”

He bowed to us and, picking up his old-fashioned bell-crowned silk hat
and his quaint, heavy cane of ebony, withdrew. Dr. Goodwin turned to me.

“I will start,” he said, after a little pause, “from when I met Richard
Drake on the field of blue poppies that are like a great prayer-rug at
the gray feet of the nameless mountain.”

The sun sank, the shadows fell, the lights of the city sparkled out, for
hours New York roared about me unheeded while I listened to the tale
of that utterly weird, stupendous drama of an unknown life, of unknown
creatures, unknown forces, and of unconquerable human heroism played
among the hidden gorges of unknown Asia.

It was dawn when I left him for my own home. Nor was it for many
hours after that I laid his then incomplete manuscript down and sought
sleep--and found a troubled sleep.

A. MERRITT




CHAPTER I. VALLEY OF THE BLUE POPPIES

In this great crucible of life we call the world--in the vaster one we
call the universe--the mysteries lie close packed, uncountable as grains
of sand on ocean's shores. They thread gigantic, the star-flung spaces;
they creep, atomic, beneath the microscope's peering eye. They walk
beside us, unseen and unheard, calling out to us, asking why we are deaf
to their crying, blind to their wonder.

Sometimes the veils drop from a man's eyes, and he sees--and speaks of
his vision. Then those who have not seen pass him by with the lifted
brows of disbelief, or they mock him, or if his vision has been great
enough they fall upon and destroy him.

For the greater the mystery, the more bitterly is its verity assailed;
upon what seem the lesser a man may give testimony and at least gain for
himself a hearing.

There is reason for this. Life is a ferment, and upon and about it,
shifting and changing, adding to or taking away, beat over legions of
forces, seen and unseen, known and unknown. And man, an atom in the
ferment, clings desperately to what to him seems stable; nor greets with
joy him who hazards that what he grips may be but a broken staff, and,
so saying, fails to hold forth a sturdier one.

Earth is a ship, plowing her way through uncharted oceans of space
wherein are strange currents, hidden shoals and reefs, and where blow
the unknown winds of Cosmos.

If to the voyagers, painfully plotting their course, comes one who cries
that their charts must be remade, nor can tell WHY they must be--that
man is not welcome--no!

Therefore it is that men have grown chary of giving testimony upon
mysteries. Yet knowing each in his own heart the truth of that vision he
has himself beheld, lo, it is that in whose reality he most believes.

The spot where I had encamped was of a singular beauty; so beautiful
that it caught the throat and set an ache within the breast--until from
it a tranquillity distilled that was like healing mist.

Since early March I had been wandering. It was now mid-July. And for the
first time since my pilgrimage had begun I drank--not of forgetfulness,
for that could never be--but of anodyne for a sorrow which had held fast
upon me since my return from the Carolines a year before.

No need to dwell here upon that--it has been written. Nor shall I recite
the reasons for my restlessness--for these are known to those who have
read that history of mine. Nor is there cause to set forth at length the
steps by which I had arrived at this vale of peace.

Sufficient is to tell that in New York one night, reading over what is
perhaps the most sensational of my books--“The Poppies and Primulas of
Southern Tibet,” the result of my travels of 1910-1911, I determined to
return to that quiet, forbidden land. There, if anywhere, might I find
something akin to forgetting.

There was a certain flower which I long had wished to study in its
mutations from the singular forms appearing on the southern slopes of
the Elburz--Persia's mountainous chain that extends from Azerbaijan
in the west to Khorasan in the east; from thence I would follow its
modified types in the Hindu-Kush ranges and its migrations along the
southern scarps of the Trans-Himalayas--the unexplored upheaval, higher
than the Himalayas themselves, more deeply cut with precipice and gorge,
which Sven Hedin had touched and named on his journey to Lhasa.

Having accomplished this, I planned to push across the passes to the
Manasarowar Lakes, where, legend has it, the strange, luminous purple
lotuses grow.

An ambitious project, undeniably fraught with danger; but it is
written that desperate diseases require desperate remedies, and until
inspiration or message how to rejoin those whom I had loved so dearly
came to me, nothing less, I felt, could dull my heartache.

And, frankly, feeling that no such inspiration or message could come, I
did not much care as to the end.

In Teheran I had picked up a most unusual servant; yes, more than this,
a companion and counselor and interpreter as well.

He was a Chinese; his name Chiu-Ming. His first thirty years had been
spent at the great Lamasery of Palkhor-Choinde at Gyantse, west of
Lhasa. Why he had gone from there, how he had come to Teheran, I never
asked. It was most fortunate that he had gone, and that I had found him.
He recommended himself to me as the best cook within ten thousand miles
of Pekin.

For almost three months we had journeyed; Chiu-Ming and I and the two
ponies that carried my impedimenta.

We had traversed mountain roads which had echoed to the marching feet of
the hosts of Darius, to the hordes of the Satraps. The highways of the
Achaemenids--yes, and which before them had trembled to the tramplings
of the myriads of the godlike Dravidian conquerors.

We had slipped over ancient Iranian trails; over paths which the
warriors of conquering Alexander had traversed; dust of bones of
Macedons, of Greeks, of Romans, beat about us; ashes of the flaming
ambitions of the Sassanidae whimpered beneath our feet--the feet of an
American botanist, a Chinaman, two Tibetan ponies. We had crept through
clefts whose walls had sent back the howlings of the Ephthalites, the
White Huns who had sapped the strength of these same proud Sassanids
until at last both fell before the Turks.

Over the highways and byways of Persia's glory, Persia's shame and
Persia's death we four--two men, two beasts--had passed. For a fortnight
we had met no human soul, seen no sign of human habitation.

Game had been plentiful--green things Chiu-Ming might lack for his
cooking, but meat never. About us was a welter of mighty summits. We
were, I knew, somewhere within the blending of the Hindu-Kush with the
Trans-Himalayas.

That morning we had come out of a ragged defile into this valley of
enchantment, and here, though it had been so early, I had pitched my
tent, determining to go no farther till the morrow.

It was a Phocean vale; a gigantic cup filled with tranquillity. A spirit
brooded over it, serene, majestic, immutable--like the untroubled calm
which rests, the Burmese believe, over every place which has guarded the
Buddha, sleeping.

At its eastern end towered the colossal scarp of the unnamed peak
through one of whose gorges we had crept. On his head was a cap of
silver set with pale emeralds--the snow fields and glaciers that crowned
him. Far to the west another gray and ochreous giant reared its bulk,
closing the vale. North and south, the horizon was a chaotic sky land of
pinnacles, spired and minareted, steepled and turreted and domed, each
diademed with its green and argent of eternal ice and snow.

And all the valley was carpeted with the blue poppies in wide, unbroken
fields, luminous as the morning skies of mid-June; they rippled mile
after mile over the path we had followed, over the still untrodden path
which we must take. They nodded, they leaned toward each other, they
seemed to whisper--then to lift their heads and look up like crowding
swarms of little azure fays, half impudently, wholly trustfully, into
the faces of the jeweled giants standing guard over them. And when the
little breeze walked upon them it was as though they bent beneath the
soft tread and were brushed by the sweeping skirts of unseen, hastening
Presences.

Like a vast prayer-rug, sapphire and silken, the poppies stretched
to the gray feet of the mountain. Between their southern edge and
the clustering summits a row of faded brown, low hills knelt--like
brown-robed, withered and weary old men, backs bent, faces hidden
between outstretched arms, palms to the earth and brows touching earth
within them--in the East's immemorial attitude of worship.

I half expected them to rise--and as I watched a man appeared on one of
the bowed, rocky shoulders, abruptly, with the ever-startling suddenness
which in the strange light of these latitudes objects spring into
vision. As he stood scanning my camp there arose beside him a laden
pony, and at its head a Tibetan peasant. The first figure waved its
hand; came striding down the hill.

As he approached I took stock of him. A young giant, three good inches
over six feet, a vigorous head with unruly clustering black hair; a
clean-cut, clean-shaven American face.

“I'm Dick Drake,” he said, holding out his hand. “Richard Keen Drake,
recently with Uncle's engineers in France.”

“My name is Goodwin.” I took his hand, shook it warmly. “Dr. Walter T.
Goodwin.”

“Goodwin the botanist--? Then I know you!” he exclaimed. “Know all
about you, that is. My father admired your work greatly. You knew
him--Professor Alvin Drake.”

I nodded. So he was Alvin Drake's son. Alvin, I knew, had died about a
year before I had started on this journey. But what was his son doing in
this wilderness?

“Wondering where I came from?” he answered my unspoken question. “Short
story. War ended. Felt an irresistible desire for something different.
Couldn't think of anything more different from Tibet--always wanted to
go there anyway. Went. Decided to strike over toward Turkestan. And here
I am.”

I felt at once a strong liking for this young giant. No doubt,
subconsciously, I had been feeling the need of companionship with my own
kind. I even wondered, as I led the way into my little camp, whether he
would care to join fortunes with me in my journeyings.

His father's work I knew well, and although this stalwart lad was unlike
what one would have expected Alvin Drake--a trifle dried, precise,
wholly abstracted with his experiments--to beget, still, I reflected,
heredity like the Lord sometimes works in mysterious ways its wonders to
perform.

It was almost with awe that he listened to me instruct Chiu-Ming as to
just how I wanted supper prepared, and his gaze dwelt fondly upon the
Chinese busy among his pots and pans.

We talked a little, desultorily, as the meal was prepared--fragments of
traveler's news and gossip, as is the habit of journeyers who come upon
each other in the silent places. Ever the speculation grew in his face
as he made away with Chiu-Ming's artful concoctions.

Drake sighed, drawing out his pipe.

“A cook, a marvel of a cook. Where did you get him?”

Briefly I told him.

Then a silence fell upon us. Suddenly the sun dipped down behind the
flank of the stone giant guarding the valley's western gate; the whole
vale swiftly darkened--a flood of crystal-clear shadows poured within
it. It was the prelude to that miracle of unearthly beauty seen nowhere
else on this earth--the sunset of Tibet.

We turned expectant eyes to the west. A little, cool breeze raced down
from the watching steeps like a messenger, whispered to the nodding
poppies, sighed and was gone. The poppies were still. High overhead a
homing kite whistled, mellowly.

As if it were a signal there sprang out in the pale azure of the western
sky row upon row of cirrus cloudlets, rank upon rank of them, thrusting
their heads into the path of the setting sun. They changed from mottled
silver into faint rose, deepened to crimson.

“The dragons of the sky drink the blood of the sunset,” said Chiu-Ming.

As though a gigantic globe of crystal had dropped upon the heavens,
their blue turned swiftly to a clear and glowing amber--then as abruptly
shifted to a luminous violet A soft green light pulsed through the
valley.

Under it, like hills ensorcelled, the rocky walls about it seemed to
flatten. They glowed and all at once pressed forward like gigantic
slices of palest emerald jade, translucent, illumined, as though by a
circlet of little suns shining behind them.

The light faded, robes of deepest amethyst dropped around the mountain's
mighty shoulders. And then from every snow and glacier-crowned peak,
from minaret and pinnacle and towering turret, leaped forth a confusion
of soft peacock flames, a host of irised prismatic gleamings, an ordered
chaos of rainbows.

Great and small, interlacing and shifting, they ringed the valley with
an incredible glory--as if some god of light itself had touched the
eternal rocks and bidden radiant souls stand forth.

Through the darkening sky swept a rosy pencil of living light; that
utterly strange, pure beam whose coming never fails to clutch the throat
of the beholder with the hand of ecstasy, the ray which the Tibetans
name the Ting-Pa. For a moment this rosy finger pointed to the east,
then arched itself, divided slowly into six shining, rosy bands; began
to creep downward toward the eastern horizon where a nebulous, pulsing
splendor arose to meet it.

And as we watched I heard a gasp from Drake. And it was echoed by my
own.

For the six beams were swaying, moving with ever swifter motion from
side to side in ever-widening sweep, as though the hidden orb from which
they sprang were swaying like a pendulum.

Faster and faster the six high-flung beams swayed--and then broke--broke
as though a gigantic, unseen hand had reached up and snapped them!

An instant the severed ends ribboned aimlessly, then bent, turned down
and darted earthward into the welter of clustered summits at the north
and swiftly were gone, while down upon the valley fell night.

“Good God!” whispered Drake. “It was as though something reached up,
broke those rays and drew them down--like threads.”

“I saw it.” I struggled with bewilderment. “I saw it. But I never saw
anything like it before,” I ended, most inadequately.

“It was PURPOSEFUL,” he whispered. “It was DELIBERATE. As though
something reached up, juggled with the rays, broke them, and drew them
down like willow withes.”

“The devils that dwell here!” quavered Chiu-Ming.

“Some magnetic phenomenon.” I was half angry at myself for my own touch
of panic. “Light can be deflected by passage through a magnetic field.
Of course that's it. Certainly.”

“I don't know.” Drake's tone was doubtful indeed. “It would take a whale
of a magnetic field to have done THAT--it's inconceivable.” He harked
back to his first idea. “It was so--so DAMNED deliberate,” he repeated.

“Devils--” muttered the frightened Chinese.

“What's that?” Drake gripped my arm and pointed to the north. A deeper
blackness had grown there while we had been talking, a pool of darkness
against which the mountain summits stood out, blade-sharp edges faintly
luminous.

A gigantic lance of misty green fire darted from the blackness and
thrust its point into the heart of the zenith; following it, leaped into
the sky a host of the sparkling spears of light, and now the blackness
was like an ebon hand, brandishing a thousand javelins of tinseled
flame.

“The aurora,” I said.

“It ought to be a good one,” mused Drake, gaze intent upon it. “Did you
notice the big sun spot?”

I shook my head.

“The biggest I ever saw. Noticed it first at dawn this morning. Some
little aurora lighter--that spot. I told you--look at that!” he cried.

The green lances had fallen back. The blackness gathered itself
together--then from it began to pulse billows of radiance, spangled with
infinite darting swarms of flashing corpuscles like uncounted hosts of
dancing fireflies.

Higher the waves rolled--phosphorescent green and iridescent violet,
weird copperous yellows and metallic saffrons and a shimmer of
glittering ash of rose--then wavered, split and formed into gigantic,
sparkling, marching curtains of splendor.

A vast circle of light sprang out upon the folds of the flickering,
rushing curtains. Misty at first, its edges sharpened until they rested
upon the blazing glory of the northern sky like a pale ring of cold
flame. And about it the aurora began to churn, to heap itself, to
revolve.

Toward the ring from every side raced the majestic folds, drew
themselves together, circled, seethed around it like foam of fire about
the lip of a cauldron, and poured through the shining circle as though
it were the mouth of that fabled cavern where old Aeolus sits blowing
forth and breathing back the winds that sweep the earth.

Yes--into the ring's mouth the aurora flew, cascading in a columned
stream to earth. Then swiftly, a mist swept over all the heavens, veiled
that incredible cataract.

“Magnetism?” muttered Drake. “I guess NOT!”

“It struck about where the Ting-Pa was broken and seemed drawn down like
the rays,” I said.

“Purposeful,” Drake said. “And devilish. It hit on all my nerves like
a--like a metal claw. Purposeful and deliberate. There was intelligence
behind that.”

“Intelligence? Drake--what intelligence could break the rays of the
setting sun and suck down the aurora?”

“I don't know,” he answered.

“Devils,” croaked Chiu-Ming. “The devils that defied Buddha--and have
grown strong--”

“Like a metal claw!” breathed Drake.

Far to the west a sound came to us; first a whisper, then a wild
rushing, a prolonged wailing, a crackling. A great light flashed
through the mist, glowed about us and faded. Again the wailing, the vast
rushing, the retreating whisper.

Then silence and darkness dropped embraced upon the valley of the blue
poppies.




CHAPTER II. THE SIGIL ON THE ROCKS

Dawn came. Drake had slept well. But I, who had not his youthful
resiliency, lay for long, awake and uneasy. I had hardly sunk into
troubled slumber before dawn awakened me.

As we breakfasted, I approached directly that matter which my growing
liking for him was turning into strong desire.

“Drake,” I asked. “Where are you going?”

“With you,” he laughed. “I'm foot loose and fancy free. And I think you
ought to have somebody with you to help watch that cook. He might get
away.”

The idea seemed to appall him.

“Fine!” I exclaimed heartily, and thrust out my hand to him. “I'm
thinking of striking over the range soon to the Manasarowar Lakes.
There's a curious flora I'd like to study.”

“Anywhere you say suits me,” he answered.

We clasped hands on our partnership and soon we were on our way to the
valley's western gate; our united caravans stringing along behind us.
Mile after mile we trudged through the blue poppies, discussing the
enigmas of the twilight and of the night.

In the light of day their breath of vague terror was dissipated.
There was no place for mystery nor dread under this floor of brilliant
sunshine. The smiling sapphire floor rolled ever on before us.

Whispering little playful breezes flew down the slopes to gossip for a
moment with the nodding flowers. Flocks of rose finches raced chattering
overhead to quarrel with the tiny willow warblers, the chi-u-teb-tok,
holding fief of the drooping, graceful bowers bending down to the little
laughing stream that for the past hour had chuckled and gurgled like a
friendly water baby beside us.

I had proven, almost to my own satisfaction, that what we had beheld
had been a creation of the extraordinary atmospheric attributes of these
highlands, an atmosphere so unique as to make almost anything of the
kind possible. But Drake was not convinced.

“I know,” he said. “Of course I understand all that--superimposed layers
of warmer air that might have bent the ray; vortices in the higher
levels that might have produced just that effect of the captured aurora.
I admit it's all possible. I'll even admit it's all probable, but damn
me, Doc, if I BELIEVE it! I had too clearly the feeling of a CONSCIOUS
force, a something that KNEW exactly what it was doing--and had a REASON
for it.”

It was mid-afternoon.

The spell of the valley upon us, we had gone leisurely. The western
mount was close, the mouth of the gorge through which we must pass,
now plain before us. It did not seem as though we could reach it before
dusk, and Drake and I were reconciled to spending another night in the
peaceful vale. Plodding along, deep in thought, I was startled by his
exclamation.

He was staring at a point some hundred yards to his right. I followed
his gaze.

The towering cliffs were a scant half mile away. At some distant time
there had been an enormous fall of rock. This, disintegrating, had
formed a gently-curving breast which sloped down to merge with the
valley's floor. Willow and witch alder, stunted birch and poplar
had found roothold, clothed it, until only their crowding outposts,
thrusting forward in a wavering semicircle, held back seemingly by the
blue hordes, showed where it melted into the meadows.

In the center of this breast, beginning half way up its slopes and
stretching down into the flowered fields was a colossal imprint.

Gray and brown, it stood out against the green and blue of slope and
level; a rectangle all of thirty feet wide, two hundred long, the
heel faintly curved and from its hither end, like claws, four slender
triangles radiating from it like twenty-four points of a ten-rayed star.

Irresistibly was it like a footprint--but what thing was there whose
tread could leave such a print as this?

I ran up the slope--Drake already well in advance. I paused at the
base of the triangles where, were this thing indeed a footprint, the
spreading claws sprang from the flat of it.

The track was fresh. At its upper edges were clipped bushes and split
trees, the white wood of the latter showing where they had been sliced
as though by the stroke of a scimitar.

I stepped out upon the mark. It was as level as though planed; bent down
and stared in utter disbelief of what my own eyes beheld. For stone
and earth had been crushed, compressed, into a smooth, microscopically
grained, adamantine complex, and in this matrix poppies still bearing
traces of their coloring were imbedded like fossils. A cyclone can and
does grip straws and thrust them unbroken through an inch board--but
what force was there which could take the delicate petals of a flower
and set them like inlay within the surface of a stone?

Into my mind came recollection of the wailings, the crashings in the
night, of the weird glow that had flashed about us when the mist arose
to hide the chained aurora.

“It was what we heard,” I said. “The sounds--it was then that this was
made.”

“The foot of Shin-je!” Chiu-Ming's voice was tremulous. “The lord of
Hell has trodden here!”

I translated for Drake's benefit.

“Has the lord of Hell but one foot?” asked Dick, politely.

“He bestrides the mountains,” said Chiu-Ming. “On the far side is his
other footprint. Shin-je it was who strode the mountains and set here
his foot.”

Again I interpreted.

Drake cast a calculating glance up to the cliff top.

“Two thousand feet, about,” he mused. “Well, if Shin-je is built in our
proportions that makes it about right. The length of this thing would
give him just about a two thousand foot leg. Yes--he could just about
straddle that hill.”

“You're surely not serious?” I asked in consternation.

“What the hell!” he exclaimed, “am I crazy? This is no foot mark. How
could it be? Look at the mathematical nicety with which these edges are
stamped out--as though by a die--

“That's what it reminds me of--a die. It's as if some impossible power
had been used to press it down. Like--like a giant seal of metal in a
mountain's hand. A sigil--a seal--”

“But why?” I asked. “What could be the purpose--”

“Better ask where the devil such a force could be gotten together and
how it came here,” he said. “Look--except for this one place there isn't
a mark anywhere. All the bushes and the trees, all the poppies and the
grass are just as they ought to be.

“How did whoever or whatever it was that made this, get here and
get away without leaving any trace but this? Damned if I don't think
Chiu-Ming's explanation puts less strain upon the credulity than any I
could offer.”

I peered about. It was so. Except for the mark, there was no slightest
sign of the unusual, the abnormal.

But the mark was enough!

“I'm for pushing up a notch or two and getting into the gorge before
dark,” he was voicing my own thought. “I'm willing to face anything
human--but I'm not keen to be pressed into a rock like a flower in a
maiden's book of poems.” Just at twilight we drew out of the valley into
the pass. We traveled a full mile along it before darkness forced us to
make camp. The gorge was narrow. The far walls but a hundred feet away;
but we had no quarrel with them for their neighborliness, no! Their
solidity, their immutability, breathed confidence back into us.

And after we had found a deep niche capable of holding the entire
caravan we filed within, ponies and all, I for one perfectly willing
thus to spend the night, let the air at dawn be what it would. We dined
within on bread and tea, and then, tired to the bone, sought each his
place upon the rocky floor. I slept well, waking only once or twice
by Chiu-Ming's groanings; his dreams evidently were none of the
pleasantest. If there was an aurora I neither knew nor cared. My slumber
was dreamless.




CHAPTER III. RUTH VENTNOR

The dawn, streaming into the niche, awakened us. A covey of partridges
venturing too close yielded three to our guns. We breakfasted well, and
a little later were pushing on down the cleft.

Its descent, though gradual, was continuous, and therefore I was not
surprised when soon we began to come upon evidences of semi-tropical
vegetation. Giant rhododendrons and tree ferns gave way to occasional
clumps of stately kopek and clumps of the hardier bamboos. We added a
few snow cocks to our larder--although they were out of their habitat,
flying down into the gorge from their peaks and table-lands for some
choice tidbit.

All that day we marched on, and when at night we made camp, sleep came
to us quickly and overmastering. An hour after dawn we were on our way.
A brief stop we made for lunch; pressed forward.

It was close to two when we caught the first sight of the ruins.

The soaring, verdure-clad walls of the canyon had long been steadily
marching closer. Above, between their rims the wide ribbon of sky was
like a fantastically shored river, shimmering, dazzling; every cove
and headland edged with an opalescent glimmering as of shining pearly
beaches.

And as though we were sinking in that sky stream's depths its light
kept lessening, darkening imperceptibly with luminous shadows of ghostly
beryl, drifting veils of pellucid aquamarine, limpid mists of glaucous
chrysolite.

Fainter, more crepuscular became the light, yet never losing its
crystalline quality. Now the high overhead river was but a brook; became
a thread. Abruptly it vanished.

We passed into a tunnel, fern walled, fern roofed, garlanded with tawny
orchids, gay with carmine fungus and golden moss. We stepped out into a
blaze of sunlight.

Before us lay a wide green bowl held in the hands of the clustered
hills; shallow, circular, as though, while plastic still, the thumb
of God had run round its rim, shaping it. Around it the peaks crowded,
craning their lofty heads to peer within.

It was about a mile in its diameter, this hollow, as my gaze then
measured it. It had three openings--one that lay like a crack in the
northeast slope; another, the tunnel mouth through which we had come.
The third lifted itself out of the bowl, creeping up the precipitous
bare scarp of the western barrier straight to the north, clinging to the
ochreous rock up and up until it vanished around a far distant shoulder.

It was a wide and bulwarked road, a road that spoke as clearly as though
it had tongue of human hands which had cut it there in the mountain's
breast. An ancient road weary beyond belief beneath the tread of
uncounted years.

From the hollow the blind soul of loneliness groped out to greet us!

Never had I felt such loneliness as that which lapped the lip of the
verdant bowl. It was tangible--as though it had been poured from some
reservoir of misery. A pool of despair--


Half the width of the valley away the ruins began. Weirdly were they its
visible expression. They huddled in two bent rows to the bottom. They
crouched in a wide cluster against the cliffs. From the cluster a
curving row of them ran along the southern crest of the hollow.

A flight of shattered, cyclopean steps lifted to a ledge and here a
crumbling fortress stood.

Irresistibly did the ruins seem a colossal hag, flung prone, lying
listlessly, helplessly, against the barrier's base. The huddled lower
ranks were the legs, the cluster the body, the upper row an outflung
arm and above the neck of the stairway the ancient fortress, rounded
and with two huge ragged apertures in its northern front was an aged,
bleached and withered head staring, watching.

I looked at Drake--the spell of the bowl was heavy upon him, his face
drawn. The Chinaman and Tibetan were murmuring, terror written large
upon them.

“A hell of a joint!” Drake turned to me, a shadow of a grin lightening
the distress on his face. “But I'd rather chance it than go back. What
d'you say?”

I nodded, curiosity mastering my oppression. We stepped over the rim,
rifles on the alert. Close behind us crowded the two servants and the
ponies.

The vale was shallow, as I have said. We trod the fragments of an olden
approach to the green tunnel so the descent was not difficult. Here and
there beside the path upreared huge broken blocks. On them I thought
I could see faint tracings as of carvings--now a suggestion of gaping,
arrow-fanged dragon jaws, now the outline of a scaled body, a hint of
enormous, batlike wings.

Now we had reached the first of the crumbling piles that stretched down
into the valley's center.

Half fainting, I fell against Drake, clutching to him for support.

A stream of utter hopelessness was racing upon us, swirling and eddying
around us, reaching to our hearts with ghostly fingers dripping with
despair. From every shattered heap it seemed to pour, rushing down the
road upon us like a torrent, engulfing us, submerging, drowning.

Unseen it was--yet tangible as water; it sapped the life from every
nerve. Weariness filled me, a desire to drop upon the stones, to be
rolled away. To die. I felt Drake's body quivering even as mine; knew
that he was drawing upon every reserve of strength.

“Steady,” he muttered. “Steady--”

The Tibetan shrieked and fled, the ponies scrambling after him. Dimly
I remembered that mine carried precious specimens; a surge of anger
passed, beating back the anguish. I heard a sob from Chiu-Ming, saw him
drop.

Drake stopped, drew him to his feet. We placed him between us, thrust
each an arm through his own. Then, like swimmers, heads bent, we pushed
on, buffeting that inexplicable invisible flood.

As the path rose, its force lessened, my vitality grew, and the terrible
desire to yield and be swept away waned. Now we had reached the foot of
the cyclopean stairs, now we were half up them--and now as we struggled
out upon the ledge on which the watching fortress stood, the clutching
stream shoaled swiftly, the shoal became safe, dry land and the cheated,
unseen maelstrom swirled harmlessly beneath us.

We stood erect, gasping for breath, again like swimmers who have fought
their utmost and barely, so barely, won.

There was an almost imperceptible movement at the side of the ruined
portal.

Out darted a girl. A rifle dropped from her hands. Straight she sped
toward me.

And as she ran I recognized her.

Ruth Ventnor!

The flying figure reached me, threw soft arms around my neck, was
weeping in relieved gladness on my shoulder.

“Ruth!” I cried. “What on earth are YOU doing here?”

“Walter!” she sobbed. “Walter Goodwin--Oh, thank God! Thank God!”

She drew herself from my arms, catching her breath; laughed shakily.

I took swift stock of her. Save for fear upon her, she was the same Ruth
I had known three years before; wide, deep blue eyes that were now
all seriousness, now sparkling wells of mischief; petite, rounded and
tender; the fairest skin; an impudent little nose; shining clusters of
intractable curls; all human, sparkling and sweet.

Drake coughed, insinuatingly. I introduced him.

“I--I watched you struggling through that dreadful pit.” She shuddered.
“I could not see who you were, did not know whether friend or enemy--but
oh, my heart almost died in pity for you, Walter,” she breathed. “What
can it be--THERE?”

I shook my head.

“Martin could not see you,” she went on. “He was watching the road that
leads above. But I ran down--to help.”

“Mart watching?” I asked. “Watching for what?”

“I--” she hesitated oddly. “I think I'd rather tell you before him. It's
so strange--so incredible.”

She led us through the broken portal and into the fortress. It was more
gigantic even than I had thought. The floor of the vast chamber we
had entered was strewn with fragments fallen from the crackling,
stone-vaulted ceiling. Through the breaks light streamed from the level
above us.

We picked our way among the debris to a wide crumbling stairway, crept
up it, Ruth flitting ahead. We came out opposite one of the eye-like
apertures. Black against it, perched high upon a pile of blocks, I
recognized the long, lean outline of Ventnor, rifle in hand, gazing
intently up the ancient road whose windings were plain through the
opening. He had not heard us.

“Martin,” called Ruth softly.

He turned. A shaft of light from a crevice in the gap's edge struck his
face, flashing it out from the semidarkness of the corner in which he
crouched. I looked into the quiet gray eyes, upon the keen face.

“Goodwin!” he shouted, tumbling down from his perch, shaking me by the
shoulders. “If I had been in the way of praying--you're the man I'd have
prayed for. How did you get here?”

“Just wandering, Mart,” I answered. “But Lord! I'm sure GLAD to see
you.”

“Which way did you come?” he asked, keenly. I threw my hand toward the
south.

“Not through that hollow?” he asked incredulously.

“And some hell of a place to get through,” Drake broke in. “It cost us
our ponies and all my ammunition.”

“Richard Drake,” I said. “Son of old Alvin--you knew him, Mart.”

“Knew him well,” cried Ventnor, seizing Dick's hand. “Wanted me to go to
Kamchatka to get some confounded sort of stuff for one of his devilish
experiments. Is he well?”

“He's dead,” replied Dick soberly.

“Oh!” said Ventnor. “Oh--I'm sorry. He was a great man.”

Briefly I acquainted him with my wanderings, my encounter with Drake.

“That place out there--” he considered us thoughtfully. “Damned if I
know what it is. Thought maybe it's gas--of a sort. If it hadn't been
for it we'd have been out of this hole two days ago. I'm pretty sure it
must be gas. And it must be much less than it was this morning, for then
we made an attempt to get through again--and couldn't.”

I was hardly listening. Ventnor had certainly advanced a theory of our
unusual symptoms that had not occurred to me. That hollow might indeed
be a pocket into which a gas flowed; just as in the mines the deadly
coal damp collects in pits, flows like a stream along the passages. It
might be that--some odorless, colorless gas of unknown qualities; and
yet--

“Did you try respirators?” asked Dick.

“Surely,” said Ventnor. “First off the go. But they weren't of any use.
The gas, if it is gas, seems to operate as well through the skin as
through the nose and mouth. We just couldn't make it--and that's all
there is to it. But if you made it--could we try it now, do you think?”
 he asked eagerly.

I felt myself go white.

“Not--not for a little while,” I stammered.

He nodded, understandingly.

“I see,” he said. “Well, we'll wait a bit, then.”

“But why are you staying here? Why didn't you make for the road up the
mountain? What are you watching for, anyway?” asked Drake.

“Go to it, Ruth,” Ventnor grinned. “Tell 'em. After all--it was YOUR
party you know.”

“Mart!” she cried, blushing.

“Well--it wasn't ME they admired,” he laughed.

“Martin!” she cried again, and stamped her foot.

“Shoot,” he said. “I'm busy. I've got to watch.”

“Well”--Ruth's voice was uncertain--“we'd been hunting up in Kashmir.
Martin wanted to come over somewhere here. So we crossed the passes.
That was about a month ago. The fourth day out we ran across what looked
like a road running south.

“We thought we'd take it. It looked sort of old and lost--but it was
going the way we wanted to go. It took us first into a country of little
hills; then to the very base of the great range itself; finally into the
mountains--and then it ran blank.”

“Bing!” interjected Ventnor, looking around for a moment. “Bing--just
like that. Slap dash against a prodigious fall of rock. We couldn't get
over it.”

“So we cast about to find another road,” went on Ruth. “All we could
strike were--just strikes.”

“No fish on the end of 'em,” said Ventnor. “God! But I'm glad to see
you, Walter Goodwin. Believe me, I am. However--go on, Ruth.”

“At the end of the second week,” she said, “we knew we were lost. We
were deep in the heart of the range. All around us was a forest of
enormous, snow-topped peaks. The gorges, the canyons, the valleys that
we tried led us east and west, north and south.

“It was a maze, and in it we seemed to be going ever deeper. There was
not the SLIGHTEST sign of human life. It was as though no human beings
except ourselves had ever been there. Game was plentiful. We had no
trouble in getting food. And sooner or later, of course, we were bound
to find our way out. We didn't worry.

“It was five nights ago that we camped at the head of a lovely little
valley. There was a mound that stood up like a tiny watch-tower, looking
down it. The trees grew round like tall sentinels.

“We built our fire in that mound; and after we had eaten, Martin slept.
I sat watching the beauty of the skies and of the shadowy vale. I heard
no one approach--but something made me leap to my feet, look behind me.

“A man was standing just within the glow of firelight, watching me.”

“A Tibetan?” I asked. She shook her head, trouble in her eyes.

“Not at all.” Ventnor turned his head. “Ruth screamed and awakened me. I
caught a glimpse of the fellow before he vanished.

“A short purple mantle hung from his shoulders. His chest was covered
with fine chain mail. His legs were swathed and bound by the thongs of
his high buskins. He carried a small, round, hide-covered shield and a
short two-edged sword. His head was helmeted. He belonged, in fact--oh,
at least twenty centuries back.”

He laughed in plain enjoyment of our amazement.

“Go on, Ruth,” he said, and took up his watch.

“But Martin did not see his face,” she went on. “And oh, but I wish I
could forget it. It was as white as mine, Walter, and cruel, so cruel;
the eyes glowed and they looked upon me like a--like a slave dealer.
They shamed me--I wanted to hide myself.

  “I cried out and Martin awakened. As he moved, the
man stepped out of the light and was gone. I think he had not seen
Martin; had believed that I was alone.

“We put out the fire, moved farther into the shadow of the trees. But
I could not sleep--I sat hour after hour, my pistol in my hand,” she
patted the automatic in her belt, “my rifle close beside me.

“The hours went by--dreadfully. At last I dozed. When I awakened again
it was dawn--and--and--” she covered her eyes, then: “TWO men were
looking down on me. One was he who had stood in the firelight.”

“They were talking,” interrupted Ventnor again, “in archaic Persian.”

“Persian,” I repeated blankly; “archaic Persian?”

“Very much so,” he nodded. “I've a fair knowledge of the modern tongue,
and a rather unusual command of Arabic. The modern Persian, as you know,
comes straight through from the speech of Xerxes, of Cyrus, of Darius
whom Alexander of Macedon conquered. It has been changed mainly by
taking on a load of Arabic words. Well--there wasn't a trace of the
Arabic in the tongue they were speaking.

“It sounded odd, of course--but I could understand quite easily. They
were talking about Ruth. To be explicit, they were discussing her with
exceeding frankness--”

“Martin!” she cried wrathfully.

“Well, all right,” he went on, half repentantly. “As a matter of fact,
I had seen the pair steal up. My rifle was under my hand. So I lay there
quietly, listening.

“You can realize, Walter, that when I caught sight of those two,
looking as though they had materialized from Darius's ghostly hordes,
my scientific curiosity was aroused--prodigiously. So in my interest I
passed over the matter of their speech; not alone because I thought
Ruth asleep but also because I took into consideration that the mode
of polite expression changes with the centuries--and these gentlemen
clearly belonged at least twenty centuries back--the real truth is I was
consumed with curiosity.

“They had got to a point where they were detailing with what pleasure a
certain mysterious person whom they seemed to regard with much fear and
respect would contemplate her. I was wondering how long my desire to
observe--for to the anthropologist they were most fascinating--could
hold my hand back from my rifle when Ruth awakened.

“She jumped up like a little fury. Fired a pistol point blank at them.
Their amazement was--well--ludicrous. I know it seems incredible, but
they seemed to know nothing of firearms--they certainly acted as though
they didn't.

“They simply flew into the timber. I took a pistol shot at one but
missed. Ruth hadn't though; she had winged her man; he left a red trail
behind him.

“We didn't follow the trail. We made for the opposite direction--and as
fast as possible.

“Nothing happened that day or night. Next morning, creeping up a slope,
we caught sight of a suspicious glitter a mile or two away in the
direction we were going. We sought shelter in a small ravine. In a
little while, over the hill and half a mile away from us, came about two
hundred of these fellows, marching along.

“And they were indeed Darius's men. Men of that Persia which had been
dead for millenniums. There was no mistaking them, with their high,
covering shields, their great bows, their javelins and armor.

“They passed; we doubled. We built no fires that night--and we ought to
have turned the pony loose, but we didn't. It carried my instruments,
and ammunition, and I felt we were going to need the latter.

“The next morning we caught sight of another band--or the same. We
turned again. We stole through a tree-covered plain; we struck an
ancient road. It led south, into the peaks again. We followed it. It
brought us here.

“It isn't, as you observe, the most comfortable of places. We struck
across the hollow to the crevice--we knew nothing of the entrance
you came through. The hollow was not pleasant, either. But it was
penetrable, then.

“We crossed. As we were about to enter the cleft there issued out of it
a most unusual and disconcerting chorus of sounds--wailings, crashings,
splinterings.”

I started, shot a look at Dick; absorbed, he was drinking in Ventnor's
every word.

“So unusual, so--well, disconcerting is the best word I can think of,
that we were not encouraged to proceed. Also the peculiar unpleasantness
of the hollow was increasing rapidly.

“We made the best time we could back to the fortress. And when next
we tried to go through the hollow, to search for another outlet--we
couldn't. You know why,” he ended abruptly.

“But men in ancient armor. Men like those of Darius.” Dick broke the
silence that had followed this amazing recital. “It's incredible!”

“Yes,” agreed Ventnor, “isn't it. But there they were. Of course, I
don't maintain that they WERE relics of Darius's armies. They might have
been of Xerxes before him--or of Artaxerxes after him. But there they
certainly were, Drake, living, breathing replicas of exceedingly ancient
Persians.

“Why, they might have been the wall carvings on the tomb of Khosroes
come to life. I mention Darius because he fits in with the most
plausible hypothesis. When Alexander the Great smashed his empire he did
it rather thoroughly. There wasn't much sympathy for the vanquished
in those days. And it's entirely conceivable that a city or two in
Alexander's way might have gathered up a fleeting regiment or so for
protection and have decided not to wait for him, but to hunt for cover.

“Naturally, they would have gone into the almost inaccessible heart of
the high ranges. There is nothing impossible in the theory that they
found shelter at last up here. As long as history runs this has been
a well-nigh unknown land. Penetrating some mountain-guarded, easily
defended valley they might have decided to settle down for a time, have
rebuilt a city, raised a government; laying low, in a sentence, waiting
for the storm to blow over.

“Why did they stay? Well, they might have found the new life more
pleasant than the old. And they might have been locked in their valley
by some accident--landslides, rockfalls sealing up the entrance. There
are a dozen reasonable possibilities.”

“But those who hunted you weren't locked in,” objected Drake.

“No,” Ventnor grinned ruefully. “No, they certainly weren't. Maybe we
drifted into their preserves by a way they don't know. Maybe they've
found another way out. I'm sure I don't know. But I DO know what I saw.”

“The noises, Martin,” I said, for his description of these had been the
description of those we had heard in the blue valley. “Have you heard
them since?”

“Yes,” he answered, hesitating oddly.

“And you think those--those soldiers you saw are still hunting for you?”

“Haven't a doubt of it,” he replied more cheerfully. “They didn't look
like chaps who would give up a hunt easily--at least not a hunt for such
novel, interesting, and therefore desirable and delectable game as we
must have appeared to them.”

“Martin,” I said decisively, “where's your pony? We'll try the hollow
again, at once. There's Ruth--and we'd never be able to hold back such
numbers as you've described.”

“You feel strong enough to try it?”




CHAPTER IV. METAL WITH A BRAIN

The eagerness, the relief in his voice betrayed the tension, the anxiety
which until now he had hidden so well; and hot shame burned me for my
shrinking, my dread of again passing through that haunted vale.

“I certainly DO.” I was once more master of myself. “Drake--don't you
agree?”

“Sure,” he replied. “Sure. I'll look after Ruth--er--I mean Miss
Ventnor.”

The glint of amusement in Ventnor's eyes at this faded abruptly; his
face grew somber.

“Wait,” he said. “I carried away some--some exhibits from the crevice of
the noises, Goodwin.”

“What kind of exhibits?” I asked, eagerly.

“Put 'em where they'd be safe,” he continued. “I've an idea they're far
more curious than our armored men--and of far more importance. At any
rate, we must take them with us.

“Go with Ruth, you and Drake, and look at them. And bring them back with
the pony. Then we'll make a start. A few minutes more probably won't
make much difference--but hurry.”

He turned back to his watch. Ordering Chiu-Ming to stay with him I
followed Ruth and Drake down the ruined stairway. At the bottom she came
to me, laid little hands on my shoulders.

“Walter,” she breathed, “I'm frightened. I'm so frightened I'm afraid to
tell even Mart. He doesn't like them, either, these little things you're
going to see. He likes them so little that he's afraid to let me know
how little he does like them.”

“But what are they? What's to fear about them?” asked Drake.

“See what you think!” She led us slowly, almost reluctantly toward the
rear of the fortress. “They lay in a little heap at the mouth of the
cleft where we heard the noises. Martin picked them up and dropped them
in a sack before we ran through the hollow.

“They're grotesque and they're almost CUTE, and they make me feel as
though they were the tiniest tippy-tip of the claw of some incredibly
large cat just stealing around the corner, a terrible cat, a cat as big
as a mountain,” she ended breathlessly.

We climbed through the crumbling masonry into a central, open court.
Here a clear spring bubbled up in a ruined and choked stone basin; close
to the ancient well was their pony, contentedly browsing in the thick
grass that grew around it. From one of its hampers Ruth took a large
cloth bag.

“To carry them,” she said, and trembled.

We passed through what had once been a great door into another chamber
larger than that we had just left; and it was in better preservation,
the ceiling unbroken, the light dim after the blazing sun of the court.
Near its center she halted us.

Before me ran a two-feet-wide ragged crack, splitting the floor and
dropping down into black depths. Beyond was an expanse of smooth
flagging, almost clear of debris.

Drake gave a low whistle. I followed his pointing finger. In the wall
at the end whirled two enormous dragon shapes, cut in low relief. Their
gigantic wings, their monstrous coils, covered the nearly unbroken
surface, and these CHIMERAE were the shapes upon the upthrust blocks of
the haunted roadway.

In Ruth's gaze I read a nameless fear, a half shuddering fascination.

But she was not looking at the cavern dragons.

Her gaze was fixed upon what at my first glance seemed to be a raised
and patterned circle in the dust-covered floor. Not more than a foot in
width, it shone wanly with a pale, metallic bluish luster, as though,
I thought, it had been recently polished. Compared with the wall's
tremendous winged figures this floor design was trivial, ludicrously
insignificant. What could there be about it to stamp that dread upon
Ruth's face?

I leaped the crevice; Dick joined me. Now I could see that the ring was
not continuous. Its broken circle was made of sharply edged cubes about
an inch in height, separated from each other with mathematical exactness
by another inch of space. I counted them--there were nineteen.

Almost touching them with their bases were an equal number of pyramids,
of tetrahedrons, as sharply angled and of similar length. They lay on
their sides with tips pointing starlike to six spheres clustered like
a conventionalized five petaled primrose in the exact center. Five of
these spheres--the petals--were, I roughly calculated, about an inch and
a half in diameter, the ball they enclosed larger by almost an inch.

So orderly was their arrangement, so much like a geometrical design
nicely done by some clever child that I hesitated to disturb it. I bent,
and stiffened, the first touch of dread upon me.

For within the ring, close to the clustering globes, was a miniature
replica of the giant track in the poppied valley!

It stood out from the dust with the same hint of crushing force, the
same die cut sharpness, the same METALLIC suggestion--and pointing
toward the globes were the claw marks of the four spreading star points.

I reached down and picked up one of the pyramids. It seemed to cling
to the rock; it was with effort that I wrenched it away. It gave to the
touch a slight sensation of warmth--how can I describe it?--a warmth
that was living.

I weighed it in my hand. It was oddly heavy, twice the weight, I should
say, of platinum. I drew out a glass and examined it. Decidedly the
pyramid was metallic, but of finest, almost silken texture--and I could
not place it among any of the known metals. It certainly was none I
had ever seen; yet it was as certainly metal. It was striated--slender
filaments radiating from tiny, dully lustrous points within the polished
surface.

And suddenly I had the weird feeling that each of these points was an
eye, peering up at me, scrutinizing me. There came a startled cry from
Dick.

“Look at the ring!”

The ring was in motion!

Faster the cubes moved; faster the circle revolved; the pyramids raised
themselves, stood bolt upright on their square bases; the six rolling
spheres touched them, joined the spinning, and with sleight-of-hand
suddenness the ring drew together; its units coalesced, cubes and
pyramids and globes threading with a curious suggestion of ferment.

With the same startling abruptness there stood erect, where but a moment
before they had seethed, a little figure, grotesque; a weirdly humorous,
a vaguely terrifying foot-high shape, squared and angled and pointed and
ANIMATE--as though a child should build from nursery blocks a fantastic
shape which abruptly is filled with throbbing life.

A troll from the kindergarten! A kobold of the toys!

Only for a second it stood, then began swiftly to change, melting
with quicksilver quickness from one outline into another as square
and triangle and spheres changed places. Their shiftings were like the
transformations one sees within a kaleidoscope. And in each vanishing
form was the suggestion of unfamiliar harmonies, of a subtle, a
transcendental geometric art as though each swift shaping were a symbol,
a WORD--

Euclid's problems given volition!

Geometry endowed with consciousness!

It ceased. Then the cubes drew one upon the other until they formed
a pedestal nine inches high; up this pillar rolled the larger globe,
balanced itself upon the top; the five spheres followed it, clustered
like a ring just below it. The other cubes raced up, clicked two by two
on the outer arc of each of the five balls; at the ends of these twin
blocks a pyramid took its place, tipping each with a point.

The Lilliputian fantasy was now a pedestal of cubes surmounted by a ring
of globes from which sprang a star of five arms.

The spheres began to revolve. Faster and faster they spun around the
base of the crowning globe; the arms became a disc upon which tiny
brilliant sparks appeared, clustered, vanished only to reappear in
greater number.

The troll swept toward me. It GLIDED. The finger of panic touched me. I
sprang aside, and swift as light it followed, seemed to poise itself to
leap.

“Drop it!” It was Ruth's cry.

But, before I could let fall the pyramid I had forgotten was in my hand,
the little figure touched me and a paralyzing shock ran through me. My
fingers clenched, locked. I stood, muscle and nerve bound, unable to
move.

The little figure paused. Its whirling disc shifted from the horizontal
plane on which it spun. It was as though it cocked its head to look up
at me--and again I had the sense of innumerable eyes peering at me. It
did not seem menacing--its attitude was inquisitive, waiting; almost as
though it had asked for something and wondered why I did not let it have
it. The shock still held me rigid, although a tingle in every nerve told
me of returning force.

The disc tilted back to place, bent toward me again. I heard a shout;
heard a bullet strike the pigmy that now clearly menaced; heard the
bullet ricochet without the slightest effect upon it. Dick leaped beside
me, raised a foot and kicked at the thing. There was a flash of light
and upon the instant he crashed down as though struck by a giant hand,
lay sprawling and inert upon the floor.

There was a scream from Ruth; there was softly sibilant rustling all
about her. I saw her leap the crevice, drop on her knees beside Drake.

There was movement on the flagging where she stood. A score or more of
faintly shining, bluish shapes were marching there--pyramids and cubes
and spheres like those forming the shape that stood before me. There was
a curious sharp tang of ozone in the air, a perceptible tightening as of
electrical tension.

They swept to the edge of the fissure, swam together, and there, hanging
half over the gap was a bridge, half spanning it, a weird and fairy arch
made up of alternate cube and angle. The shape at my feet disintegrated;
resolved itself into units that raced over to the beckoning span.

At the hither side of the crack they clicked into place, even as had the
others. Before me now was a bridge complete except for the one arc near
the middle where an angled gap marred it.

I felt the little object I held pulse within my hand, striving to
escape. I dropped it. The tiny shape swept to the bridge, ascended
it--dropped into the gap.

The arch was complete--hanging in one flying span over the depths!

Upon it, over it, as though they had but awaited this completion, rolled
the six globes. And as they dropped to the farther side the end of the
bridge nearest me raised itself in air, curved itself like a scorpion's
tail, drew itself into a closer circled arc, and dropped upon the floor
beyond.

Again the sibilant rustling--and cubes and pyramids and spheres were
gone.

Nerves tingling slowly back to life, mazed in absolute bewilderment,
my gaze sought Drake. He was sitting up, feebly, his head supported by
Ruth's hands.

“Goodwin!” he whispered. “What--what were they?”

“Metal,” I said--it was the only word to which my whirling mind could
cling--“metal--”

“Metal!” he echoed. “These things metal? Metal--ALIVE AND THINKING!”

Suddenly he was silent, his face a page on which, visibly, dread
gathered slowly and ever deeper.

And as I looked at Ruth, white-faced, and at him, I knew that my own was
as pallid, as terror-stricken as theirs.

“They were such LITTLE THINGS,” muttered Drake. “Such little
things--bits of metal--little globes and pyramids and cubes--just little
THINGS.”

“Babes! Only babes!” It was Ruth--“BABES!”

“Bits of metal”--Dick's gaze sought mine, held it--“and they looked for
each other, they worked with each other--THINKINGLY, CONSCIOUSLY--they
were deliberate, purposeful--little things--and with the force of a
score of dynamos--living, THINKING--”

“Don't!” Ruth laid white hands over his eyes. “Don't--don't YOU be
frightened!”

“Frightened?” he echoed. “I'M not afraid--yes, I AM afraid--”

He arose, stiffly--and stumbled toward me.

Afraid? Drake afraid. Well--so was I. Bitterly, TERRIBLY afraid.

For what we had beheld in the dusk of that dragoned, ruined chamber was
outside all experience, beyond all knowledge or dream of science. Not
their shapes--that was nothing. Not even that, being metal, they had
moved.

But that being metal, they had moved consciously, thoughtfully,
deliberately.

They were metal things with--MINDS!

That--that was the incredible, the terrifying thing. That--and their
power.

Thor compressed within Hop-o'-my-thumb--and thinking. The lightnings
incarnate in metal minacules--and thinking.

The inert, the immobile, given volition, movement,
cognoscence--thinking.

Metal with a brain!




CHAPTER V. THE SMITING THING

Silently we looked at each other, and silently we passed out of the
courtyard. The dread was heavy upon me. The twilight was stealing upon
the close-clustered peaks. Another hour, and their amethyst-and-purple
mantles would drop upon them; snowfields and glaciers sparkle out in
irised beauty; nightfall.

As I gazed upon them I wondered to what secret place within their
brooding immensities the little metal mysteries had fled. And to what
myriads, it might be, of their kind? And these hidden hordes--of what
shapes were they? Of what powers? Small like these, or--or--

Quick on the screen of my mind flashed two pictures, side by side--the
little four-rayed print in the great dust of the crumbling ruin and its
colossal twin on the breast of the poppied valley.

I turned aside, crept through the shattered portal and looked over the
haunted hollow.

Unbelieving, I rubbed my eyes; then leaped to the very brim of the bowl.

A lark had risen from the roof of one of the shattered heaps and had
flown caroling up into the shadowy sky.

A flock of the little willow warblers flung themselves across the
valley, scolding and gossiping; a hare sat upright in the middle of the
ancient roadway.

The valley itself lay serenely under the ambering light, smiling,
peaceful--emptied of horror!

I dropped over the side, walked cautiously down the road up which but
an hour or so before we had struggled so desperately; paced farther and
farther with an increasing confidence and a growing wonder.

Gone was that soul of loneliness; vanished the whirlpool of despair that
had striven to drag us down to death.

The bowl was nothing but a quiet, smiling lovely little hollow in the
hills. I looked back. Even the ruins had lost their sinister shape; were
time-worn, crumbling piles--nothing more.

I saw Ruth and Drake run out upon the ledge and beckon me; made my way
back to them, running.

“It's all right,” I shouted. “The place is all right.”

I stumbled up the side; joined them.

“It's empty,” I cried. “Get Martin and Chiu-Ming quick! While the way's
open--”

A rifle-shot rang out above us; another and another. From the portal
scampered Chiu-Ming, his robe tucked up about his knees.

“They come!” he gasped. “They come!”

There was a flashing of spears high up the winding mountain path. Down
it was pouring an avalanche of men. I caught the glint of helmets and
corselets. Those in the van were mounted, galloping two abreast upon
sure-footed mountain ponies. Their short swords, lifted high, flickered.

After the horsemen swarmed foot soldiers, a forest of shining points and
dully gleaming pikes above them. Clearly to us came their battlecries.

Again Ventnor's rifle cracked. One of the foremost riders went down;
another stumbled over him, fell. The rush was checked for an instant,
milling upon the road.

“Dick,” I cried, “rush Ruth over to the tunnel mouth. We'll follow. We
can hold them there. I'll get Martin. Chiu-Ming, after the pony, quick.”

I pushed the two over the rim of the hollow. Side by side the Chinaman
and I ran back through the gateway. I pointed to the animal and rushed
back into the fortress.

“Quick, Mart!” I shouted up the shattered stairway. “We can get through
the hollow. Ruth and Drake are on their way to the break we came
through. Hurry!”

“All right. Just a minute,” he called.

I heard him empty his magazine with almost machine-gun quickness.
There was a short pause, and down the broken steps he leaped, gray eyes
blazing.

“The pony?” He ran beside me toward the portal. “All my ammunition is on
him.”

“Chiu-Ming's taking care of that,” I gasped.

We darted out of the gateway. A good five hundred yards away were Ruth
and Drake, running straight to the green tunnel's mouth. Between them
and us was Chiu-Ming urging on the pony.

As we sped after him I looked back. The horsemen had recovered, were
now a scant half-mile from where the road swept past the fortress. I saw
that with their swords the horsemen bore great bows. A little cloud of
arrows sparkled from them; fell far short.

“Don't look back,” grunted Ventnor. “Stretch yourself, Walter. There's a
surprise coming. Hope to God I judged the time right.”

We turned off the ruined way; raced over the sward.

“If it looks as though--we can't make it,” he panted, “YOU beat it after
the rest. I'll try to hold 'em until you get into the tunnel. Never do
for 'em to get Ruth.”

“Right.” My own breathing was growing labored, “WE'LL hold them. Drake
can take care of Ruth.”

“Good boy,” he said. “I wouldn't have asked you. It probably means
death.”

“Very well,” I gasped, irritated. “But why borrow trouble?”

He reached out, touched me.

“You're right, Walter,” he grinned. “It does--seem--like carrying
coals--to Newcastle.”

There was a thunderous booming behind us; a shattering crash. A cloud of
smoke and dust hung over the northern end of the ruined fortress.

It lifted swiftly, and I saw that the whole side of the structure had
fallen, littering the road with its fragments. Scattered prone among
these were men and horses; others staggered, screaming. On the farther
side of this stony dike our pursuers were held like rushing waters
behind a sudden fallen tree.

“Timed to a second!” cried Ventnor. “Hold 'em for a while. Fuses and
dynamite. Blew out the whole side, right on 'em, by the Lord!”

On we fled. Chiu-Ming was now well in advance; Ruth and Dick less than
half a mile from the opening of the green tunnel. I saw Drake stop,
raise his rifle, empty it before him, and, holding Ruth by the hand,
race back toward us.

Even as he turned, the vine-screened entrance through which we had come,
through which we had thought lay safety, streamed other armored men. We
were outflanked.

“To the fissure!” shouted Ventnor. Drake heard, for he changed
his course to the crevice at whose mouth Ruth had said the--Little
Things--had lain.

After him streaked Chiu-Ming, urging on the pony. Shouting out of the
tunnel, down over the lip of the bowl, leaped the soldiers. We dropped
upon our knees, sent shot after shot into them. They fell back,
hesitated. We sprang up, sped on.

All too short was the check, but once more we held them--and again.

Now Ruth and Dick were a scant fifty yards from the crevice. I saw him
stop, push her from him toward it. She shook her head.

Now Chiu-Ming was with them. Ruth sprang to the pony, lifted from its
back a rifle. Then into the mass of their pursuers Drake and she poured
a fusillade. They huddled, wavered, broke for cover.

“A chance!” gasped Ventnor.

Behind us was a wolflike yelping. The first pack had re-formed; had
crossed the barricade the dynamite had made; was rushing upon us.

I ran as I had never known I could. Over us whined the bullets from
the covering guns. Close were we now to the mouth of the fissure. If
we could but reach it. Close, close were our pursuers, too--the arrows
closer.

“No use!” said Ventnor. “We can't make it. Meet 'em from the front.
Drop--and shoot.”

We threw ourselves down, facing them. There came a triumphant shouting.
And in that strange sharpening of the senses that always goes hand
in hand with deadly peril, that is indeed nature's summoning of every
reserve to meet that peril, my eyes took them in with photographic
nicety--the linked mail, lacquered blue and scarlet, of the horsemen;
brown, padded armor of the footmen; their bows and javelins and short
bronze swords, their pikes and shields; and under their round helmets
their cruel, bearded faces--white as our own where the black beards did
not cover them; their fierce and mocking eyes.

The springs of ancient Persia's long dead power, these. Men of Xerxes's
ruthless, world-conquering hordes; the lustful, ravening wolves of
Darius whom Alexander scattered--in this world of ours twenty centuries
beyond their time!

Swiftly, accurately, even as I scanned them, we had been drilling into
them. They advanced deliberately, heedless of their fallen. Their arrows
had ceased to fly. I wondered why, for now we were well within their
range. Had they orders to take us alive--at whatever cost to themselves?

“I've got only about ten cartridges left, Martin,” I told him.

“We've saved Ruth anyway,” he said. “Drake ought to be able to hold that
hole in the wall. He's got lots of ammunition on the pony. But they've
got us.”

Another wild shouting; down swept the pack.

We leaped to our feet, sent our last bullets into them; stood ready,
rifles clubbed to meet the rush. I heard Ruth scream--

What was the matter with the armored men? Why had they halted? What was
it at which they were glaring over our heads? And why had the rifle fire
of Ruth and Drake ceased so abruptly?

Simultaneously we turned.

Within the black background of the fissure stood a shape, an apparition,
a woman--beautiful, awesome, incredible!

She was tall, standing there swathed from chin to feet in clinging veils
of pale amber, she seemed taller even than tall Drake. Yet it was not
her height that sent through me the thrill of awe, of half incredulous
terror which, relaxing my grip, let my smoking rifle drop to earth; nor
was it that about her proud head a cloud of shining tresses swirled
and pennoned like a misty banner of woven copper flames--no, nor that
through her veils her body gleamed faint radiance.

It was her eyes--her great, wide eyes whose clear depths were like
pools of living star fires. They shone from her white face--not
phosphorescent, not merely lucent and light reflecting, but as though
they themselves were SOURCES of the cold white flames of far stars--and
as calm as those stars themselves.

And in that face, although as yet I could distinguish nothing but the
eyes, I sensed something unearthly.

“God!” whispered Ventnor. “What IS she?”

The woman stepped from the crevice. Not fifty feet from her were Ruth
and Drake and Chiu-Ming, their rigid attitudes revealing the same shock
of awe that had momentarily paralyzed me.

She looked at them, beckoned them. I saw the two walk toward her,
Chiu-Ming hang back. The great eyes fell upon Ventnor and myself. She
raised a hand, motioned us to approach.

I turned. There stood the host that had poured down the mountain road,
horsemen, spearsmen, pikemen--a full thousand of them. At my right were
the scattered company that had come from the tunnel entrance, threescore
or more.

There seemed a spell upon them. They stood in silence, like automatons,
only their fiercely staring eyes showing that they were alive.

“Quick,” breathed Ventnor.

We ran toward her who had checked death even while its jaws were closing
upon us.

Before we had gone half-way, as though our flight had broken whatever
bonds had bound them, a clamor arose from the host; a wild shouting,
a clanging of swords on shields. I shot a glance behind. They were in
motion, advancing slowly, hesitatingly as yet--but I knew that soon that
hesitation would pass; that they would sweep down upon us, engulf us.

“To the crevice,” I shouted to Drake. He paid no heed to me, nor did
Ruth--their gaze fastened upon the swathed woman.

Ventnor's hand shot out, gripped my shoulder, halted me. She had thrown
up her head. The cloudy METALLIC hair billowed as though wind had blown
it.

From the lifted throat came a low, a vibrant cry; harmonious, weirdly
disquieting, golden and sweet--and laden with the eery, minor wailings
of the blue valley's night, the dragoned chamber.

Before the cry had ceased there poured with incredible swiftness out of
the crevice score upon score of the metal things. The fissures vomited
them!

Globes and cubes and pyramids--not small like those of the ruins, but
shapes all of four feet high, dully lustrous, and deep within that
luster the myriads of tiny points of light like unwinking, staring eyes.

They swirled, eddied and formed a barricade between us and the armored
men.

Down upon them poured a shower of arrows from the soldiers. I heard the
shouts of their captains; they rushed. They had courage--those men--yes!

Again came the woman's cry--golden, peremptory.

Sphere and block and pyramid ran together, seemed to seethe. I had
again that sense of a quicksilver melting. Up from them thrust a thick
rectangular column. Eight feet in width and twenty feet high, it shaped
itself. Out from its left side, from right side, sprang arms--fearful
arms that grew and grew as globe and cube and angle raced up the
column's side and clicked into place each upon, each after, the other.
With magical quickness the arms lengthened.

Before us stood a monstrous shape; a geometric prodigy. A shining angled
pillar that, though rigid, immobile, seemed to crouch, be instinct with
living force striving to be unleashed.

Two great globes surmounted it--like the heads of some two-faced Janus
of an alien world.

At the left and right the knobbed arms, now fully fifty feet in
length, writhed, twisted, straightened; flexing themselves in grotesque
imitation of a boxer. And at the end of each of the six arms the spheres
were clustered thick, studded with the pyramids--again in gigantic,
awful, parody of the spiked gloves of those ancient gladiators who
fought for imperial Nero.

For an instant it stood here, preening, testing itself like an
athlete--a chimera, amorphous yet weirdly symmetric--under the darkening
sky, in the green of the hollow, the armored hosts frozen before it--

And then--it struck!

Out flashed two of the arms, with a glancing motion, with appalling
force. They sliced into the close-packed forward ranks of the armored
men; cut out of them two great gaps.

Sickened, I saw fragments of man and horse fly. Another arm javelined
from its place like a flying snake, clicked at the end of another,
became a hundred-foot chain which swirled like a flail through the
huddling mass. Down upon a knot of the soldiers with a straight-forward
blow drove a third arm, driving through them like a giant punch.

All that host which had driven us from the ruins threw down sword,
spear, and pike; fled shrieking. The horsemen spurred their mounts,
riding heedless over the footmen who fled with them.

The Smiting Thing seemed to watch them go with--AMUSEMENT!

Before they could cover a hundred yards it had disintegrated. I heard
the little wailing sounds--then behind the fleeing men, close behind
them, rose the angled pillar; into place sprang the flexing arms, and
again it took its toll of them.

They scattered, running singly, by twos, in little groups, for the sides
of the valley. They were like rats scampering in panic over the bottom
of a great green bowl. And like a monstrous cat the shape played with
them--yes, PLAYED.

It melted once more--took new form. Where had been pillar and flailing
arms was now a tripod thirty feet high, its legs alternate globe and
cube and upon its apex a wide and spinning ring of sparkling spheres.
Out from the middle of this ring stretched a tentacle--writhing,
undulating like a serpent of steel, four score yards at least in length.

At its end cube, globe and pyramid had mingled to form a huge trident.
With the three long prongs of this trident the thing struck, swiftly,
with fearful precision--JOYOUSLY--tining those who fled, forking them,
tossing them from its points high in air.

It was, I think, that last touch of sheer horror, the playfulness of the
Smiting Thing, that sent my dry tongue to the roof of my terror-parched
mouth, and held open with monstrous fascination eyes that struggled to
close.

Ever the armored men fled from it, and ever was it swifter than they,
teetering at their heels on its tripod legs.

From half its length the darting snake streamed red rain.

I heard a sigh from Ruth; wrested my gaze from the hollow; turned. She
lay fainting in Drake's arms.

Beside the two the swathed woman stood, looking out upon that slaughter,
calm and still, shrouded with an unearthly tranquillity--viewing it, it
came to me, with eyes impersonal, cold, indifferent as the untroubled
stars which look down upon hurricane and earthquake in this world of
ours.

There was a rushing of many feet at our left; a wail from Chiu-Ming.
Were they maddened by fear, driven by despair, determined to slay before
they themselves were slain? I do not know. But those who still lived of
the men from the tunnel mouth were charging us.

They clustered close, their shields held before them. They had no bows,
these men. They moved swiftly down upon us in silence--swords and pikes
gleaming.

The Smiting Thing rocked toward us, the metal tentacle straining out
like a rigid, racing serpent, flying to cut between its weird mistress
and those who menaced her.

I heard Chiu-Ming scream; saw him throw up his hands, cover his
eyes--run straight upon the pikes!

“Chiu-Ming!” I shouted. “Chiu-Ming! This way!”

I ran toward him. Before I had gone five paces Ventnor flashed by me,
revolver spitting. I saw a spear thrown. It struck the Chinaman squarely
in the breast. He tottered--fell upon his knees.

Even as he dropped, the giant flail swept down upon the soldiers. It
swept through them like a scythe through ripe grain. It threw them,
broken and torn, far toward the valley's sloping sides. It left only
fragments that bore no semblance to men.

Ventnor was at Chiu-Ming's head; I dropped beside him. There was a
crimson froth upon his lips.

“I thought that Shin-Je was about to slay us,” he whispered. “Fear
blinded me.”

His head dropped; his body quivered, lay still.

We arose, looked about us dazedly. At the side of the crevice stood the
woman, her gaze resting upon Drake, his arms about Ruth, her head hidden
on his breast.

The valley was empty--save for the huddled heaps that dotted it.

High up on the mountain path a score of figures crept, all that were
left of those who but a little before had streamed down to take us
captive or to slay. High up in the darkening heavens the lammergeiers,
the winged scavengers of the Himalayas, were gathering.

The woman lifted her hand, beckoned us once more. Slowly we walked
toward her, stood before her. The great clear eyes searched us--but no
more intently than our own wondering eyes did her.




CHAPTER VI. NORHALA OF THE LIGHTNINGS

We looked upon a vision of loveliness such, I think, as none has beheld
since Trojan Helen was a maid. At first all I could note were the eyes,
clear as rain-washed April skies, crystal clear as some secret spring
sacred to crescented Diana. Their wide gray irises were flecked with
golden amber and sapphire--flecks that shone like clusters of little
aureate and azure stars.

Then with a strange thrill of wonder I saw that these tiny
constellations were not in the irises alone; that they clustered even
within the pupils--deep within them, like far-flung stars in the depths
of velvety, midnight heavens.

Whence had come those cold fires that had flared from them, I
wondered--more menacing, far more menacing, in their cold tranquillity
than the hot flames of wrath? These eyes were not perilous--no. Calm
they were and still--yet in them a shadow of interest flickered; a ghost
of friendliness smiled.

Above them were level, delicately penciled brows of bronze. The lips
were coral crimson and--asleep. Sweet were those lips as ever master
painter, dreaming his dream of the very soul of woman's sweetness,
saw in vision and limned upon his canvas--and asleep, nor wistful for
awakening.

A proud, straight nose; a broad low brow, and over it the masses of the
tendriling tresses--tawny, lustrous topaz, cloudy, METALLIC. Like spun
silk of ruddy copper; and misty as the wisps of cloud that Soul'tze,
Goddess of Sleep, sets in the skies of dawn to catch the wandering
dreams of lovers.

Down from the wondrous face melted the rounded column of her throat
to merge into exquisite curves of shoulders and breasts, half revealed
beneath the swathing veils.

But upon that face, within her eyes, kissing her red lips and clothing
her breasts, was something unearthly.

Something that came straight out of the still mysteries of the
star-filled spaces; out of the ordered, the untroubled, the illimitable
void.

A passionless spirit that watched over the human passion in the scarlet
mouth, in every slumbering, sculptured line of her--guarding her against
its awakening.

Twilight calm dropping down from the sun sleep to still the restless
mountain tarn. Ishtar dreamlessly asleep within Nirvana.

Something not of this world we know--and yet of it as the winds of the
Cosmos are to the summer breeze, the ocean to the wave, the lightnings
to the glowworm.

“She isn't--human,” I heard Ventnor whispering at my ear. “Look at her
eyes; look at the skin of her--”

Her skin was white as milk of pearls; gossamer fine, silken and creamy;
translucent as though a soft brilliancy dwelt within it. Beside it
Ruth's fair skin was like some sun-and-wind-roughened country lass's to
Titania's.

She studied us as though she were seeing for the first time beings of
her own kind. She spoke--and her voice was elfin distant, chimingly
sweet like hidden little golden bells; filled with that tranquil, far
off spirit that was part of her--as though indeed a tiny golden chime
should ring out from the silences, speak for them, find tongues for
them. The words were hesitating, halting as though the lips that uttered
them found speech strange--as strange as the clear eyes found our
images.

And the words were Persian--purest, most ancient Persian.

“I am Norhala,” the golden voice chimed forth, whispered down into
silence. “I am Norhala.”

She shook her head impatiently. A hand stole forth from beneath her
veils, slender, long-fingered with nails like rosy pearls; above the
wrist was coiled a golden dragon with wicked little crimson eyes. The
slender white hand touched Ruth's head, turned it until the strange,
flecked orbs looked directly into the misty ones of blue.

Long they gazed--and deep. Then she who had named herself Norhala thrust
out a finger, touched the tear that hung upon Ruth's curled lashes,
regarded it wonderingly.

Something of recognition, of memory, seemed to awaken within her.

“You are--troubled?” she asked with that halting effort.

Ruth shook her head.

“THEY--do not trouble you?”

She pointed to the huddled heaps strewing the hollow. And then I saw
whence the light which had streamed from her great eyes came. For the
little azure and golden stars paled, trembled, then flashed out like
galaxies of tiny, clustered silver suns.

From that weird radiance Ruth shrank, affrighted.

“No--no,” she gasped. “I weep for--HIM.”

She pointed where Chiu-Ming lay, a brown blotch at the edge of the
shattered men.

“For--him?” There was puzzlement in the faint voice. “For--that? But
why?”

She looked at Chiu-Ming--and I knew that to her the sight of the
crumpled form carried no recognition of the human, nothing of kin to
her. There was a faint wonder in her eyes, no longer light-filled, when
at last she turned back to us. Long she considered us.

“Now,” she broke the silence, “now something stirs within me that it
seems has long been sleeping. It bids me take you with me. Come!”

Abruptly she turned from us, glided to the crevice. We looked at each
other, seeking council, decision.

“Chiu-Ming,” Drake spoke. “We can't leave him like that. At least let's
cover him from the vultures.”

“Come.” The woman had reached the mouth of the fissure.

“I'm afraid! Oh, Martin--I'm afraid.” Ruth reached little trembling
hands to her tall brother.

“Come!” Norhala called again. There was an echo of harshness, a
clanging, peremptory and inexorable, in the chiming.

Ventnor shrugged his shoulders.

“Come, then,” he said.

With one last look at the Chinese, the lammergeiers already circling
about him, we walked to the crevice. Norhala waited, silent, brooding
until we passed her; then glided behind us.

Before we had gone ten paces I saw that the place was no fissure. It
was a tunnel, a passage hewn by human hands, its walls covered with the
writhing dragon lines, its roof the mountain.

The swathed woman swept by us. Swiftly we followed her. Far, far ahead
was a wan gleaming. It quivered, a faintly shimmering, ghostly curtain,
a full mile away.

Now it was close; we passed through it and were out of the tunnel.
Before us stretched a narrow gorge, a sword slash in the body of the
towering giant under whose feet the tunnel crept. High above was the
ribbon of the sky.

The sides were dark, but it came to me that here were no trees, no
verdure of any kind. Its floor was strewn with boulders, fantastically
shaped, almost indistinguishable in the fast closing dark.

Twin monoliths bulwarked the passage end; the gigantic stones were
leaning, crumbling. Fissures radiated from the opening, like deep
wrinkles in the rock, showing where earth warping, range pressure, had
long been working to close this hewn way.

“Stop,” Norhala's abrupt, golden note halted us; and again through the
clear eyes I saw the white starshine flash.

“It may be well--” She spoke as though to herself. “It may be well to
close this way. It is not needed--”

Her voice rang out again, vibrant, strangely disquieting, harmonious.
Murmurous chanting it was at first, rhythmic and low; ripples and
flutings, tones and progressions utterly unknown to me; unfamiliar,
abrupt, and alien themes that kept returning, droppings of crystal-clear
jewels of sound, golden tollings--and all ordered, mathematical,
GEOMETRIC, even as had been the gestures of the shapes; Lilliputians of
the ruins, Brobdignagian of the haunted hollow.

What was it? I had it--IT WAS THOSE GESTURES TRANSFORMED INTO SOUND!

There was a movement down by the tunnel mouth. It grew more rapid,
seemed to vibrate with her song. Within the darkness there were
little flashes; glimmerings of light began to come and go--like
little awakenings of eyes of soft, jeweled flames, like giant gorgeous
fireflies; flashes of cloudy amber, gleam of rose, sparkles of diamonds
and of opals, of emeralds and of rubies--blinking, gleaming.

A shimmering mist drew down around them--a swift and swirling mist.
It thickened, was shot with slender shuttled threads like cobweb,
coruscating strands of light.

The shining threads grew thicker, pulsed, were spangled with tiny vivid
sparklings. They ran together, condensed--and all this in an instant, in
a tenth of the time it takes me to write it.

From fiery mist and gemmed flashes came bolt upon bolt of lightning. The
cliff face leaped out, a cataract of green flame. The fissures widened,
the monoliths trembled, fell.

In the wake of that dazzling brilliancy came utter blackness. I opened
my blinded eyes; slowly the flecks of green fire cleared. A faint
lambency still clung to the cliff. By it I saw that the tunnel's mouth
had vanished, had been sealed--where it had gaped were only tons of
shattered rock.

Came a rushing past us as of great bodies; something grazed my hand,
something whose touch was like that of warm metal--but metal throbbing
with life. They rushed by--and whispered down into silence.

“Come!” Norhala flitted ahead of us, a faintly luminous shape in the
darkness. Swiftly we followed. I found Ruth beside me; felt her hand
grip my wrist.

“Walter,” she whispered, “Walter--she isn't human!”

“Nonsense,” I muttered. “Nonsense, Ruth. What do you think she is--a
goddess, a spirit of the Himalayas? She's as human as you or I.”

“No.” Even in the darkness I could sense the stubborn shake of her curly
head. “Not all human. Or how could she have commanded those things? Or
have summoned the lightnings that blasted the tunnel's mouth? And her
skin and hair--they're too WONDERFUL, Walter.

“Why, she makes me look--look coarse. And the light that hovers about
her--why, it is by that light we are making our way. And when she
touched me--I--I glowed--all through.

“Human, yes--but there is something else in her--something stronger than
humanness, something that--makes it sleep!” she added astonishingly.

The ground was level as a dancing floor. We followed the enigmatic
glow--emanation, it seemed to me--from Norhala which was as a light
for us to follow within the darkness. The high ribbon of sky had
vanished--seemed to be overcast, for I could see no stars.

Within the darkness I began again to sense faint movement; soft stirring
all about us. I had the feeling that on each side and behind us moved an
invisible host.

“There's something moving all about us--going with us,” Ruth echoed my
thought.

“It's the wind,” I said, and paused--for there was no wind.

From the blackness before us came a succession of curious, muffled
clickings, like a smothered mitrailleuse. The luminescence that clothed
Norhala brightened, deepening the darkness.

“Cross!”

She pointed into the void ahead; then, as we started forward, thrust
out a hand to Ruth, held her back. Drake and Ventnor drew close to them,
questioningly, anxious. But I stepped forward, out of the dim gleaming.

Before me were two cubes; one I judged in that uncertain light to be
six feet high, the other half its bulk. From them a shaft of pale-blue
phosphorescence pierced the murk. They stood, the smaller pressed
against the side of the larger, for all the world like a pair of immense
nursery blocks, placed like steps by some giant child.

As my eyes swept over them, I saw that the shining shaft was an unbroken
span of cubes; not multi-arched like the Lilliputian bridge of the
dragon chamber, but flat and running out over an abyss that gaped at
my very feet. All of a hundred feet they stretched; a slender, lustrous
girder crossing unguessed depths of gloom. From far, far below came the
faint whisper of rushing waters.

I faltered. For these were the blocks that had formed the body of the
monster of the hollow, its flailing arms. The thing that had played so
murderously with the armored men.

And now had shaped itself into this anchored, quiescent bridge.

“Do not fear.” It was the woman speaking, softly, as one would reassure
a child. “Ascend. Cross. They obey me.”

I stepped firmly upon the first block, climbed to the second. The
span stretched, sharp edged, smooth, only a slender, shimmering line
revealing where each great cube held fast to the other.

I walked at first slowly, then with ever-increasing confidence, for up
from the surface streamed a guiding, a holding force, that was like a
host of little invisible hands, steadying me, keeping firm my feet. I
looked down; the myriads of enigmatic eyes were staring, staring up
at me from deep within. They fascinated me; I felt my pace slowing; a
vertigo seized me. Resolutely I dragged my gaze up and ahead; marched
on.

From the depths came more clearly the sound of the waters. Now there
were but a few feet more of the bridge before me. I reached its end,
dropped my feet over, felt them touch a smaller cube, and descended.

Over the span came Ventnor. He was leading his laden pony. He had
bandaged its eyes so that it could not look upon the narrow way it was
treading. And close behind, a hand resting reassuringly upon its flank,
strode Drake, swinging along carelessly. The little beast ambled along
serenely, sure-footed as all its mountain kind, and docile to darkness
and guidance.

Then, an arm about Ruth, floated Norhala. Now she was beside us; dropped
her arm from Ruth; glided past us. On for a hundred yards or more we
went, and then she drew us a little toward the unseen canyon wall.

She stood before us, shielding us. One golden call she sent.

I looked back into the darkness. Something like an enormous, dimly
shimmering rod was raising itself. Higher it rose and higher. Now it
stood, upright, a slender towering pillar, a gigantic slim figure whose
tip pointed a full hundred feet in the air.

Then slowly it inclined itself toward us; drew closer, closer to
the ground; touched and lay there for an instant inert. Abruptly it
vanished.

But well I knew what I had seen. The span over which we had passed had
raised itself even as had the baby bridge of the fortress; had lifted
itself across the chasm and dropping itself upon the hither verge had
disintegrated into its units; was following us.

A bridge of metal that could build itself--and break itself. A thinking,
conscious metal bridge! A metal bridge with volition--with mind--that
was following us.

There sighed from behind a soft, sustained wailing; rapidly it neared
us. A wanly glimmering shape drew by; halted. It was like a rigid
serpent cut from a gigantic square bar of cold blue steel.

Its head was a pyramid, a tetrahedron; its length vanished in the
further darkness. The head raised itself, the blocks that formed its
neck separating into open wedges like a Brobdignagian replica of those
jointed, fantastic, little painted reptiles the Japanese toy-makers cut
from wood.

It seemed to regard us--mockingly. The pointed head dropped--past us
streamed the body. Upon it other pyramids clustered--like the spikes
that guarded the back of the nightmare Brontosaurus. Its end came
swiftly into sight--its tail another pyramid twin to its head.

It FLIRTED by--gaily; vanished.

I had thought the span must disintegrate to follow--and it did not
need to! It could move as a COMPOSITE as well as in UNITS. Move
intelligently, consciously--as the Smiting Thing had moved.

“Come!” Norhala's command checked my thoughts; we fell in behind her.
Looking up I caught the friendly sparkle of a star; knew the cleft was
widening.

The star points grew thicker. We stepped out into a valley small as
that hollow from which we had fled; ringed like it with heaven-touching
summits. I could see clearly. The place was suffused with a soft
radiance as though into it the far, bright stars were pouring all their
rays, filling it as a cup with their pale flames.

It was luminous as the Alaskan valleys when on white arctic nights they
are lighted, the Athabascans believe, by the gleaming spears of hunting
gods. The walls of the valley seemed to be drawn back into infinite
distances.

The shimmering mists that had nimbused Norhala had vanished--or merging
into the wan gleaming had become one with it.

I stared straight at her, striving to clarify in my own clouded thought
what it was that I had sensed as inhuman--never of OUR world or its
peoples. Yet this conviction came not because of the light that had
hovered about her, nor of her summonings of the lightnings; nor even
of her control of those--things--which had smitten the armored men and
spanned for us the abyss.

All of that I was certain lay in the domain of the explicable, could be
resolved into normality once the basic facts were gained.

Suddenly, I knew. Side by side with what we term the human there dwelt
within this woman an actual consciousness foreign to earth, passionless,
at least as we know passion, ordered, mathematical--an emanation of the
eternal law which guides the circling stars.

This it was that had moved in the gestures which had evoked the
lightnings. This it was that had spoken in the song which were those
gestures transformed into sound. This it was that something greater than
my consciousness knew and accepted.

Something which shared, no--that reigned, serene and untroubled, upon
the throne of her mind; something utterly UNCOMPREHENDING, utterly
unconscious OF, cosmically blind TO all human emotion; that spread
itself like a veil over her own consciousness; that PLATED her
thought--that was a strange word--why had it come to me--something that
had set its mark upon her like--like--the gigantic claw print on the
poppied field, the little print of the dragoned hall.

I caught at my mind, whirling I thought then in the grip of fantasy;
strove by taking minute note of her to bring myself back to normal.

Her veils had slipped from her, baring her neck, her arms, the right
shoulder. Under the smooth throat a buckle of dull gold held the sheer,
diaphanous folds of the pale amber silk which swathed the high and
rounded breasts, hiding no goddess curve of them.

A wide and golden girdle clasped the waist, covered the rounded hips
and thighs. The long, narrow, and high-arched feet were shod with golden
sandals, laced just below the rounded knees with flat turquoise studded
bands.

And shining through the amber folds, as glowing above them, the miracle
of her body.

The dream of master sculptor given life. A goddess of earth's youth
reborn in Himalayan wilds.

She raised her eyes; broke the long silence.

“Now being with you,” she said dreamily, “there waken within me old
thoughts, old wisdom, old questioning--all that I had forgotten and
thought forgotten forever--”

The golden voice died--she who had spoken was gone from us, like the
fading out of a phantom; like the breaking of a film.

A flicker shot over the skies, another and another. A brilliant ray of
intense green like that of a distant searchlight swept to the zenith,
hung for a moment and withdrew. Up came pouring the lances and the
streamers of the aurora; faster and faster, banners and slender shining
spears of green and iridescent blues and smoky, glistening reds.

The valley sprang into full view.

I felt Ventnor's grip upon my wrist. I followed his pointing finger.
Into the valley from the right ran a black spur of rock, half a mile
from us, fifty feet high.

Upon its crest stood--Norhala!

Her arms were lifted to the sparkling sky; her braids were loosened--and
as the fires of the aurora rose and fell, raced and were still, the
silken cloud of her tresses swirled and eddied with them. Little clouds
of coruscations danced gaily like fireflies about and through it.

And all her bared body was outlined in living light, glowed and throbbed
with light--light filled her like a vessel, she bathed in it. She thrust
arms through the streaming, flaming locks; held them out from her,
prisoned. She swayed slowly, rhythmically; like a faint, golden chiming
came the echo of her song.

Abruptly around her, half circling her on the black spur, gleamed
myriads of gem fires. Flares and flames of pale emerald, steady glowing
of flame rubies, glints and lambencies of deepest sapphire, of wan
sapphire, flickering opalescences, irised glitterings. A moment they
gleamed. Then from them came bolt upon bolt of lightning--lightning that
darted upon the lovely shape swaying there; lightnings that fell upon
her, broke and dashed, cascading, from her radiant body.

The lightnings bathed her--she bathed in them.

The skies were covered by a swift mist. The aurora was veiled.

The valley filled with a palely shimmering radiance which dropped like
veils upon it, hiding all within it. Hiding within fold upon luminous
fold--Norhala!




CHAPTER VII. THE SHAPES IN THE MIST

Mutely we faced each other, white and wan in the ghostly light.

The valley was very still; as silent as though sound had been withdrawn
from it. The shimmering radiance suffusing it had thickened perceptibly;
hovered over the valley floor faintly sparkling mists; hid it.

Like a shroud was that silence. Beneath it my mind struggled, its
unease, its forebodings growing ever stronger. Silently we repacked the
saddlebags; girthed the pony; silently we waited for Norhala's return.

Idly I had noted that the place on which we stood must be raised
above the level of the vale. Up toward us the gathering mists had been
steadily rising; still was their wavering crest a half score feet below
us.

Abruptly out of their dim nebulosity a faintly phosphorescent square
broke. It lifted, slowly; then swept, a dully lustrous six-foot cube,
up the slope and came to rest almost at our feet. It dwelt there;
contemplated us from its myriads of deep-set, sparkling striations.

In its wake swam, one by one, six others--their tops raising from
the vapors like the first, watchfully; like shimmering backs of
sea monsters; like turrets of fantastic angled submarines from
phosphorescent seas. One by one they skimmed swiftly over the ledge; and
one by one they nestled, edge to edge and alternately, against the cube
which had gone before.

In a crescent, they stretched before us. Back from them, a pace, ten
paces, twenty, we retreated.

They lay immobile--staring at us.

Cleaving the mists, silk of copper hair streaming wide, unearthly eyes
lambent, floated up behind them--Norhala. For an instant she was hidden
behind their bulk; suddenly was upon them; drifted over them like some
spirit of light; stood before us.

Her veils were again about her; golden girdle, sandals of gold and
turquoise in their places. Pearl white her body gleamed; no mark of
lightning marred it.

She walked toward us, turned and faced the watching cubes. She uttered
no sound, but as at a signal the central cube slid forward, halted
before her. She rested a hand upon its edge.

“Ride with me,” she said to Ruth.

“Norhala.” Ventnor took a step forward. “Norhala, we must go with her.
And this”--he pointed to the pony--“must go with us.”

“I meant--you--to come,” the faraway voice chimed, “but I had not
thought of--that.”

A moment she considered; then turned to the six waiting cubes. Again as
at a command four of the things moved, swirled in toward each other
with a weird precision, with a monstrous martial mimicry; joined; stood
before us, a platform twelve feet square, six high.

“Mount,” sighed Norhala.

Ventnor looked helplessly at the sheer front facing him.

“Mount.” There was half-wondering impatience in her command. “See!”

She caught Ruth by the waist and with the same bewildering swiftness
with which she had vanished from us when the aurora beckoned she stood,
holding the girl, upon the top of the single cube. It was as though the
two had been lifted, had been levitated with an incredible rapidity.

“Mount,” she murmured again, looking down upon us.

Slowly Ventnor began to bandage the pony's eyes. I placed my hand upon
the edge of the quadruple; sprang. A myriad unseen hands caught me,
raised me, set me instantaneously on the upward surface.

“Lift the pony to me,” I called to Ventnor.

“Lift it?” he echoed, incredulously.

Drake's grin cut like a sunray through the nightmare dread that shrouded
my mind.

“Catch,” he called; placed one hand beneath the beast's belly, the other
under its throat; his shoulders heaved--and up shot the pony, laden as
it was, landed softly upon four wide-stretched legs beside me. The faces
of the two gaped up, ludicrous in their amazement.

“Follow,” cried Norhala.

Ventnor leaped wildly for the top, Drake beside him; in the flash of a
humming-bird's wing they were gripping me, swearing feebly. The unseen
hold angled; struck upward; clutched from ankle to thigh; held us
fast--men and beast.

Away swept the block that bore Ruth and Norhala; I saw Ruth crouching,
head bent, her arms around the knees of the woman. They slipped into the
mists; vanished.

And after them, like a log in a racing current, we, too, dipped beneath
the faintly luminous vapors.

The cubes moved with an entire absence of vibration; so smoothly and
skimmingly, indeed, that had it not been for the sudden wind that had
risen when first we had stirred, and that now beat steadily upon our
faces, and the cloudy walls streaming by, I would have thought ourselves
at rest.

I saw the blurred form of Ventnor drift toward the forward edge. He
walked as though wading. I essayed to follow him; my feet I could not
lift; I could advance only by gliding them as though skating.

Also the force, whatever it was, that held me seemed to pass me on from
unseen clutch to clutch; it was as though up to my hips I moved through
a closely woven yet fluid mass of cobwebs. I had the fantastic idea that
if I so willed I could slip over the edge of the blocks, crawl about
their sides without falling--like a fly on the vertical faces of a huge
sugar loaf.

I drew beside Ventnor. He was staring ahead, striving, I knew, to pierce
the mists for some glimpse of Ruth.

He turned to me, his face drawn with anxiety, his eyes feverish.

“Can you see them, Walter?” His voice shook. “God--why did I ever let
her go like that? Why did I let her go alone?”

“They'll be close ahead, Martin.” I spoke out of a conviction I could
not explain. “Whatever it is we're bound for, wherever it is the woman's
taking us, she means to keep us together--for a time at least. I'm sure
of it.”

“She said--follow.” It was Drake beside us. “How the hell can we do
anything else? We haven't any control over this bird we're on. But she
has. What she meant, Ventnor, is that it would follow her.”

“That's true”--new hope softened the haggard face--“that's true--but
is it? We're reckoning with creatures that man's imagination never
conceived--nor could conceive. And with this--woman--human in shape,
yes, but human in thought--never. How then can we tell--”

He turned once more, all his consciousness concentrated in his searching
eyes.

Drake's rifle slipped from his hand.

He stooped to pick it up; then tugged with both hands. The rifle lay
immovable.

I bent and strove to aid him. For all the pair of us could do, the rifle
might have been a part of the gleaming surface on which it rested. The
tiny, deepset star points winked up--

“They're--laughing at us!” grunted Drake.

“Nonsense,” I answered, and tried to check the involuntary shuddering
that shook me, as I saw it shake him. “Nonsense. These blocks are great
magnets--that's what holds the rifle; what holds us, too.”

“I don't mean the rifle,” he said; “I mean those points of lights--the
eyes--”

There came from Ventnor a cry of almost anguished relief. We
straightened. Our head shot above the mists like those of swimmers from
water. Unnoticed, we had been climbing out of them.

And a hundred yards ahead of us, cleaving them, veiled in them almost to
the shoulders, was Norhala, red-gold tresses steaming; and close beside
her were the brown curls of Ruth. At her brother's cry she turned and
her arm flashed out of the veils with reassuring gesture.

A mile away was an opening in the valley's mountainous wall; toward it
we were speeding. It was no ragged crevice, no nature split fissure; it
gave the impression of a gigantic doorway.

“Look,” whispered Drake.

Between us and the vast gateway, gleaming triangles began to break
through the vapors, like the cutting fins of sharks, glints of round
bodies like gigantic porpoises--the vapors seethed with them. Quickly
the fins and rolling curves were all about us. They centered upon the
portal, streamed through--a horde of the metal things, leading us,
guarding us, playing about us.

And weird, unutterably weird was that spectacle--the vast and silent
vale with its still, smooth vapors like a coverlet of cloud; the regal
head of Norhala sweeping over them; the dull glint and gleam of the
metal paradoxes flowing, in ordered motion, all about us; the titanic
gateway, glowing before us.

We were at its threshold; over it.




CHAPTER VIII. THE DRUMS OF THUNDER

Upon that threshold the mists foamed like breaking billows, then ceased
abruptly to be. Keeping exactly the distance I had noted when our gaze
had risen above the fog, glided the block that bore Ruth and Norhala.
In the strange light of the place into which we had emerged--and
whether that place was canyon, corridor, or tunnel I could not then
determine--it stood out sharply.

One arm of Norhala held Ruth--and in her attitude I sensed a shielding
intent, guardianship--the first really human impulse this shape of
mystery and beauty had revealed.

In front of them swept score upon score of her familiars--no longer
dully lustrous, but shining as though cut from blue and polished steel.
They--marched--in ordered rows, globes and cubes and pyramids; moving
sedately now as units.

I looked behind me; out of the spume boiling at the portal, were pouring
forth other scores of the Metal Things, darting through like divers
through a wave. And as they drew into our wake and swam into the light,
their dim lustre vanished like a film; their surfaces grew almost
radiant.

Whence came the light that set them gleaming? Our pace had slackened--I
looked about me. The walls of the cleft or tunnel were perpendicular,
smooth and shining with a cold, metallic, greenish glow.

Between the walls, like rhythmic flashing of fire-flies, pulsed soft and
fugitive glimmerings that carried a sense of the infinitely minute--of
electrons, it came to me, rather than atoms. Their irradiance was
greenish, like the walls; but I was certain that these corpuscles did
not come from them.

They blinked and faded like motes within a shifting sunbeam; or, to use
a more scientific comparison, like colloids within the illuminated field
of the ultramicroscope; and like these latter it was as though the eyes
took in not the minute particles themselves but their movement only.

Save for these gleamings the light of the place, although crepuscular,
was crystalline clear. High above us--five hundred, a thousand feet--the
walls merged into a haze of clouded beryl.

Rock certainly the cliffs were--but rock cut and planed, smoothed and
polished and PLATED!

Yes, that was it--plated. Plated with some metallic substance that was
itself a reservoir of luminosity and from which, it came to me, pulsed
the force that lighted the winking ions. But who could have done such a
thing? For what purpose? How?

And the meticulousness, the perfection of these smoothed cliffs struck
over my nerves as no rasp could, stirring a vague resentment, an
irritated desire for human inharmonies, human disorder.

Absorbed in my examination I had forgotten those who must share with me
my doubts and dangers. I felt a grip on my arm.

“If we get close enough and I can get my feet loose from this damned
thing I'll jump,” Drake said.

“What?” I gasped, blankly, startled out of my preoccupation. “Jump
where?”

I followed his pointing finger. We were rapidly closing upon the other
cube; it was now a scant twenty paces ahead; it seemed to be stopping.
Ventnor was leaning forward, quivering with eagerness.

“Ruth!” he called. “Ruth--are you all right?”

Slowly she turned to us--my heart gave a great leap, then seemed
to stop. For her sweet face was touched with that same unearthly
tranquillity which was Norhala's; in her brown eyes was a shadow of that
passionless spirit brooding in Norhala's own; her voice as she answered
held within it more than echo of Norhala's faint, far-off golden
chiming.

“Yes,” she sighed; “yes, Martin--have no fear for me--”

And turned from us, gazing forward once more with the woman and as
silent as she.

I glanced covertly at Ventnor, at Drake--had I imagined, or had they
too seen? Then I knew they had seen, for Ventnor's face was white to the
lips, and Drake's jaw was set, his teeth clenched, his eyes blazing with
anger.

“What's she doing to Ruth--you saw her face,” he gritted, half
inarticulately.

“Ruth!” There was anguish in Ventnor's cry.

She did not turn again. It was as though she had not heard him.

The cubes were now not five yards apart. Drake gathered himself;
strained to loosen his feet from the shining surface, making ready to
leap when they should draw close enough. His great chest swelled with
his effort, the muscles of his neck knotted, sweat steamed down his
face.

“No use,” he gasped, “no use, Goodwin. It's like trying to lift yourself
by your boot-straps--like a fly stuck in molasses.”

“Ruth,” cried Ventnor once more.

As though it had been a signal the block darted forward, resuming the
distance it had formerly maintained between us.

The vanguard of the Metal Things began to race. With an incredible speed
they fled into, were lost in an instant within, the luminous distances.

The cube that bore the woman and girl accelerated; flew faster and
faster onward. And as swiftly our own followed it. The lustrous walls
flowed by, dizzily.

We had swept over toward the right wall of the cleft and were gliding
over a broad ledge. This ledge was, I judged, all of a hundred feet in
width. From it the floor of the place was dropping rapidly.

The opposite precipices were slowly drawing closer. After us flowed the
flanking host.

Steadily our ledge arose and the floor of the canyon dropped. Now we
were twenty feet above it, now thirty. And the character of the cliffs
was changing. Veins of quartz shone under the metallic plating like
cut crystal, like cloudy opals; here was a splash of vermilion, there a
patch of amber; bands of pallid ochre stained it.

My gaze was caught by a line of inky blackness in the exact center of
the falling floor. So black was it that at first glance I took it for a
vein of jetty lignite.

It widened. It was a crack, a fissure. Now it was a yard in width, now
three, and blackness seemed to well up from within it, blackness that
was the very essence of the depths. Steadily the ebon rift expanded;
spread suddenly wide open in two sharp-edged, flying wedges--

Earth had dropped away. At our side a gulf had opened, an abyss,
striking down depth upon depth; profound; immeasurable.

We were human atoms, riding upon a steed of sorcery and racing along a
split rampart of infinite space.

I looked behind--scores of the cubes were darting from the metal host
trailing us; in a long column of twos they flashed by, raced ahead. Far
in front of us a gloom began to grow; deepened until we were rushing
into blackest night.

Through the murk stabbed a long lance of pale blue phosphorescence.
It unrolled like a ribbon of wan flame, flicked like a serpent's
tongue--held steady. I felt the Thing beneath us leap forward; its
velocity grew prodigious; the wind beat upon us with hurricane force.

I shielded my eyes with my hands and peered through the chinks of my
fingers. Ranged directly in our path was a barricade of the cubes and
upon them we were racing like a flying battering-ram. Involuntarily I
closed my eyes against the annihilating impact that seemed inevitable.

The Thing on which we rode lifted.

We were soaring at a long angle straight to the top of the barrier; were
upon it, and still with that awful speed unchecked were hurtling through
the blackness over the shaft of phosphorescence, the ribbon of pale
light that I had watched pierce it and knew now was but another span of
the cubes that but a little before had fled past us. Beneath the span,
on each side of it, I sensed illimitable void.

We were over; rushing along in darkness. There began a mighty tumult,
a vast crashing and roaring. The clangor waxed, beat about us with
tremendous strokes of sound.

Far away was a dim glowing, as of rising sun through heavy mists of
dawn. The mists faded--miles away gleamed what at first glimpse seemed
indeed to be the rising sun; a gigantic orb, whose lower limb just
touched, was sharply, horizontally cut by the blackness, as though at
its base that blackness was frozen.

The sun? Reason returned to me; told me this globe could not be that.

What was it then? Ra-Harmachis, of the Egyptians, stripped of his wings,
exiled and growing old in the corridors of the Dead? Or that mocking
luminary, the cold phantom of the God of light and warmth which the old
Norsemen believed was set in their frozen hell to torment the damned?

I thrust aside the fantasies, impatiently. But sun or no sun, light
streamed from this orb, light in multicolored, lanced rays, banishing
the blackness through which we had been flying.

Closer we came and closer; lighter it grew about us, and by the growing
light I saw that still beside us ran the abyss. And even louder, more
thunderous, became the clamor.

At the foot of the radiant disk I glimpsed a luminous pool. Into it, out
of the depths, protruded a tremendous rectangular tongue, gleaming like
gray steel.

On the tongue an inky shape appeared; it lifted itself from the abyss,
rushed upon the disk and took form.

Like a gigantic spider it was, squat and horned. For an instant it was
silhouetted against the smiling sphere, poised itself--and vanished
through it.

Now, not far ahead, silhouetted as had been the spider shape, blackened
into sight a cube and on it Ruth and Norhala. It seemed to hover, to
wait.

“It's a door,” Drake's shout beat thinly in my ears against the
hurricane of sound.

What I thought had been an orb was indeed a gateway, a portal; and it
was gigantic.

The light streamed through it, the flaming colors, the lightning glare,
the drifting shadows were all beyond it. The suggestion of sphere had
been an illusion, born of the darkness in which we were moving and in
its own luminescence.

And I saw that the steel tongue was a ramp, a slide, dropping down into
the gulf.

Norhala raised her hands high above her head. Up from the darkness flew
an incredible shape--like a monstrous, armored flat-backed crab; angled
spikes protruded from it; its huge body was spangled with darting,
greenish flames.

It swept beneath us and by. On its back were multitudinous breasts from
which issued blinding flashes--sapphire blue, emerald green, sun yellow.
It hung poised as had that other nightmare shape, standing out jet black
and colossal, rearing upon columnar legs, whose outlines were those of
alternate enormous angled arrow-points and lunettes. Swiftly its form
shifted; an instant it hovered, half disintegrate.

Now I saw spinning spheres and darting cubes and pyramids click into new
positions. The front and side legs lengthened, the back legs shortened,
fitting themselves plainly to what must be a varying angle of descent
beyond.

And it was no chimera, no kraken of the abyss. It was a car made of
the Metal Things. I caught again the flashes and thought that they were
jewels or heaps of shining ores carried by the conscious machine.

It vanished. In its place hung poised the cube that bore the enigmatic
woman and Ruth. Then they were gone and we stood where but an instant
before they had been.

We were high above an ocean of living light--a sea of incandescent
splendors that stretched mile upon uncounted mile away and whose
incredible waves streamed thousands of feet in air, flew in gigantic
banners, in tremendous streamers, in coruscating clouds of varicolored
flame--as though torn by the talons of a mighty wind.

My dazzled sight cleared, glare and blaze and searing incandescence
took form, became ordered. Within the sea of light I glimpsed shapes
cyclopean, unnameable.

They moved slowly, with an awesome deliberateness. They shone darkly
within the flame-woven depths. From them came the volleys of the
lightnings.

Score upon score of them there were--huge and enigmatic. Their flaming
levins threaded the shimmering veils, patterned them, as though they
were the flying robes of the very spirit of fire.

And the tumult was as ten thousand Thors, smiting with hammers against
the enemies of Odin. As a forge upon whose shouting anvils was being
shaped a new world.

A new world? A metal world!

The thought spun through my mazed brain, was gone--and not until
long after did I remember it. For suddenly all that clamor died; the
lightnings ceased; all the flitting radiances paled and the sea of
flaming splendors grew thin as moving mists. The storming shapes dulled
with them, seemed to darken into the murk.

Through the fast-waning light and far, far away--miles it seemed on high
and many, many miles in length--a broad band of fluorescent amethyst
shone. From it dropped curtains, shimmering, nebulous as the marching
folds of the aurora; they poured, cascaded, from the amethystine band.

Huge and purple-black against their opalescence bulked what at first I
thought a mountain, so like was it to one of those fantastic buttes of
our desert Southwest when their castellated tops are silhouetted against
the setting sun; knew instantly that this was but subconscious striving
to translate into terms of reality the incredible.

It was a City!

A city full five thousand feet high and crowned with countless spires
and turrets, titanic arches, stupendous domes! It was as though the
man-made cliffs of lower New York were raised scores of times their
height, stretched a score of times their length. And weirdly enough it
did suggest those same towering masses of masonry when one sees them
blacken against the twilight skies.

The pit darkened as though night were filtering down into it; the vast,
purple-shadowed walls of the city sparkled out with countless lights.
From the crowning arches and turrets leaped broad filaments of flame,
flashing, electric.

Was it my straining eyes, the play of the light and shadow--or were
those high-flung excrescences shifting, changing shape? An icy
hand stretched out of the unknown, stilled my heart. For they
were shifting--arches and domes, turrets and spires; were melting,
reappearing in ferment; like the lightning-threaded, rolling edges of
the thundercloud.

I wrenched my gaze away; saw that our platform had come to rest upon a
broad and silvery ledge close to the curving frame of the portal and not
a yard from where upon her block stood Norhala, her arm clasped about
the rigid form of Ruth. I heard a sigh from Ventnor, an exclamation from
Drake.

Before one of us could cry out to Ruth, the cube glided to the edge of
the shelf, dipped out of sight.

That upon which we rode trembled and sped after it.

There came a sickening sense of falling; we lurched against each other;
for the first time the pony whinnied, fearfully. Then with awful speed
we were flying down a wide, a glistening, a steeply angled ramp into the
Pit, straight toward the half-hidden, soaring escarpments flashing afar.

Far ahead raced the Thing on which stood woman and maid. Their hair
streamed behind them, mingled, silken web of brown and shining veil
of red-gold; little clouds of sparkling corpuscles threaded them, like
flitting swarms of fire-flies; their bodies were nimbused with tiny,
flickering tongues of lavender flame.

About us, above us, began again to rumble the countless drums of the
thunder.




CHAPTER IX. THE PORTAL OF FLAME

It was as though we were on a meteor hurtling through space. The split
air shrieked and shrilled, a keening barrier against the avalanche of
the thunder. The blast bent us far back on thighs held rigid by the
magnetic grip.

The pony spread its legs, dropped its head; through the hurricane
roaring its screaming pierced thinly, that agonizing, terrible
lamentation which is of the horse and the horse alone when the limit of
its endurance is reached.

Ventnor crouched lower and lower, eyes shielded behind arms folded over
his brows, straining for a glimpse of Ruth; Drake crouched beside him,
bracing him, supporting him against the tempest.

Our line of flight became less abrupt, but the speed increased, the
wind-pressure became almost insupportable. I twisted, dropped upon my
right arm, thrust my head against my shoulder, stared backward. When
first I had looked upon the place I had sensed its immensity; now I
began to realize how vast it must really be--for already the gateway
through which we had come glimmered far away on high, shrunk to a hoop
of incandescent brass and dwindling fast.

Nor was it a cavern; I saw the stars, traced with deep relief the
familiar Northern constellations. Pit it might be, but whatever terror,
whatever ordeals were before us, we would not have to face them buried
deep within earth. There was a curious comfort to me in the thought.

Suddenly stars and sky were blotted out.

We had plunged beneath the surface of the radiant sea.

Lying in the position in which I was, I was sensible of a diminution
of the cyclonic force; the blast streamed up and over the front of the
cube. To me drifted only the wailings of our flight and the whimpering
terror of the pony.

I turned my head cautiously. Upon the very edge of the flying blocks
squatted Drake and Ventnor, grotesquely frog-like. I crawled toward
them--crawled, literally, like a caterpillar; for wherever my body
touched the surface of the cubes the attracting force held it, allowed a
creeping movement only, surface sliding upon surface--and weirdly enough
like a human measuring-worm I looped myself over to them.

As my bare palms clung to the Things I realized with finality that
whatever their activation, their life, they WERE metal.

There was no mistaking now the testimony of touch. Metal they were, with
a hint upon contact of highly polished platinum, or at the least of a
metal as finely grained as it.

Also they had temperature, a curiously pleasant warmth--the surfaces
were, I judged, around ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. I looked deep
down into the little sparkling points that were, I knew, organs of
sight; they were like the points of contact of innumerable intersecting
crystal planes. They held strangest paradoxical suggestion of being
close to the surface and still infinite distances away.

And they were like--what was it they were like?--it came to me with a
distinct shock.

They were like the galaxies of little aureate and sapphire stars in the
clear gray heavens of Norhala's eyes.

I crept beside Drake, struck him with my head.

“Can't move,” I shouted. “Can't lift my hands. Stuck fast--like a
fly--just as you said.”

“Drag 'em over your knees,” he cried, bending to me. “It slides 'em out
of the attraction.”

Acting as he had suggested I found to my astonishment I could slip my
hands free; I caught his belt, tried to lift myself by it.

“No use, Doc.” The old grin lightened for a moment his tense young face.
“You'll have to keep praying till the power's turned off. Nothing here
you can slide your knees on.”

I nodded, waddling close to his side; then sank back on my haunches to
relieve the strain upon my aching leg-muscles.

“Can you see them ahead, Walter--Ruth and the woman?” Ventnor turned his
anxious eyes toward me.

I peered into the glimmering murk; shook my head. I could see nothing.
It was indeed, as though the clustered cubes sped within a bubble of the
now wanly glistening vapors; or rather as though in our passage--as a
projectile does in air--we piled before us a thick wave of the mists
which streaming along each side, closing in behind, obscured all that
lay around.

Yet I had, persistently, the feeling that beyond these shroudings was
vast and ordered movement; marchings and counter-marchings of hosts
greater even than those Golden Hordes of Genghis which ages agone had
washed about the outer bases of the very peaks that hid this place.
Came, too, flitting shadowings of huge shapes, unnameable, moving
swiftly beside our way; gleamings that thrust themselves through the
veils like wheeling javelins of flame.

And always, always, everywhere that constant movement, rhythmic,
terrifying--like myriads of feet of creatures of an unseen, stranger
world marking time just outside the threshold of our own. Preparing,
DRILLING there in some wide vestibule of space between the known and the
unknown, alert and menacing--poised for the signal which would send them
pouring over it.


Once again I seemed to stand upon the brink of an abyss of incredible
revelation, striving helplessly, struggling for realization--and so
struggling became aware that our speed was swiftly slackening, the
roaring blast dying down, the veils before us thinning.

They cleared away. I saw Drake and Ventnor straighten up; raised myself
to my own aching knees.

We were at one end of a vortex, a funneling within the radiant vapors; a
funnel whose further end a mile ahead broadened out into a huge
circle, its mistily outlined edges impinging upon the towering scarp
of the--city. It was as though before us lay, upon its side, a cone of
crystalline clear air against whose curved sides some radiant medium
heavier than air, lighter than water, pressed.

The top arc of its prostrate base reached a thousand feet or more up the
precipitous wall; above it all was hidden in sparkling nebulosities that
were like still clouds of greenly glimmering fire-flies. Back from
the curving sides of this cone, above it and below it, the pressing
luminosities stretched into, it seemed, infinite distances.

Through them, suddenly, thousands of bright beams began to dart, to
dance, weaving and interweaving, shooting hither and yon--like myriads
of great searchlights in a phosphorescent sea fog, like countless lances
of the aurora thrusting through its own iridescent veils! And in the
play of these beams was something appallingly ordered, appallingly
rhythmic.

It was--how can I describe it?--PURPOSEFUL; purposeful as the geometric
shiftings of the Little Things of the ruins, of the summoning song of
Norhala, of the Protean changes of the Smiting Shape and the Following
Thing; and like all of these it was as laden with that baffling
certainty of hidden meanings, of messages that the brain recognized as
such yet knew it never could read.

The rays seemed to spring upward from the earth. Now they were like
countless lances of light borne by marching armies of Titans; now they
crossed and angled and flew as though they were clouds of javelins
hurled by battling swarms of the Genii of Light. And now they stood
upright while through them, thrusting them aside, bending them, passed
vast, vague shapes like mountains forming and dissolving; like darkening
monsters of some world of light pushing through thick forests of
slender, high-reaching trees of cold flame; shifting shadows of
monstrous chimerae slipping through jungles of bamboo with trunks of
diamond fire; phantasmal leviathans swimming through brakes of giant
reeds of radiance rising from the sparking ooze of a sea of star shine.

Whence came the force, the mechanism that produced this cone of clarity,
this NOT searchlight, but unlight in the midst of light? Not from
behind, that was certain--for turning I saw that behind us the mist was
as thick. I turned again--it came to me, why I knew not, yet with an
absolute certainty, that the energy, the force emanated from the distant
wall itself.

The funnel, the cone, did not expand from where we were standing, now
motionless.

It began at the wall and focused upon us.

Within the great circle the surface of the wall was smooth, utterly
blank; upon it was no trace of those flitting lights we had seen before
we had plunged down toward the radiant sea. It shone with a pale blue
phosphorescence. It was featureless, smooth, a blind cliff of polished,
blue metal--and that was all.

“Ruth!” groaned Ventnor. “Where is she?”

Aghast at my mental withdrawal from him, angry at myself for my
callousness, awkwardly I tried to crawl over to him, to touch him,
comfort him as well as I might.

And then, as though his cry had been a signal, the great cone began to
move. Slowly the circled base slipped down the shimmering facades; down,
steadily down; I realized that we had paused at the edge of some steep
declivity, for the bottom of the cone was now at a decided angle while
the upper edge of the circle had dropped a full two hundred feet below
the place where it had rested--and still it fell.


There came a gasp of relief from Ventnor, a sigh from Drake while, from
my own heart, a weight rolled. Not ten yards ahead of us and still deep
within the luminosity had appeared the regal head of Norhala, the lovely
head of Ruth. The two rose out of the glow like swimmers floating from
the depths. Now they were clear before us, and now we could see the
surface of the cube on which they rode.

But neither turned to us; each stared straightly, motionless along the
axis of the sinking cone, the woman's left arm holding Ruth close to her
side.

Drake's hand caught my shoulder in a grip that hurt--nor did he need to
point toward that which had wrung the exclamation from him. The funnel
had broken from its slow falling; it had made one swift, startling
drop and had come to rest. Its recumbent side was now flattened into a
triangular plane, widening from the narrow tip in which we stood to all
of five hundred feet where its base rested against the blue wall, and
falling at a full thirty-degree pitch.

The misty-edged circle had become an oval, a flattened ellipse another
five hundred feet high and three times that in length. And in its exact
center, shining forth as though it opened into a place of pale azure
incandescence was another rectangular Cyclopean portal.

On each side of it, in the apparently solid face of the gleaming,
metallic cliffs, a slit was opening.

They began as thin lines a hundred yards in height through which
the intense light seemed to hiss; quickly they opened--widening like
monstrous cat pupils until at last, their widening ceasing, they glared
forth, the blue incandescence gushing from them like molten steel from
an opened sluice.

Deep within them I sensed a movement. Scores of towering shapes swam
within and glided out of them, each reflecting the vivid light as though
they themselves were incandescent. Around their crests spun wide and
flaming coronets.

They rushed forth, wheeling, whirling, driven like leaves in a
whirlwind. Out they swirled from the cat's eyes of the glimmering wall,
these dervish obelisks crowded with spinning fires. They vanished in the
mists. Instantly with their going, the eyes contracted; were but slits;
were gone. And before us within the oval was only the waiting portal.

The leading block leaped forward. As abruptly, those that bore us
followed. Again under that strain of projectile flight we clutched each
other; the pony screamed in terror. The metal cliff rushed to meet us
like a thunder cloud of steel; the portal raced upon us--a square mouth
of cold blue flame.

And into it we swept; were devoured by it.

Light in blinding, intolerable flood beat about us, blackening the sight
with agony. We pressed, the three of us, against the side of the pony,
burying our faces in its shaggy coat, striving to hide our eyes from the
radiance which, strain closely as we might, seemed to pierce through the
body of the little beast, through our own heads, searing the sight.




CHAPTER X. “WITCH! GIVE BACK MY SISTER”

How long we were within that glare I do not know; it seemed unending
hours; it was of course only minutes--seconds, perhaps. Then I was
sensible of a permeating shadow, a darkness gentle and healing.

I raised my head and opened my eyes. We were moving tranquilly, with
a curious suggestion of homing leisureliness, through a soft, blue
shimmering darkness. It was as though we were drifting within some high
borderland of light; a region in which that rapid vibration we call the
violet was mingled with a still more rapid vibration whose quick pulsing
was felt by the brain but ever fled ere that brain could register it in
terms of color. And there seemed to be a film over my sight; dazzlement
from the unearthly blaze, I thought, shaking my head impatiently.

My eyes focused upon an object a little more than a foot away; my neck
grew rigid, my scalp prickled while I stared, unbelieving. And that at
which I stared was--a skeleton hand. Every bone a grayish black, sharply
silhouetted, clean as some master surgeon's specimen, it was extended
as though clutching at--clutching at--what was that toward which it was
reaching?

Again the icy prickling over scalp and skin--for its talons stretched
out to grasp a steed that Death himself might have ridden, a rack whose
bare skull hung drooping upon bent vertebrae.

I raised my hands to my face to shut out the ghostly sight--and swiftly
the clutching bony hand moved toward me--was before my eyes--touched me.

The cry that sheer horror wrested from me was strangled by realization.
And so acute was my relief, so reassuring was it to have in the midst
of these mysteries some sane, understandable thing occur that I laughed
aloud.

For the skeleton hand was my own. The mournful ghastly mount of death
was--our pony. And when I looked again I knew what I would see--and
see them I did--two tall skeletons, skulls resting on their bony arms,
leaning against the frame of the beast.

While ahead of us, floating poised upon the surface of the glistening
cube, were two women skeletons--Ruth and Norhala!

Weird enough was the sight. Dureresque, grimly awful as materialization
of a scene of the Dance Macabre--and yet--vastly comforting.

For here was something which was well within the range of human
knowledge. It was the light about us that did it; a vibration that even
as I conjectured, was within the only partly explored region of the
ultraviolet and the comparatively unexplored region above it.

Yet there were differences, for there was none of that misty halo around
the bones, the flesh which the X-rays cannot render wholly invisible.
The skeletons stood out clean cut, with no trace of fleshly vestments.

I crept over, spoke to the two.

“Don't look up yet,” I said. “Don't open your eyes. We're going through
a queer light. It has an X-ray quality. You're going to see me as a
skeleton--”

“What?” shouted Drake. Disobeying my warning he straightened, glared
at me. And disquieting as the spectacle had been before, fully
understanding it as I did, I could not restrain my shudder at the utter
weirdness of that skull which was his head thrusting itself toward me.

The skeleton that was Ventnor turned to me; was arrested by the sight of
the flitting pair ahead. I saw the fleshless jaws clamp, then opened to
speak.

Abruptly, upon the skeletons in front the flesh dropped back. Girl and
woman stood there once again robed in beauty.

So swift was that transition from the grisly unreal to the normal that
even to my unsuperstitious mind it smacked of necromancy. The next
instant the three of us stood looking at each other, clothed once more
in the flesh, and the pony no longer the steed of death, but our shaggy,
patient little companion.

The light had changed; the high violet had gone from it, and it was shot
with yellow gleamings like fugitive sunbeams. We were passing through
a wide corridor that seemed to be unending. The yellow light grew
stronger.

“That light wasn't exactly the Roentgen variety,” Drake interrupted my
absorption in our surroundings. “And I hope to God it's as different as
it seemed. If it's not we may be up against a lot of trouble.”

“More trouble than we're in?” I asked, a trifle satirically.

“X-ray burns,” he answered, “and no way to treat them in this place--if
we live to want treatment,” he ended grimly.

“I don't think we were subjected to their action long enough--” I began,
and was silent.

The corridor had opened without warning into a place for whose immensity
I have no images that are adequate. It was a chamber that was vaster
than ten score of the Great Halls of Karnac in one; great as that fabled
hall in dread Amenti where Osiris sits throned between the Searcher of
Hearts and the Eater of Souls, judging the jostling hosts of the newly
dead.

Temple it was in its immensity, and its solemn vastness--but unlike any
temple ever raised by human toil. In no ruin of earth's youth giants'
work now crumbling under the weight of time had I ever sensed a
shadow of the strangeness with which this was instinct. No--nor in the
shattered fanes that once had held the gods of old Egypt, nor in the
pillared shrines of Ancient Greece, nor Imperial Rome, nor mosque,
basilica nor cathedral.

All these had been dedicated to gods which, whether created by humanity
as science believes, or creators of humanity as their worshippers
believed, still held in them that essence we term human.

The spirit, the force, that filled this place had in it nothing, NOTHING
of the human.

No place? Yes, there was one--Stonehenge. Within that monolithic circle
I had felt a something akin to this, as inhuman; a brooding spirit
stony, stark, unyielding--as though not men but a people of stone had
raised the great Menhirs.

This was a sanctuary built by a people of metal!

It was filled with a soft yellow glow like pale sunshine. Up from its
floor arose hundreds of tremendous, square pillars down whose polished
sides the crocus light seemed to flow.

Far, far as the gaze could reach, the columns marched, oppressively
ordered, appallingly mathematical. From their massiveness distilled a
sense of power, mysterious, mechanical yet--living; something priestly,
hierophantic--as though they were guardians of a shrine.

Now I saw whence came the light suffusing this place. High up among the
pillars floated scores of orbs that shone like pale gilt frozen suns.
Great and small, through all the upper levels these strange luminaries
gleamed, fixed and motionless, hanging unsupported in space. Out from
their shining spherical surfaces darted rays of the same pale gold,
rigid, unshifting, with the same suggestion of frozen stillness.

“They look like big Christmas-tree stars,” muttered Drake.

“They're lights,” I answered. “Of course they are. They're not
matter--not metal, I mean--”

“There's something about them like St. Elmo's fire, witch
lights--condensations of atmospheric electricity,” Ventnor's voice was
calm; now that it was plain we were nearing the heart of this mystery
in which we were enmeshed he had clearly taken fresh grip, was again his
observant, scientific self.

We watched, once more silent; and indeed we had spoken little since
we had begun that ride whose end we sensed close. In the unfolding of
enigmatic happening after happening the mind had deserted speech and
crouched listening at every door of sight and hearing to gather some
clue to causes, some thread of understanding.

Slowly now we were gliding through the forest of pillars; so effortless,
so smooth our flight that we seemed to be standing still, the tremendous
columns flitting past us, turning and wheeling around us, dizzyingly. My
head swam with the mirage motion, I closed my eyes.

“Look,” Drake was shaking me. “Look. What do you make of that?”

Half a mile ahead the pillars stopped at the edge of a shimmering,
quivering curtain of green luminescence. High, high up past the pale
gilt suns its smooth folds ran, into the golden amber mist that canopied
the columns.

In its sparkling was more than a hint of the dancing corpuscles of the
aurora; it was, indeed, as though woven of the auroral rays. And all
about it played shifting, tremulous shadows formed by the merging of the
golden light with the curtain's emerald gleaming.

Up to its base swept the cube that bore Ruth and Norhala--and stopped.
From it leaped the woman, and drew Ruth down beside her, then turned and
gestured toward us.

That upon which we rode drew close. I felt it quiver beneath me; felt on
the instant, the magnetic grip drop from me, angle downward and leave me
free. Shakily I arose from aching knees, and saw Ventnor flash down and
run, rifle in hand, toward his sister.

Drake bent for his gun. I moved unsteadily toward the side of the
clustered cubes. There came a curious pushing motion driving me to the
edge. Sliding over upon me came Drake and the pony--

The cube tilted, gently, playfully--and with the slightest of jars the
three of us stood beside it on the floor, we two men gaping at it in
renewed wonder, and the little beast stretching its legs, lifting its
feet and whinnying with relief.

Then abruptly the four blocks that had been our steed broke from each
other; that which had been the woman's glided to them.

The four clicked into place behind it and darted from sight.

“Ruth!” Ventnor's voice was vibrant with his fear. “Ruth! What is wrong
with you? What has she done to you?”

We ran to his side. He stood clutching her hands, searching her eyes.
They were wide, unseeing, dream filled. Upon her face the calm and
stillness, which were mirrored reflections of Norhala's unearthly
tranquillity, had deepened.

“Brother.” The sweet voice seemed far away, drifting out of untroubled
space, an echo of Norhala's golden chimings--“Brother, there is nothing
wrong with me. Indeed--all is--well with me--brother.”

He dropped the listless palms, faced the woman, tall figure tense, drawn
with mingled rage and anguish.

“What have you done to her?” he whispered in Norhala's own tongue.

Her serene gaze took him in, undisturbed by his anger save for the
faintest shadow of wonder, of perplexity.

“Done?” she repeated, slowly. “I have stilled all that was troubled
within her--have lifted her above sorrow. I have given her the peace--as
I will give it to you if--”

“You'll give me nothing,” he interrupted fiercely; then, his passion
breaking through all restraint--“Yes, you damned witch--you'll give me
back my sister!”

In his rage he had spoken English; she could not, of course, have
understood the words, but their anger and hatred she did understand.
Her serenity quivered, broke. The strange stars within her eyes began
to glitter forth as they had when she had summoned the Smiting Thing.
Unheeding, Ventnor thrust out a hand, caught her roughly by one bare,
lovely shoulder.

“Give her back to me, I say!” he cried. “Give her back to me!”

The woman's eyes grew--awful. Out of the distended pupils the strange
stars blazed; upon her face was something of the goddess outraged. I
felt the shadow of Death's wings.

“No! No--Norhala! No, Martin!” the veils of inhuman calm shrouding Ruth
were torn; swiftly the girl we knew looked out from them. She threw
herself between the two, arms outstretched.

“Ventnor!” Drake caught his arms, held them tight; “that's not the way
to save her!”

Ventnor stood between us, quivering, half sobbing. Never until then had
I realized how great, how absorbing was that love of his for Ruth. And
the woman saw it, too, even though dimly; envisioned it humanly. For,
under the shock of human passion, that which I thought then as utterly
unknown to her as her cold serenity was to us, the sleeping soul--I
use the popular word for those emotional complexes that are peculiar to
mankind--stirred, awakened.

Wrath fled from her knitted brows; her eyes dropping to the girl, lost
their dreadfulness; softened. She turned them upon Ventnor, they brooded
upon him; within their depths a half-troubled interest, a questioning.

A smile dawned upon the exquisite face, humanizing it, transfiguring
it, touching with tenderness the sweet and sleeping mouth--as a hovering
dream the lips of the slumbering maid.

And on the face of Ruth, as upon a mirror, I watched that same slow,
understanding tenderness reflected!

“Come,” said Norhala, and led the way through the sparkling curtains.
As she passed, an arm around Ruth's neck, I saw the marks of Ventnor's
fingers upon her white shoulder, staining its purity, marring it like a
blasphemy.

For an instant I hung behind, watching their figures grow misty within
the shining shadows; then followed hastily. Entering the mists I was
conscious of a pleasant tingling, an acceleration of the pulse, an
increase of that sense of well-being which, I grew suddenly aware,
had since the beginning of our strange journey minimized the nervous
attrition of constant contact with the abnormal.

Striving to classify, to reduce to order, my sensations I drew close to
the others, overtaking them in a dozen paces. A dozen paces more and we
stepped out of the curtainings.




CHAPTER XI. THE METAL EMPEROR

We stood at the edge of a well whose walls were of that same green
vaporous iridescence through which we had just come, but finer grained,
compact; as though here the corpuscles of which they were woven were far
closer spun. Thousands of feet above us the mighty cylinder uprose, and
in the lessened circle that was its mouth I glimpsed the bright stars;
and knew by this it opened into the free air.

All of half a mile in diameter was this shaft, and ringed regularly
along its height by wide amethystine bands--like rings of a hollow
piston. They were, in color, replicas of that I had glimpsed before
our descent into this place and against whose gleaming cataracts the
outlines of the incredible city had lowered. And they were in motion,
spinning smoothly, and swiftly.

Only one swift glance I gave them, my eyes held by a most
extraordinary--edifice--altar--machine--I could not find the word for
it--then.

Its base was a scant hundred yards from where we had paused and
concentric with the sides of the pit. It stood upon a thick circular
pedestal of what appeared to be cloudy rock crystal supported by
hundreds of thick rods of the same material.

Up from it lifted the structure, a thing of glistening cones and
spinning golden disks; fantastic yet disquietingly symmetrical; bizarre
as an angled headdress worn by a mountainous Javanese god--yet coldly,
painfully mathematical. In every direction the cones pointed, seemingly
interwoven of strands of metal and of light.

What was their color? It came to me--that of the mysterious element
which stains the sun's corona, that diadem seen only when our day star
is in eclipse; the unknown element which science has named coronium,
which never yet has been found on earth and that may be electricity
in its one material form; electricity that is ponderable; force whose
vibrations are keyed down to mass; power transmuted into substance.

Thousands upon thousands the cones bristled, pyramiding to the base
of one tremendous spire that tapered up almost to the top of the shaft
itself.

In their grouping the mind caught infinite calculations carried into
infinity; an apotheosis of geometry compassing the rhythms of unknown
spatial dimensions; concentration of the equations of the star hordes.

The mathematics of the Cosmos.

From the left of the crystalline base swept an enormous sphere. It was
twice the height of a tall man, and it was a paler blue than any of
these Things I had seen, almost, indeed, an azure; different, too, in
other subtle, indefinable ways.

Behind it glided a pair of the pyramidal shapes, their pointed
tips higher by a yard or more than the top of the sphere. They
paused--regarding us. Out from the opposite arc of the crystal pedestal
moved six other globes, somewhat smaller than the first and of a deep
purplish luster.

They separated, lining up on each side of the leader now standing a
little in advance of the twin tetrahedrons, rigid and motionless as
watching guards.

There they stood--that enigmatic row, intent, studying us beneath their
god or altar or machine of cones and disks within their cylinder walled
with light.

And at that moment there crystallized within my consciousness the
sublimation of all the strangenesses of all that had gone before, a
panic loneliness as though I had wandered into an alien world--a world
as unfamiliar to humanity, as unfamiliar with it as our own would seem
to a thinking, mobile crystal adrift among men.

Norhala raised her white arms in salutation; from her throat came a
lilting theme of her weirdly ordered, golden chanting. Was it speech, I
wondered; and if so--prayer or entreaty or command?

The great sphere quivered and undulated. Swifter than the eye could
follow it dilated; opened!

Where the azure globe had been, flashed out a disk of flaming splendors,
the very secret soul of flowered flame! And simultaneously the pyramids
leaped up and out behind it--two gigantic, four-rayed stars blazing with
cold blue fires.

The green auroral curtainings flared out, ran with streaming
radiance--as though some Spirit of Jewels had broken bonds of
enchantment and burst forth jubilant, flooding the shaft with its freed
glories. Norhala's song ceased; an arm dropped down upon the shoulders
of Ruth.

Then woman and girl began to float toward the radiant disk.

As one, the three of us sprang after them. I felt a shock that was like
a quick, abrupt tap upon every nerve and muscle, stiffening them into
helpless rigidity.

Paralyzing that sharp, unseen contact had been, but nothing of pain
followed it. Instead it created an extraordinary acuteness of sight and
hearing, an abnormal keying up of the observational faculties, as though
the energy so mysteriously drawn from our motor centers had been thrown
back into the sensory.

I could take in every minute detail of the flashing miracle of gemmed
fires and its flaming ministers. Halfway between them and us Norhala and
Ruth drifted; I could catch no hint of voluntary motion on their part
and knew that they were not walking, but were being borne onward by some
manifestation of that same force which held us motionless.

I forgot them in my contemplation of the Disk.

It was oval, twenty feet in height, I judged, and twelve in its greatest
width. A broad band, translucent as sun golden chrysolite, ran about its
periphery.

Set within this zodiac and spaced at mathematically regular intervals
were nine ovoids of intensely living light. They shone like nine
gigantic cabochon cut sapphires; they ranged from palest, watery blue
up through azure and purple and down to a ghostly mauve shot with sullen
undertones of crimson.

In each of them was throned a flame that seemed the very fiery essence
of vitality.

The--BODY--was convex, swelling outward like the boss of a shield;
shimmering rosy-gray and crystalline. From the vital ovoids ran a
pattern of sparkling threads, irised and brilliant as floss of molten
jewels; converging with interfacings of spirals, of volutes and of
triangles into the nucleus.

And that nucleus, what was it?

Even now I can but guess--brain in part as we understand brain,
certainly; but far, far more than that in its energies, its powers.

It was like an immense rose. An incredible rose of a thousand close
clustering petals. It blossomed with a myriad shifting hues. And instant
by instant the flood of varicolored flame that poured into its petalings
down from the sapphire ovoids waxed and waned in crescendoes and
diminuendoes of relucent harmonies--ecstatic, awesome.

The heart of the rose was a star of incandescent ruby.

From the flaming crimson center to aureate, flashing penumbra it was
instinct with and poured forth power--power vast and conscious.

Not with that same completeness could I realize the ministering star
shapes, half hidden as they were by the Disk. Their radiance was less,
nor had they its miracle of pulsing gem fires. Blue they were, blue of
a peculiar vibrancy, and blue were the glistening threads that ran
down from blue-black circular convexities set within each of the points
visible to me.

Unlike in shape, their flame of vitality dimmer than the ovoids of the
Disk's golden zone, still I knew that they were even as those--ORGANS,
organs of unknown senses, unknown potentialities. Their nuclei I could
not observe.

The floating figures had drawn close to that disk and had paused.

And on the moment of their pausing I felt a surge of strength, a
snapping of the spell that had bound us, an instantaneous withdrawal of
the inhibiting force. Ventnor broke into a run, holding his rifle at
the alert. We raced after him; were close to the shining shapes. And,
gasping, we stopped short not a dozen paces away.

For Norhala had soared up toward the flaming rose of the Disk as though
lifted by gentle, unseen hands. Close to it for an instant she swung. I
saw the exquisite body gleam through her thin robes as though bathed in
soft flames of rosy pearl.

Higher she floated, and toward the right of the zodiac. From the edges
of three of the ovoids swirled a little cloud of tentacles, gossamer
filaments of opal. They whipped out a full yard from the Disk's surface,
touching her, caressing her.

For a moment she hung there, her face hidden from us; then was dropped
softly to her feet and stood, arms stretched wide, her copper hair
streaming cloudily about her regal head.

And up past her floated Ruth, levitated as had been she--and her face,
ecstatic as though she were gazing into Paradise, yet drenched with the
tranquillity of the infinite. Her wide eyes stared up toward that rose
of splendors through which the pulsing colors now raced more swiftly.
She hung poised before it while around her head a faint aureole began to
form.

Again the gossamer threads thrust forth, searched her. They ran over her
rough clothing--perplexedly. They coiled about her neck, stole through
her hair, brushed shut her eyes, circled her brow, her breasts, girdled
her.

Weirdly was it like some intelligence observing, studying, some creature
of another species--puzzled by its similarity and unsimilarity with the
one other creature of its kind it knew, and striving to reconcile those
differences. And like such a questioning brain calling upon others for
counsel, it swung Ruth upward to the watching star at the right.

A rifle shot rang out.

Another--the reports breaking the silence like a profanation. Unseen by
either of us, Ventnor had slipped to one side where he could cover the
core of ruby flame that must have seemed to him the heart of the Disk's
rose of fire. He knelt a few yards away, white lipped, eyes cold gray
ice, sighting carefully for a third shot.

“Don't! Martin--don't fire!” I shouted, leaping toward him.

“Stop! Ventnor--” Drake's panic cry mingled with my own.

But before we could reach him, Norhala flew to him, like a darting
swallow. Down the face of the Disk glided the upright body of Ruth,
struck softly, stood swaying.

And out of the blue-black convexity within a star point of one of the
opened pyramids a lance of intense green flame darted, a lightning bolt
as real as any hurled by tempest, upon Ventnor.

The shattered air closed behind the streaming spark with the sound of
breaking glass.

It struck--Norhala.

It struck her. It seemed to splash upon her, to run down her like water.
One curling tongue writhed over her bare shoulder and leaped to the
barrel of the rifle in Ventnor's hands. It flashed up it and licked
him. The gun was torn from his grip, hurled high in air, exploding as it
went. He leaped convulsively from his knees and dropped.

I heard a wailing, low, bitter and heartbroken. Past us ran Ruth, all
dream, all unearthliness gone from a face now a tragic mask of human
woe and terror. She threw herself down beside her brother, felt of his
heart; then raised herself upon her knees and thrust out supplicating
hands to the shapes.

“Don't hurt him any more! He didn't mean it!” she cried out to them
piteously--like a child. She reached up, caught one of Norhala's hands.
“Norhala--don't let them kill him. Don't let them hurt him any more.
Please!” she sobbed.

Beside me I heard Drake cursing.

“If they touch her I'll kill the woman! I will, by God I will!” He
strode to Norhala's side.

“If you want to live, call off these devils of yours.” His voice was
strangled.

She looked at him, wonder deepening on the tranquil brow, in the clear,
untroubled gaze. Of course she could not understand his words--but it
was not that which made my own sick apprehension grow.

It was that she did not understand what called them forth. Did not even
understand what reason lay behind Ruth's sorrow, Ruth's prayer.

And more and more wondering grew in her eyes as she looked from the
threatening Drake to the supplicating Ruth, and from them to the still
body of Ventnor.

“Tell her what I say, Goodwin. I mean it.”

I shook my head. That was not the way, I knew. I looked toward the Disk,
still flanked with its sextette of spheres, still guarded by the flaming
blue stars. They were motionless, calm, watching. I sensed no hostility,
no anger; it was as though they were waiting for us to--to--waiting for
us to do what?

It came to me--they were indifferent. That was it--as indifferent as we
could be to the struggle of an ephemera; and as mildly curious.

“Norhala,” I turned to the woman, “she would not have him suffer; she
would not have him die. She loves him.”

“Love?” she repeated, and all of her wonderment seemed crystallized in
the word. “Love?” she asked.

“She loves him,” I said; and then, why I did not know, but I added,
pointing to Drake: “and he loves her.”

There was a tiny, astonished sob from Ruth. Again Norhala brooded over
her. Then with a little despairing shake of her head, she paced over and
faced the great Disk.


Tensely we waited. Communication there was between them, interchange
of--thought; how carried out I would not hazard even to myself.

But of a surety these two--the goddess woman, the wholly unhuman shape
of metal, of jeweled fires and conscious force--understood each other.

For she turned, stood aside--and the body of Ventnor quivered, arose
from the floor, stood upright and with closed eyes, head dropping upon
one shoulder, glided toward the Disk like a dead man carried by those
messengers never seen by man who, the Arabs believe, bear the death
drugged souls before Allah for their awakening.

Ruth moaned and hid her eyes; Drake reached down, gathered her up in his
arms, held her close.

Ventnor's body stood before the Disk, then swam up along its face. The
tendrils waved out, felt of it, thrust themselves down through the wide
collar of the shirt. The floating form passed higher, over the edge of
the Disk; lay high beside the right star point of the rayed shape to
which Ruth had been passing when Ventnor's shot brought the tragedy upon
us. I saw other tentacles whip forth, examine, caress.

Then down the body swung, was borne through air, laid gently at our
feet.

“He is not--dead,” it was Norhala beside me; she lifted Ruth's face from
Drake's breast. “He will not die. It may be he will walk again. They
can not help,” there was a shadow of apology in her tones. “They did
not know. They thought it was the”--she hesitated as though at loss for
words--“the--the Fire Play.”

“The Fire Play?” I gasped.

“Yes,” she nodded. “You shall see it. And now I will take him to my
house. You are safe--now, nor need you trouble. For he has given you to
me.”

“Who has given us to you--Norhala?” I asked, as calmly as I could.

“He”--she nodded to the Disk, then spoke the phrase that was both
ancient Assyria's and ancient Persia's title for their all-conquering
rulers, and that meant--“the King of Kings. The Great King, Master of
Life and Death.”

She took Ruth from Drake's arms, pointing to Ventnor.

“Bear him,” she commanded, and led the way back through the walls of
light.

As we lifted the body, I slipped my hand through the shirt, felt at the
heart. Faint was the pulsation and slow, but regular.

Close to the encircling vapors I cast one look behind me. The shapes
stood immobile, flashing disks, gigantic radiant stars and the six great
spheres beneath their geometric super-Euclidean god or shrine or machine
of interwoven threads of luminous force and metal--still motionless,
still watching.

We emerged into the place of pillars. There stood the hooded pony and
its patience, its uncomplaining acceptance of its place as servant to
man brought a lump into my throat, salved, I suppose, my human vanity,
abased as it had been by the colossal indifference of those things to
which we were but playthings.

Again Norhala sent forth her call. Out of the maze glided her quintette
of familiars; again the four clicked into one. Upon its top we lifted,
Drake ascending first, the pony; then the body of Ventnor.

I saw Norhala lead Ruth to the remaining cube; saw the girl break away
from her, leap beside me, and kneeling at her brother's head, cradle
it against her soft breast. Then as I found in the medicine case the
hypodermic needle and the strychnine for which I had been searching, I
began my examination of Ventnor.

The cubes quivered--swept away through the forest of columns.

We crouched, the three of us, blind to anything that lay about us,
heedless of whatever road of wonders we were on, striving to strengthen
in Ventnor the spark of life so near extinction.




CHAPTER XII. “I WILL GIVE YOU PEACE”

In our concentration upon Ventnor none of us had given thought to the
passing of time, nor where we were going. We stripped him to the waist,
and while Ruth massaged head and neck, Drake's strong fingers kneaded
chest and abdomen. I had used to the utmost my somewhat limited medical
knowledge.

We had found no mark nor burn upon him, not even upon his hands over
which had run the licking flame. The slightly purplish, cyanotic
tinge of his skin had given way to a clear pallor; the skin was itself
disquietingly cold, the blood-pressure only slightly subnormal. The
pulse was more rapid, stronger; the breathing faint but regular, and
with no laboring. The pupils of his eyes were contracted almost to the
point of invisibility.

I could get no nervous reactions whatever. I am familiar with the
effects of electric shock and know what to do in such cases, but
Ventnor's symptoms, while similar in part, presented other features
unknown to me and most puzzling. There was a passive automatism, a
perplexing muscular rigidity which caused arms and legs, hands and head
to remain, doll-like, in any position placed.

Several times during my labors I had been aware of Norhala gazing down
upon us; but she made no effort to help, nor did she speak.

Now, my strained attention relaxing, I began to receive and note
impressions from without. There was a different feeling in the air,
a diminution of the magnetic tension; I smelled the blessed breath of
trees and water.

The light about us was clear and pearly, about the intensity of the moon
at full. Looking back along the way we had been traveling, I saw a half
mile away vertical, knife-sharp edges of two facing cliffs, the gap
between them a mile or more wide.

Through them we must have passed, for beyond them were the radiant mists
of the pit of the city, and through this precipitous gateway filtered
the enveloping luminosity. On each side of us uprose gradually
converging and perpendicular scarps along whose base huddled a sparse
foliage.

There came a low whistle of astonishment from Drake; I turned. We were
slowly gliding toward something that looked like nothing so much as a
huge and shimmering bubble of mingled sapphire and turquoise, swimming
up from and two-thirds above and the balance still hidden within earth.
It seemed to draw to itself the light, sending it back with gleamings
of the gray-blue of the star sapphire, with pellucid azures and lazulis
like clouded jades, with glistening peacock iridescences and tender,
milky greens of tropic shallows.

Little turrets globular and topaz, yellow and pierced with tiny
hexagonal openings clustered about it like baby bubbles just nestling
down to rest.

Great trees shadowed it, unfamiliar trees among whose glossy leaves
blossomed in wreaths flowers pink and white as apple-blossoms.
From their graceful branches strange fruits, golden and scarlet and
pear-shaped, hung pendulous.

It was an elfin palace; a goblin dwelling; such a bower as some
mirthful, beauty-loving Jinn King of Jewels might have built from
enchanted hoards for some well-beloved daughter of earth.

All of fifty feet in height was the blue globe, and up to a wide and
ovaled entrance ran a broad and shining roadway. Along this the cubes
swept and stopped.

“My house,” murmured Norhala.

The attraction that had held us to the surface of the blocks relaxed,
angled through changed and assisting lines of force; the hosts of
minute eyes sparkling quizzically, interestedly, at us, we gently slid
Ventnor's body; lifted down the pony.

“Enter,” sighed Norhala, and waved a welcoming hand.

“Tell her to wait a minute,” ordered Drake.

He slipped the bandage from off the pony's head, threw off the
saddlebags, and led it to the side of the roadway where thick, lush
grass was growing, spangled with flowerets. There he hobbled it and
rejoined us. Together we picked up Ventnor and passed slowly through the
portal.

We stood in a shadowed chamber. The light that filled it was
translucent, and oddly enough with little of the bluish quality I had
expected. Crystalline it was; the shadows crystalline, too, rigid--like
the facets of great crystals. And as my eyes accustomed themselves I saw
that what I had thought shadows actually were none.

They were slices of semitransparent stone like pale moonstones,
springing from the curving walls and the high dome, and bisecting and
intersecting the chamber. They were pierced with oval doorways over
which fell glimmering metallic curtains--silk of silver and gold.

I glimpsed a pile of this silken stuff near by, and as we laid our
burden upon it Ruth caught my arm with a little frightened cry.

Through a curtained oval sidled a figure.

Black and tall, its long and gnarled arms swung apelike; its shoulders
were distorted, one so much longer than the other that the hand upon
that side hung far below the knee.

It walked with a curious, crablike motion. Upon its face were stamped
countless wrinkles and its blackness seemed less that of pigmentation
than the weathering of unbelievable years, the very stain of
ancientness. And about neither face nor figure was there anything to
show whether it was man or woman.

From the twisted shoulders a short and sleeveless red tunic fell.
Incredibly old the creature was--and by its corded muscles, its sinewy
tendons, as incredibly powerful. It raised within me a half sick
revulsion, loathing. But the eyes were not ancient, no. Irisless,
lashless, black and brilliant, they blazed out of the face's carven web
of wrinkles, intent upon Norhala and filled with a flame of worship.


It threw itself at her feet, prostrate, the inordinately long arms
outstretched.

“Mistress!” it whined in a high and curiously unpleasant falsetto.
“Great lady! Goddess!”

She stretched out a sandaled foot, touched one of the black taloned
hands, and at the contact I saw a shiver of ecstasy run through the lank
body. “Yuruk--” she began, and paused, regarding us.

“The goddess speaks! Yuruk hears! The goddess speaks!” It was a chant of
adoration.

“Yuruk. Rise. Look upon the strangers.”

The creature--and now I knew what it was--writhed, twisted, and
hideously apelike crouched upon its haunches, hands knuckling the floor.

By the amazement in the unwinking eyes it was plain that not till now
had the eunuch taken cognizance of us. The amazement fled, was replaced
with a black fire of malignancy, of hatred--jealousy.

“Augh!” he snarled; leaped to his feet; thrust an arm toward Ruth. She
gave a little cry, cowered against Drake.

“None of that!” He struck down the clutching arm.

“Yuruk!” There was a hint of anger in the bell-toned voice. “Yuruk,
these belong to me. No harm must come to them. Yuruk--beware!”

“The goddess commands. Yuruk obeys.” If fear quavered in the words,
beneath was more than a trace of a sullenness, too, sinister enough.

“That's a nice little playmate for her new playthings,” muttered Drake.
“If that bird gets the least bit gay--I shoot him pronto.” He gave Ruth
a reassuring hug. “Cheer up, Ruth. Don't mind that thing. He's something
we can handle.”

Norhala waved a white hand; Yuruk sidled over to one of the curtained
ovals and through it, reappearing almost instantly with a huge platter
upon which were fruits, and a curdly white liquid in bowls of thick
porcelain.

“Eat,” she said, as the gnarled black arms placed the platter at our
feet.

“Hungry?” asked Drake. Ruth shook her head violently.

“I'm going out for the saddlebags,” said Drake. “We'll use our own
stuff--while it lasts. I'm taking no chances on what the Yuruk lad
brings--with all due respect to Norhala's good intentions.”

He started for the doorway; the eunuch blocked his way.

“We have with us food of our own, Norhala,” I explained. “He goes to get
it.”

She nodded indifferently; clapped her hands. Yuruk shrank back, and out
strode Drake.

“I am weary,” sighed Norhala. “The way was long. I will refresh
myself--”

She stretched out a foot toward Yuruk. He knelt, unlaced the turquoise
bands, drew off the sandals. Her hands sought her breast, dwelt for an
instant there.

Down slipped her silken veils, clingingly, slowly, as though reluctant
to unclasp her; whispering they fell from the high and tender breasts,
the delicate rounded hips, and clustered about her feet in soft
petalings as of some flower of pale amber foam. Out of the calyx of that
flower arose the gleaming miracle of her body crowned with glowing glory
of her cloudy hair.

Naked she was, yet clothed with an unearthly purity, the purity of the
far-flung, serene stars, of the eternal snows upon some calm, high-flung
peak, the tranquil, silver dawns of spring; protected by some spell of
divinity which chilled and slew the flame of desire. A maiden Ishtar, a
virginal Isis; a woman--yet with no more of woman's lure than if she had
been some exquisite and breathing statue of mingled ivory and milk of
pearls.

So she stood, indifferent to us who gazed upon her, withdrawn, musing,
as though she had forgotten us. And that serene indifference, with its
entire absence of what we term sex consciousness, revealed to me once
more how great was the abyss between us and her.

Slowly she raised her arms, wound the floating tresses into a coronal.
I saw Drake enter with the saddlebags; saw them drop from hands relaxing
under the shock of this amazing tableau; saw his eyes widen and fill
with wonder and half-awed admiration.

Now Norhala stepped out of her fallen robes and moved toward the further
wall, Yuruk following. He stooped, raised an ewer of silver and began
gently to pour over her shoulders its contents. Again and again he bent
and filled the vessel, dipping it into a shallow basin from which came
the bubbling and chuckling of a little spring. And again I marveled at
the marble smoothness and fineness of her skin on which the caressing
water left tiny silvery globules, gemming it. The eunuch slithered to
one side, drew from a quaint chest clothes of white floss; patted her
dry with them; threw over her shoulders a silken robe of blue.

Back she floated to us; hovered over Ruth, crouching with her brother's
head upon her knees.

She made a motion as though to draw the girl to her; hesitated as Ruth's
face set in a passion of denial. A shadow of kindness drifted through
the wide, mysterious eyes; a shadow of pity joined it as she looked
curiously down on Ventnor.

“Bathe,” she murmured, and pointed to the pool. “And rest. No harm shall
come to any of you here. And you--” A hand rested for a moment lightly
on the girl's curly head. “When you desire it--I will again give
you--peace!”

She parted the curtains, and the eunuch still following, was hidden
beyond them.




CHAPTER XIII. “VOICE FROM THE VOID”

Helplessly we looked at each other. Then called forth perhaps by what
she saw in Drake's eyes, perhaps by another thought, Ruth's cheeks
crimsoned, her head drooped; the web of her hair hid the warm rose of
her face, the frozen pallor of Ventnor's.

Abruptly, she sprang to her feet. “Walter! Dick! Something's happening
to Martin!”

Before she had ceased we were beside her; bending over Ventnor. His
mouth was opening, slowly, slowly--with an effort agonizing to watch.
Then his voice came through lips that scarcely moved; faint, faint as
though it floated from infinite distances, a ghost of a voice whispering
with phantom breath out of a dead throat.

“Hard--hard! So hard!” the whispering complained. “Don't know how long I
can keep connection--with voice.

“Was fool to shoot. Sorry--might have gotten you in worse trouble--but
crazy with fear for Ruth--thought, too, might be worth chance.
Sorry--not my usual line--”

The thin thread of sound ceased. I felt my eyes fill with tears; it was
like Ventnor to flay himself like this for what he thought stupidity,
like him to make this effort to admit his supposed fault and crave
forgiveness--as like him as that mad attack upon the flaming Disk in its
own temple, surrounded by its ministers, had been so bafflingly unlike
his usual cool, collected self.

“Martin,” I called, bending closer, “it's nothing, old friend. No one
blames you. Try to rouse yourself.”

“Dear,” it was Ruth, passionately tender, “it's me. Can you hear me?”

“Only speck of consciousness and motionless in the void,” the whisper
began again. “Terribly alive, terribly alone. Seem outside space
yet--still in body. Can't see, hear, feel--short-circuited from every
sense--but in some strange way realize you--Ruth, Walter, Drake.

“See without seeing--here floating in darkness that is also light--black
light--indescribable. In touch, too, with these--”

Again the voice trailed into silence; returned, word and phrase pouring
forth disconnected, with a curious and turbulent rhythm, like rushing
wave crests linked by half-seen threads of the spindrift, vocal
fragments of thought swiftly assembled by some subtle faculty of the
mind as they fell into a coherent, incredible message.

“Group consciousness--gigantic--operating within our sphere--operating
also in spheres of vibration, energy, force--above, below one to which
humanity reacts--perception, command forces known to us--but in
greater degree--cognizant, manipulate unknown energies--senses known to
us--unknown--can't realize them fully--impossible cover, only impinge
on contact points akin to our senses, forces--even these profoundly
modified by additional ones--metallic, crystalline, magnetic,
electric--inorganic with every power of organic--consciousness basically
same as ours--profoundly changed by differences in mechanism through
which it finds expression--difference our bodies--theirs.

“Conscious, mobile--inexorable, invulnerable. Getting clearer--see more
clearly--see--” the voice shrilled out in a shuddering, thin lash of
despair--“No! No--oh, God--no!”

Then clearly and solemnly:

“And God said: let us make men in our image, after our likeness, and
let them have dominion over all the earth, and every creeping thing that
creepeth upon the earth.”

A silence; we bent closer, listening; the still, small voice took up
the thread once more--but clearly further on. Something we had missed
between that text from Genesis and what we were now hearing; something
that even as he had warned us, he had not been able to articulate. The
whisper broke through clearly in the middle of a sentence.

“Nor is Jehovah the God of myriads of millions who through those same
centuries, and centuries upon centuries before them, found earth a
garden and grave--and all these countless gods and goddesses only
phantom barriers raised by man to stand between him and the eternal
forces man's instinct has always warned him are ever in readiness to
destroy. That do destroy him as soon as his vigilance relaxes, his
resistance weakens--the eternal, ruthless law that will annihilate
humanity the instant it runs counter to that law and turns its will and
strength against itself--”

A little pause; then came these singular sentences:

“Weaklings praying for miracles to make easy the path their own wills
should clear. Beggars who whine for alms from dreams. Shirkers each
struggling to place upon his god the burden whose carrying and whose
carrying alone can give him strength to walk free and unafraid, himself
godlike among the stars.”

And now distinctly, unfalteringly, the voice went on:

“Dominion over all the earth? Yes--as long as man is fit to rule; no
longer. Science has warned us. Where was the mammal when the giant
reptiles reigned? Slinking hidden and afraid in the dark and secret
places. Yet man sprang from these skulking beasts.

“For how long a time in the history of earth has man been master of it?
For a breath--for a cloud's passing. And will remain master only until
something grown stronger wrests mastery from him--even as he wrested it
from his ravening kind--as they took it from the reptiles--as did the
reptiles from the giant saurians--which snatched it from the nightmare
rulers of the Triassic--and so down to whatever held sway in the murk of
earth dawn.

“Life! Life! Life! Life everywhere struggling for completion!

“Life crowding other life aside, battling for its moment of supremacy,
gaining it, holding it for one rise and fall of the wings of time
beating through eternity--and then--hurled down, trampled under the feet
of another straining life whose hour has struck.

“Life crowding outside every barred threshold in a million circling
worlds, yes, in a million rushing universes; pressing against the doors,
bursting them down, overwhelming, forcing out those dwellers who had
thought themselves so secure.

“And these--these--” the voice suddenly dropped, became thickly,
vibrantly resonant, “over the Threshold, within the House of Man--nor
does he even dream that his doors are down. These--Things of metal whose
brains are thinking crystals--Things that suck their strength from the
sun and whose blood is the lightning.

“The sun! The sun!” he cried. “There lies their weakness!”

The voice rose in pitch, grew strident.

“Go back to the city! Go back to the city! Walter--Drake. They are not
invulnerable. No! The sun--strike them through the sun! Go into the
city--not invulnerable--the Keeper of the Cones--strike at the Cones
when--the Keeper of the Cones--ah-h-h-ah--”

We shrank back appalled, for from the parted, scarcely moving lips in
the unchanging face a gust of laughter, mad, mocking, terrifying, racked
its way.

“Vulnerable--under the law--even as we! The Cones!

“Go!” he gasped. A tremor shook him; slowly the mouth closed.

“Martin! Brother,” wept Ruth. I thrust my hand into his breast; felt
the heart beating, with a curious suggestion of stubborn, unshakable
strength, as though every vital force had concentrated there as in a
beleaguered citadel.

But Ventnor himself, the consciousness that was Ventnor was gone; had
withdrawn into that subjective void in which he had said he floated--a
lonely sentient atom, his one line of communication with us cut; severed
from us as completely as though he were, as he had described it, outside
space.

And Drake and I looked at each other's eyes, neither daring to be first
to break the silence of which the muffled sobbing of the girl seemed to
be the sorrowful soul.




CHAPTER XIV. “FREE! BUT A MONSTER!”

The peculiar ability of the human mind to slip so readily into the
refuge of the commonplace after, or even during, some well-nigh
intolerable crisis, has been to me long one of the most interesting
phenomena of our psychology.

It is instinctively a protective habit, of course, acquired through
precisely the same causes that had given to animals their protective
coloration--the stripes, say, of the zebra and tiger that blend so
cunningly with the barred and speckled shadowings of bush and jungle,
the twig and leaflike shapes and hues of certain insects; in fact, all
that natural camouflage which was the basis of the art of concealment so
astonishingly developed in the late war.

Like the animals of the wild, the mind of man moves through a
jungle--the jungle of life, passing along paths beaten out by the
thought of his countless forefathers in their progress from birth to
death.

And these paths are bordered and screened, figuratively and
literally, with bush and trees of his own selection, setting out and
cultivation--shelters of the familiar, the habitual, the customary.

On these ancestral paths, within these barriers of usage, man moves
hidden and secure as the animals in their haunts--or so he thinks.

Outside them lie the wildernesses and the gardens of the unknown, and
man's little trails are but rabbit-runs in an illimitable forest.

But they are home to him!

Therefore it is that he scurries from some open place of revelation,
some storm of emotion, some strength-testing struggle, back into the
shelter of the obvious; finding it an intellectual environment that
demands no slightest expenditure of mental energy or initiative,
strength to sally forth again into the unfamiliar.

I crave pardon for this digression. I set it down because now I remember
how, when Drake at last broke the silence that had closed in upon
the passing of that still, small voice the essence of these thoughts
occurred to me.

He strode over to the weeping girl, and in his voice was a roughness
that angered me until I realized his purpose.

“Get up, Ruth,” he ordered. “He came back once and he'll come back
again. Now let him be and help us get a meal together. I'm hungry.”

She looked up at him, incredulously, indignation rising.

“Eat!” she exclaimed. “You can be hungry?”

“You bet I can--and I am,” he answered cheerfully. “Come on; we've got
to make the best of it.”

“Ruth,” I broke in gently, “we'll all have to think about ourselves a
little if we're to be of any use to him. You must eat--and then rest.”

“No use crying in the milk even if it's spilt,” observed Drake, even
more cheerfully brutal. “I learned that at the front where we got so
we'd yelp for food even when the lads who'd been bringing it were all
mixed up in it.”

She lifted Ventnor's head from her lap, rested it on the silks; arose,
eyes wrathful, her little hands closed in fists as though to strike him.

“Oh--you brute!” she whispered. “And I thought--I thought--Oh, I hate
you!”

“That's better,” said Dick. “Go ahead and hit me if you want. The madder
you get the better you'll feel.”

For a moment I thought she was going to take him at his word; then her
anger fled.

“Thanks--Dick,” she said quietly.

And while I sat studying Ventnor, they put together a meal from the
stores, brewed tea over the spirit-lamp with water from the bubbling
spring. In these commonplaces I knew that she at least was finding
relief from that strain of the abnormal under which we had labored so
long. To my surprise I found that I was hungry, and with deep relief I
watched Ruth partake of food and drink even though lightly.

About her seemed to hover something of the ethereal, elusive, and
disquieting. Was it the strangely pellucid light that gave the effect, I
wondered; and knew it was not, for as I scanned her covertly, there
fell upon her face that shadow of inhuman tranquillity, of unearthly
withdrawal which, I guessed, had more than anything else maddened
Ventnor into his attack upon the Disk.

I watched her fight against it, drive it back. White lipped, she raised
her head and met my gaze. And in her eyes I read both terror and--shame.

It came to me that painful as it might be for her the time for
questioning had come.

“Ruth,” I said, “I know it's not necessary to remind you that we're in
a tight place. Every fact and every scrap of knowledge that we can lay
hold of is of the utmost importance in enabling us to determine our
course.

“I'm going to repeat your brother's question--what did Norhala do to
you? And what happened when you were floating before the Disk?”

The blaze of interest in Drake's eyes at these questions changed to
amazement at her stricken recoil from them.

“There was nothing,” she whispered--then defiantly--“nothing. I don't
know what you mean.”

“Ruth!” I spoke sharply now, in my own perplexity. “You do know. You
must tell us--for his sake.” I pointed toward Ventnor.


She drew a long breath.

“You're right--of course,” she said unsteadily. “Only I--I thought maybe
I could fight it out myself. But you'll have to know it--there's a taint
upon me.”

I caught in Drake's swift glance the echo of my own thrill of
apprehension for her sanity.

“Yes,” she said, now quietly. “Some new and alien thing within my heart,
my brain, my soul. It came to me from Norhala when we rode the flying
block, and--he--sealed upon me when I was in--his”--again she crimsoned,
“embrace.”

And as we gazed at her, incredulously:

“A thing that urges me to forget you two--and Martin--and all the
world I've known. That tries to pull me from you--from all--to drift
untroubled in some vast calm filled with an ordered ecstasy of peace.
And whose calling I want, God help me, oh, so desperately to heed!

“It whispered to me first,” she said, “from Norhala--when she put her
arm around me. It whispered and then seemed to float from her and cover
me like--like a veil, and from head to foot. It was a quietness and
peace that held within it a happiness at one and the same time utterly
tranquil and utterly free.

“I seemed to be at the doorway to unknown ecstasies--and the life I had
known only a dream--and you, all of you--even Martin, dreams within a
dream. You weren't--real--and you did not--matter.”

“Hypnotism,” muttered Drake, as she paused.

“No.” She shook her head. “No--more than that. The wonder of it
grew--and grew. I thrilled with it. I remember nothing of that ride, saw
nothing--except that once through the peace enfolding me pierced warning
that Martin was in peril, and I broke through to see him clutching
Norhala and to see floating up in her eyes death for him.

“And I saved him--and again forgot. Then, when I saw that
beautiful, flaming Shape--I felt no terror, no fear--only a
tremendous--joyous--anticipation, as though--as though--” She faltered,
hung her head, then leaving that sentence unfinished, whispered: “and
when--it--lifted me it was as though I had come at last out of some
endless black ocean of despair into the full sun of paradise.”

“Ruth!” cried Drake, and at the pain in his cry she winced.

“Wait,” she said, and held up a little, tremulous hand. “You asked--and
now you must listen.”

She was silent; and when once more she spoke her voice was low,
curiously rhythmic; her eyes rapt:

“I was free--free from every human fetter of fear or sorrow or love or
hate; free even of hope--for what was there to hope for when everything
desirable was mine? And I was elemental; one with the eternal things yet
fully conscious that I was--I.

“It was as though I were the shining shadow of a star afloat upon the
breast of some still and hidden woodland pool; as though I were a little
wind dancing among the mountain tops; a mist whirling down a quiet glen;
a shimmering lance of the aurora pulsing in the high solitudes.

“And there was music--strange and wondrous music and terrible, but not
terrible to me--who was part of it. Vast chords and singing themes that
rang like clusters of little swinging stars and harmonies that were like
the very voice of infinite law resolving within itself all discords. And
all--all--passionless, yet--rapturous.

“Out of the Thing that held me, out from its fires pulsed vitality--a
flood of inhuman energy in which I was bathed. And it was as though this
energy were--reassembling me, fitting me even closer to the elemental
things, changing me fully into them.

“I felt the little tendrils touching, caressing--then came the shots.
Awakening was--dreadful, a struggling back from drowning. I saw
Martin--blasted. I drove the--the spell away from me, tore it away.

“And, O Walter--Dick--it hurt--it hurt--and for a breath before I ran
to him it was like--like coming from a world in which there was no
disorder, no sorrow, no doubts, a rhythmic, harmonious world of light
and music, into--into a world that was like a black and dirty kitchen.

“And it's there,” her voice rose, hysterically. “It's still within
me--whispering, whispering; urging me away from you, from Martin, from
every human thing; bidding me give myself up, surrender my humanity.

“Its seal,” she sobbed. “No--HIS seal! An alien consciousness sealed
within me, that tries to make the human me a slave--that waits to
overcome my will--and if I surrender gives me freedom, an incredible
freedom--but makes me, being still human, a--monster.”

She hid her face in her hands, quivering.

“If I could sleep,” she wailed. “But I'm afraid to sleep. I think I
shall never sleep again. For sleeping how do I know what I may be when I
wake?”

I caught Drake's eye; he nodded. I slipped my hand down into the
medicine-case, brought forth a certain potent and tasteless combination
of drugs which I carry upon explorations.

I dropped a little into her cup, then held it to her lips. Like a child,
unthinking, she obeyed and drank.

“But I'll not surrender.” Her eyes were tragic. “Never think it! I can
win--don't you know I can?”

“Win?” Drake dropped down beside her, drew her toward him. “Bravest girl
I've known--of course you'll win. And remember this--nine-tenths of what
you're thinking now is purely over-wrought nerves and weariness. You'll
win--and we'll win, never doubt it.”

“I don't,” she said. “I know it--oh, it will be hard--but I will--I
will--”




CHAPTER XV. THE HOUSE OF NORHALA

Her eyes closed, her body relaxed; the potion had done its work quickly.
We laid her beside Ventnor on the pile of silken stuffs, covered them
both with a fold, then looked at each other long and silently--and I
wondered whether my face was as grim and drawn as his.

“It appears,” he said at last, curtly, “that it's up to you and me for
powwow quick. I hope you're not sleepy.”

“I am not,” I answered as curtly; the edge of nerves in his manner of
questioning doing nothing to soothe my own, “and even if I were I would
hardly expect to put all the burden of the present problem upon you by
going to sleep.”

“For God's sake don't be a prima donna,” he flared up. “I meant no
offense.”

“I'm sorry, Dick,” I said. “We're both a little jumpy, I guess.” He
nodded; gripped my hand.

“It wouldn't be so bad,” he muttered, “if all four of us were all
right. But Ventnor's down and out, and God alone knows for how long. And
Ruth--has all the trouble we have and some special ones of her own. I've
an idea”--he hesitated--“an idea that there was no exaggeration in that
story she told--an idea that if anything she underplayed it.”

“I, too,” I replied somberly. “And to me it is the most hideous phase
of this whole situation--and for reasons not all connected with Ruth,” I
added.

“Hideous!” he repeated. “Unthinkable--yet all this is unthinkable.
And still--it is! And Ventnor--coming back--that way. Like a lost soul
finding voice.

“Was it raving, Goodwin? Or could he have been--how was it he put it--in
touch with these Things and their purpose? Was that message--truth?”

“Ask yourself that question,” I said. “Man--you know it was truth. Had
not inklings of it come to you even before he spoke? They had to me.
His message was but an interpretation, a synthesis of facts I, for one,
lacked the courage to admit.”

“I, too,” he nodded. “But he went further than that. What did he mean by
the Keeper of the Cones--and that the Things--were vulnerable under the
same law that orders us? And why did he command us to go back to the
city? How could he know--how could he?”

“There's nothing inexplicable in that, at any rate,” I answered.
“Abnormal sensitivity of perception due to the cutting off of all
sensual impressions. There's nothing uncommon in that. You have its most
familiar form in the sensitivity of the blind. You've watched the same
thing at work in certain forms of hypnotic experimentation, haven't you?

“Through the operation of entirely understandable causes the mind gains
the power to react to vibrations that normally pass unperceived; is able
to project itself through this keying up of perception into a wider area
of consciousness than the normal. Just as in certain diseases of the ear
the sufferer, though deaf to sounds within the average range of hearing,
is fully aware of sound vibrations far above and far below those the
healthy ear registers.”

“I know,” he said. “I don't need to be convinced. But we accept these
things in theory--and when we get up against them for ourselves we
doubt.

“How many people are there in Christendom, do you think, who believe
that the Saviour ascended from the dead, but who if they saw it today
would insist upon medical inspection, doctor's certificates, a
clinic, and even after that render a Scotch verdict? I'm not speaking
irreverently--I'm just stating a fact.”

Suddenly he moved away from me, strode over to the curtained oval
through which Norhala had gone.

“Dick,” I cried, following him hastily, “where are you going? What are
you going to do?”

“I'm going after Norhala,” he answered. “I'm going to have a showdown
with her or know the reason why.”

“Drake,” I cried again, aghast, “don't make the mistake Ventnor did.
That's not the way to win through. Don't--I beg you, don't.”

“You're wrong,” he answered stubbornly. “I'm going to get her. She's got
to talk.”

He thrust out a hand to the curtains. Before he could touch them, they
were parted. Out from between them slithered the black eunuch. He stood
motionless, regarding us; in the ink-black eyes a red flame of hatred. I
pushed myself between him and Drake.

“Where is your mistress, Yuruk?” I asked.

“The goddess has gone,” he replied sullenly.

“Gone?” I said suspiciously, for certainly Norhala had not passed us.
“Where?”

“Who shall question the goddess?” he asked. “She comes and she goes as
she pleases.”

I translated this for Drake.

“He's got to show me,” he said. “Don't think I'm going to spill any
beans, Goodwin. But I want to talk to her. I think I'm right, honestly I
do.”


After all, I reflected, there was much in his determination to recommend
it. It was the obvious thing to do--unless we admitted that Norhala was
superhuman; and that I would not admit. In command of forces we did not
yet know, en rapport with these People of Metal, sealed with that alien
consciousness Ruth had described--all these, yes. But still a woman--of
that I was certain. And surely Drake could be trusted not to repeat
Ventnor's error.

“Yuruk,” I said, “we think you lie. We would speak to your mistress.
Take us to her.”

“I have told you that the goddess is not here,” he said. “If you do not
believe it is nothing to me. I cannot take you to her for I do not know
where she is. Is it your wish that I take you through her house?”

“It is,” I said.

“The goddess has commanded me to serve you in all things.” He bowed,
sardonically. “Follow.”

Our search was short. We stepped out into what for want of better words
I can describe only as a central hall. It was circular, and strewn with
thick piled small rugs whose hues had been softened by the alchemy of
time into exquisite, shadowy echoes of color.

The walls of this hall were of the same moonstone substance that had
enclosed the chamber upon whose inner threshold we were. They whirled
straight up to the dome in a crystalline, cylindrical cone. Four
doorways like that in which we stood pierced them. Through each of their
curtainings in turn we peered.

All were precisely similar in shape and proportions, radiating in a
lunetted, curved base triangle from the middle chamber; the curvature of
the enclosing globe forming back wall and roof; the translucent slicings
the sides; the circle of floor of the inner hall the truncating lunette.

The first of these chambers was utterly bare. The one opposite held a
half-dozen suits of the lacquered armor, as many wicked looking, short
and double-edged swords and long javelins. The third I judged to be the
lair of Yuruk; within it was a copper brazier, a stand of spears and a
gigantic bow, a quiver full of arrows leaning beside it. The fourth room
was littered with coffers great and small, of wood and of bronze, and
all tightly closed.

The fifth room was beyond question Norhala's bedchamber. Upon its floor
the ancient rugs were thick. A low couch of carven ivory inset with gold
rested a few feet from the doorway. A dozen or more of the chests were
scattered about and flowing over with silken stuffs.

Upon the back of four golden lions stood a high mirror of polished
silver. And close to it, in curiously incongruous domestic array stood
a stiffly marshaled row of sandals. Upon one of the chests were heaped
combs and fillets of shell and gold and ivory studded with jewels blue
and yellow and crimson.

To all of these we gave but a passing glance. We sought for Norhala.
And of her we found no shadow. She had gone even as the black eunuch had
said; flitting unseen past Ruth, perhaps, absorbed in her watch over her
brother; perhaps through some hidden opening in this room of hers.

Yuruk let drop the curtains, sidled back to the first room, we after
him. The two there had not moved. We drew the saddlebags close, propped
ourselves against them.

The black eunuch squatted a dozen feet away, facing us, chin upon his
knees, taking us in with unblinking eyes blank of any emotion. Then
he began to move slowly his tremendously long arms in easy, soothing
motion, the hands running along the floor upon their talons in arcs
and circles. It was curious how these hands seemed to be endowed with a
volition of their own, independent of the arms upon which they swung.

And now I could see only the hands, shuttling so smoothly, so
rhythmically back and forth--weaving so sleepily, so sleepily back and
forth--black hands that dripped sleep--hypnotic.

Hypnotic! I sprang from the lethargy closing upon me. In one quick side
glance I saw Drake's head nodding--nodding in time to the movement of
the black hands. I jumped to my feet, shaking with an intensity of rage
unfamiliar to me; thrust my pistol into the wrinkled face.

“Damn you!” I cried. “Stop that. Stop it and turn your back.”

The corded muscles of the arms contracted, the claws of the slithering
paws drew in as though he were about to clutch me; the ebon pools of
eyes were covered with a frozen film of hate.

He could not have known what was this tube with which I menaced him,
but its threat he certainly sensed and was afraid to meet. He squattered
about, wrapped his arms around his knees, crouched with back toward us.

“What's the matter?” asked Drake drowsily.

“He tried to hypnotize us,” I answered shortly. “And pretty nearly did.”

“So that's what it was.” He was now wide awake. “I watched those hands
of his and got sleepier and sleepier--I guess we'd better tie Mr. Yuruk
up.” He jumped to his feet.

“No,” I said, restraining him. “No. He's safe enough as long as we're on
the alert. I don't want to use any force on him yet. Wait until we know
we can get something worth while by doing it.”

“All right,” he nodded, grimly. “But when the time comes I'm telling you
straight, Doc, I'm going the limit. There's something about that human
spider that makes me itch to squash him--slowly.”

“I'll have no compunction--when it's worth while,” I answered as grimly.

We sank down again against the saddlebags; Drake brought out a black
pipe, looked at it sorrowfully; at me appealingly.

“All mine was on that pony that bolted,” I answered his wistfulness.

“All mine was on my beast, too,” he sighed. “And I lost my pouch in that
spurt from the ruins.”

He sighed again, clamped white teeth down upon the stem.

“Of course,” he said at last, “if Ventnor was right in that--that
disembodied analysis of his, it's rather--well, terrifying, isn't it?”

“It's all of that,” I replied, “and considerably more.”

“Metal, he said,” Drake mused. “Things of metal with brains of thinking
crystal and their blood the lightnings. You accept that?”

“So far as my own observation has gone--yes,” I said. “Metallic yet
mobile. Inorganic but with all the quantities we have hitherto thought
only those of the organic and with others added. Crystalline, of course,
in structure and highly complex. Activated by magnetic-electric forces
consciously exerted and as much a part of their life as brain energy
and nerve currents are of our human life. Animate, moving, sentient
combinations of metal and electric energy.”

He said:

“The opening of the Disk from the globe and of the two blasting stars
from the pyramids show the flexibility of the outer--plate would you
call it? I couldn't help thinking of the armadillo after I had time to
think at all.”

“It may be”--I struggled against the conviction now strong upon me--“it
may be that within that metallic shell is an organic body, something
soft--animal, as there is within the horny carapace of the turtle, the
nacreous valves of the oyster, the shells of the crustaceans--it may be
that even their inner surface is organic--”

“No,” he interrupted, “if there is a body--as we know a body--it must
be between the outer surface and the inner, for the latter is crystal,
jewel hard, impenetrable.

“Goodwin--Ventnor's bullets hit fair. I saw them strike. They did not
ricochet--they dropped dead. Like flies dashed up against a rock--and
the Thing was no more conscious of their striking than a rock would have
been of those flies.”


“Drake,” I said, “my own conviction is that these creatures are
absolutely metallic, entirely inorganic--incredible, unknown forms. Let
us go on that basis.”

“I think so, too,” he nodded; “but I wanted you to say it first. And
yet--is it so incredible, Goodwin? What is the definition of vital
intelligence--sentience?

“Haeckel's is the accepted one. Anything which can receive a stimulus,
that can react to a stimulus and retains memory of a stimulus must be
called an intelligent, conscious entity. The gap between what we have
long called the organic and the inorganic is steadily decreasing. Do you
know of the remarkable experiments of Lillie upon various metals?”

“Vaguely,” I said.

“Lillie,” he went on, “proved that under the electric current and other
exciting mediums metals exhibited practically every reaction of the
human nerve and muscle. It grew weary, rested, and after resting
was perceptibly stronger than before; it got what was practically
indigestion, and it exhibited a peculiar but unmistakable memory. Also,
he found, it could acquire disease and die.

“Lillie concluded that there existed a real metallic consciousness. It
was Le Bon who first proved also that metal is more sensitive than
man, and that its immobility is only apparent. (Le Bon in 'Evolution of
Matter,' Chapter eleven.)

“Take the block of magnetic iron that stands so gray and apparently
lifeless, subject it to a magnetic current lifeless, what happens? The
iron block is composed of molecules which under ordinary conditions are
disposed in all possible directions indifferently. But when the current
passes through there is tremendous movement in that apparently inert
mass. All of the tiny particles of which it is composed turn and shift
until their north poles all point more or less approximately in the
direction of the magnetic force.

“When that happens the block itself becomes a magnet, filled with and
surrounded by a field of magnetic energy; instinct with it. Outwardly it
has not moved; actually there has been prodigious motion.”

“But it is not conscious motion,” I objected.

“Ah, but how do you know?” he asked. “If Jacques Loeb* is right, that
action of the iron molecules is every bit as conscious a movement as
the least and the greatest of our own. There is absolutely no difference
between them.

“Your and my and its every movement is nothing but an involuntary and
inevitable reaction to a certain stimulus. If he's right, then I'm a
buttercup--but that's neither here nor there. Loeb--all he did was
to restate destiny, one of humanity's oldest ideas, in the terms of
tropisms, infusoria and light. Omar Khayyam chemically reincarnated in
the Rockefeller Institute. Nevertheless those who accept his theories
have to admit that there is essentially no difference between their
impulses and the rush of filings toward a magnet.

“Equally nevertheless, Goodwin, the iron does meet Haeckel's three
tests--it can receive a stimulus, it does react to that stimulus and it
retains memory of it; for even after the current has ceased it remains
changed in tensile strength, conductivity and other qualities that were
modified by the passage of that current; and as time passes this memory
fades. Precisely as some human experience increases wariness, caution,
which keying up of qualities remains with us after the experience
has passed, and fades away in the ratio of our sensitivity plus
retentiveness divided by the time elapsing from the original
experience--exactly as it is in the iron.”

     * Professor Jacques Loeb, of the Rockefeller Institute, New
     York, “The Mechanistic Conception of Life.”




CHAPTER XVI. CONSCIOUS METAL!

“Granted,” I acquiesced. “We now come to their means of locomotion. In
its simplest terms all locomotion is progress through space against
the force of gravitation. Man's walk is a series of rhythmic stumbles
against this force that constantly strives to drag him down to earth's
face and keep him pressed there. Gravitation is an etheric--magnetic
vibration akin to the force which holds, to use your simile again,
Drake, the filing against the magnet. A walk is a constant breaking of
the current.

“Take a motion picture of a man walking and run it through the lantern
rapidly and he seems to be flying. We have none of the awkward fallings
and recoveries that are the tempo of walking as we see it.

“I take it that the movement of these Things is a conscious breaking of
the gravitational current just as much as is our own movement, but by a
rhythm so swift that it appears to be continuous.

“Doubtless if we could so control our sight as to admit the vibrations
of light slowly enough we would see this apparently smooth motion as a
series of leaps--just as we do when the motion-picture operator
slows down his machine sufficiently to show us walking in a series of
stumbles.

“Very well--so far, then, we have nothing in this phenomenon which the
human mind cannot conceive as possible; therefore intellectually we
still remain masters of the phenomena; for it is only that which human
thought cannot encompass which it need fear.”

“Metallic,” he said, “and crystalline. And yet--why not? What are we but
bags of skin filled with certain substances in solution and stretched
over a supporting and mobile mechanism largely made up of lime? Out of
that primeval jelly which Gregory * calls Protobion came after untold
millions of years us with our skins, our nails, and our hair; came, too,
the serpents with their scales, the birds with their feathers; the horny
hide of the rhinoceros and the fairy wings of the butterfly; the shell
of the crab, the gossamer loveliness of the moth and the shimmering
wonder of the mother-of-pearl.

     * J. W. Gregory, F.R.S.D.Sc., Professor of Geology,
     University of Glasgow.

“Is there any greater gap between any of these and the metallic? I think
not.”

“Not materially,” I answered. “No. But there remains--consciousness!”

“That,” he said, “I cannot understand. Ventnor spoke of--how did he put
it?--a group consciousness, operating in our sphere and in spheres above
and below ours, with senses known and unknown. I got--glimpses--Goodwin,
but I cannot understand.”

“We have agreed for reasons that seem sufficient to us to call these
Things metallic, Dick,” I replied. “But that does not necessarily mean
that they are composed of any metal that we know. Nevertheless, being
metal, they must be of crystalline structure.

“As Gregory has pointed out, crystals and what we call living matter had
an equal start in the first essentials of life. We cannot conceive life
without giving it the attribute of some sort of consciousness. Hunger
cannot be anything but conscious, and there is no other stimulus to eat
but hunger.

“The crystals eat. The extraction of power from food is conscious
because it is purposeful, and there can be no purpose without
consciousness; similarly the power to work from such derived energy is
also purposeful and therefore conscious. The crystals do both. And the
crystals can transmit all these abilities to their children, just as we
do. For although there would seem to be no reason why they should not
continue to grow to gigantic size under favorable conditions--yet they
do not. They reach a size beyond which they do not develop.

“Instead, they bud--give birth, in fact--to smaller ones, which increase
until they reach the size of the preceding generation. And like the
children of man and animals, these younger generations grow on precisely
as their progenitors!

“Very well, then--we arrive at the conception of a metallically
crystalline being, which by some explosion of the force of evolution
has burst from the to us familiar and apparently inert stage into these
Things that hold us. And is there any greater difference between the
forms with which we are familiar and them than there is between us and
the crawling amphibian which is our remote ancestor? Or between that and
the amoeba--the little swimming stomach from which it evolved? Or the
amoeba and the inert jelly of the Protobion?

“As for what Ventnor calls a group consciousness I would assume that
he means a communal intelligence such as that shown by the bees and the
ants--that in the case of the former Maeterlinck calls the 'Spirit
of the Hive.' It is shown in their groupings--just as the geometric
arrangement of those groupings shows also clearly their crystalline
intelligence.

“I submit that in their rapid coordination either for attack or movement
or work without apparent communication having passed between the units,
there is nothing more remarkable than the swarming of a hive of bees
where also without apparent communication just so many waxmakers,
nurses, honey-gatherers, chemists, bread-makers, and all the varied
specialists of the hive go with the old queen, leaving behind sufficient
number of each class for the needs of the young queen.

“All this apportionment is effected without any means of communication
that we recognize. Still it is most obviously intelligent selection.
For if it were haphazard all the honeymakers might leave and the hive
starve, or all the chemists might go and the food for the young bees not
be properly prepared--and so on and so on.”

“But metal,” he muttered, “and conscious. It's all very well--but where
did that consciousness come from? And what is it? And where did they
come from? And most of all, why haven't they overrun the world before
this?

“Such development as theirs, such an evolution, presupposes aeons of
time--long as it took us to drag up from the lizards. What have
they been doing--why haven't they been ready to strike--if Ventnor's
right--at humanity until now?”

“I don't know,” I answered, helplessly. “But evolution is not the
slow, plodding process that Darwin thought. There seem to be
explosions--nature will create a new form almost in a night. Then comes
the long ages of development and adjustment, and suddenly another new
race appears.

“It might be so of these--some extraordinary conditions that shaped
them. Or they might have developed through the ages in spaces within
the earth--there's that incredible abyss we saw that is evidently one of
their highways. Or they might have dropped here upon some fragment of a
broken world, found in this valley the right conditions and developed in
amazing rapidity. * They're all possible theories--take your pick.”

     * Professor Svante Arrhenius's theory of propagation of life
     by means of minute spores carried through space. See his
     “Worlds in the Making.”--W.T.G.

“Something's held them back--and they're rushing to a climax,” he
whispered. “Ventnor's right about that--I feel it. And what can we do?”

“Go back to their city,” I said. “Go back as he ordered. I believe he
knows what he's talking about. And I believe he'll be able to help us.
It wasn't just a request he made, nor even an appeal--it was a command.”

“But what can we do--just two men--against these Things?” he groaned.

“Maybe we'll find out--when we're back in the city,” I answered.

“Well,” his old reckless cheerfulness came back to him, “in every crisis
of this old globe it's been up to one man to turn the trick. We're two.
And at the worst we can only go down fighting a little before the rest
of us. So, after all, whatEVER the hell, WHAT the hell.”

For a time we were silent.

“Well,” he said at last, “we have to go to the city in the morning.”
 He laughed. “Sounds as though we were living in the suburbs, somehow,
doesn't it?”

“It can't be many hours before dawn,” I said. “Turn in for a while, I'll
wake you when I think you've slept enough.”

“It doesn't seem fair,” he protested, but sleepily.

“I'm not sleepy,” I told him; nor was I.

But whether I was or not, I wanted to question Yuruk, uninterrupted and
undisturbed.

Drake stretched himself out. When his breathing showed him fast asleep
indeed, I slipped over to the black eunuch and crouched, right hand
close to the butt of my automatic, facing him.




CHAPTER XVII. YURUK

“Yuruk,” I whispered, “you love us as the wheat field loves the hail;
we are as welcome to you as the death cord to the condemned. Lo, a door
opened into a land of unpleasant dreams you thought sealed, and we came
through. Answer my questions truthfully and it may be that we shall
return through that door.”

Interest welled up in the depths of the black eyes.

“There is a way from here,” he muttered. “Nor does it pass
through--Them. I can show it to you.”

I had not been blind to the flash of malice, of cunning, that had shot
across the wrinkled face.

“Where does that way lead?” I asked. “There were those who sought us;
men clad in armor with javelins and arrows. Does your way lead to them,
Yuruk?”

For a time he hesitated, the lashless lids half closed.

“Yes,” he said sullenly. “The way leads to them; to their place. But
will it not be safer for you there--among your kind?”

“I don't know that it will,” I answered promptly. “Those who are unlike
us smote those who are like us and drove them back when they would have
taken and slain us. Why is it not better to remain with them than to go
to our kind who would destroy us?”

“They would not,” he said “If you gave them--her.” He thrust a long
thumb backward toward sleeping Ruth. “Cherkis would forgive much for
her. And why should you not? She is only a woman.”

He spat--in a way that made me want to kill him.

“Besides,” he ended, “have you no arts to amuse him?”

“Cherkis?” I asked.

“Cherkis,” he whined. “Is Yuruk a fool not to know that in the world
without, new things have arisen since long ago we fled from Iskander
into the secret valley? What have you to beguile Cherkis beyond this
woman flesh? Much, I think. Go then to him--unafraid.”

Cherkis? There was a familiar sound to that. Cherkis? Of course--it
was the name of Xerxes, the Persian Conqueror, corrupted by time into
this--Cherkis. And Iskander? Equally, of course--Alexander. Ventnor had
been right.

“Yuruk,” I demanded directly, “is she whom you call goddess--Norhala--of
the people of Cherkis?”

“Long ago,” he answered; “long, long ago there was trouble in their
city, even in the great dwelling place of Cherkis. I fled with her who
was the mother of the goddess. There were twenty of us; and we fled
here--by the way which I will show you--”

He leered cunningly; I gave no sign of interest.

“She who was the mother of the goddess found favor in the sight of the
ruler here,” he went on. “But after a time she grew old and ugly and
withered. So he slew her--like a little mound of dust she danced and
blew away after he had slain her; and also he slew others who had grown
displeasing to him. He blasted me--as he was blasted--” He pointed to
Ventnor.

“Then it was that, recovering, I found my crooked shoulder. The goddess
was born here. She is kin to Him Who Rules! How else could she shed the
lightnings? Was not the father of Iskander the god Zeus Ammon, who came
to Iskander's mother in the form of a great snake? Well? At any rate the
goddess was born--shedder of the lightnings even from her birth. And she
is as you see her.

“Cleave to your kind! Cleave to your kind!” Suddenly he shrilled.
“Better is it to be whipped by your brother than to be eaten by the
tiger. Cleave to your kind. Look--I will show you the way to them.”

He sprang to his feet, clasped my wrist in one of his long hands, led
me through the curtained oval into the cylindrical hall, parted the
curtainings of Norhala's bedroom and pushed me within. Over the floor he
slid, still holding fast to me, and pressed against the farther wall.


An ovoid slice of the gemlike material slid aside, revealing a doorway.
I glimpsed a path, a trail, leading into a forest pallid green beneath
the wan light. This way thrust itself like a black tongue into the
boskage and vanished in the depths.

“Follow it.” He pointed. “Take those who came with you and follow it.”

The wrinkles upon his face writhed with his eagerness.

“You will go?” panted Yuruk. “You will take them and go by that path?”

“Not yet,” I answered absently. “Not yet.”

And was brought abruptly to full alertness, vigilance, by the flame of
rage that filled the eyes thrust so close.

“Lead back,” I directed curtly. He slid the door into place, turned
sullenly. I followed, wondering what were the sources of the bitter
hatred he so plainly bore for us; the reasons for his eagerness to be
rid of us despite the commands of this woman who to him at least was
goddess.

And by that curious human habit of seeking for the complex when the
simple answer lies close, failed to recognize that it was jealousy of
us that was the root of his behavior; that he wished to be, as it would
seem he had been for years, the only human thing near Norhala; failed
to realize this, and with Ruth and Drake was terribly to pay for this
failure.

I looked down upon the pair, sleeping soundly; upon Ventnor lost still
in trance.

“Sit,” I ordered the eunuch. “And turn your back to me.”

I dropped down beside Drake, my mind wrestling with the mystery, but
every sense alert for movement from the black. Glibly enough I had
passed over Dick's questioning as to the consciousness of the Metal
People; now I faced it knowing it to be the very crux of these
incredible phenomena; admitting, too, that despite all my special
pleading, about that point swirled in my own mind the thickest mists of
uncertainty. That their sense of order was immensely beyond a man's was
plain.

As plain was it that their knowledge of magnetic force and its
manipulation were far beyond the sphere of humanity. That they had
realization of beauty this palace of Norhala's proved--and no human
imagination could have conceived it nor human hands have made its
thought of beauty real. What were their senses through which their
consciousness fed?

Nine in number had been the sapphire ovals set within the golden zone of
the Disk. Clearly it came to me that these were sense organs!

But--nine senses!

And the great stars--how many had they? And the cubes--did they open as
did globe and pyramid?

Consciousness itself--after all what is it? A secretion of the brain?
The cumulative expression, wholly chemical, of the multitudes of cells
that form us? The inexplicable governor of the city of the body of which
these myriads of cells are the citizens--and created by them out of
themselves to rule?

Is it what many call the soul? Or is it a finer form of matter, a
self-realizing force, which uses the body as its vehicle just as other
forces use for their vestments other machines? After all, I thought,
what is this conscious self of ours, the ego, but a spark of realization
running continuously along the path of time within the mechanism we call
the brain; making contact along that path as the electric spark at the
end of a wire?

Is there a sea of this conscious force which laps the shores of the
farthest-flung stars; that finds expression in everything--man and rock,
metal and flower, jewel and cloud? Limited in its expression only by the
limitations of that which animates, and in essence the same in all. If
so, then this problem of the life of the Metal People ceased to be a
problem; was answered!

So thinking I became aware of increasing light; strode past Yuruk to
the door and peeped out. Dawn was paling the sky. I stooped over Drake,
shook him. On the instant he was awake, alert.

“I only need a little sleep, Dick,” I said. “When the sun is well up,
call me.”

“Why, it's dawn,” he whispered. “Goodwin, you ought not to have let me
sleep so long. I feel like a damned pig.”

“Never mind,” I said. “But watch the eunuch closely.”

I rolled myself up in his warm blanket; sank almost instantly into
dreamless slumber.




CHAPTER XVIII. INTO THE PIT

High was the sun when I awakened; or so, I supposed, opening my eyes
upon a flood of daylight. As I lay, lazily, recollection rushed upon me.

It was no sky into which I was gazing; it was the dome of Norhala's
elfin home. And Drake had not aroused me. Why? And how long had I slept?

I jumped to my feet, stared about. Ruth nor Drake nor the black eunuch
was there!

“Ruth!” I shouted. “Drake!”

There was no answer. I ran to the doorway. Peering up into the white
vault of the heavens I set the time of day as close to seven; I had
slept then three hours, more or less. Yet short as that time of slumber
had been, I felt marvelously refreshed, reenergized; the effect, I was
certain, of the extraordinarily tonic qualities of the atmosphere of
this place. But where were the others? Where Yuruk?

I heard Ruth's laughter. Some hundred yards to the left, half hidden
by a screen of flowering shrubs, I saw a small meadow. Within it a
half-dozen little white goats nuzzled around her and Dick. She was
milking one of them.

Reassured, I drew back into the chamber, knelt over Ventnor. His
condition was unchanged. My gaze fell upon the pool that had been
Norhala's bath. Longingly I looked at it; then satisfying myself
that the milking process was not finished, slipped off my clothes and
splashed about.

I had just time to get back in my clothes when through the doorway came
the pair, each carrying a porcelain pannikin full of milk.

There was no shadow of fear or horror on her face. It was the old Ruth
who stood before me; nor was there effort in the smile she gave me. She
had been washed clean in the waters of sleep.

“Don't worry, Walter,” she said. “I know what you're thinking. But
I'm--ME again.”

“Where is Yuruk?” I turned to Drake bruskly to smother the sob of
sheer happiness I felt rising in my throat; and at his wink and warning
grimace abruptly forebore to press the question.

“You men pick out the things and I'll get breakfast ready,” said Ruth.

Drake picked up the teakettle and motioned me before him.

“About Yuruk,” he whispered when he had gotten outside. “I gave him a
little object lesson. Persuaded him to go down the line a bit, showed
him my pistol, and then picked off one of Norhala's goats with it. Hated
to do it, but I knew it would be good for his soul.

“He gave one screech and fell on his face and groveled. Thought it was
a lightning bolt, I figure; decided I had been stealing Norhala's stuff.
'Yuruk,' I told him, 'that's what you'll get, and worse, if you lay a
finger on that girl inside there.'”

“And then what happened?” I asked.

“He beat it back there.” He grinned, pointing toward the forest through
which ran the path the eunuch had shown me. “Probably hiding back of a
tree.”

As we filled the container at the outer spring, I told him of the
revelations and the offer Yuruk had made to me.

“Whew-w!” he whistled. “In the nutcracker, eh? Trouble behind us and
trouble in front of us.”

“When do we start?” he asked, as we turned back.

“Right after we've eaten,” I answered. “There's no use putting it off.
How do you feel about it?”

“Frankly, like the chief guest at a lynching party,” he said. “Curious
but none too cheerful.”

Nor was I. I was filled with a fever of scientific curiosity. But I was
not cheerful--no!


We ministered to Ventnor as well as we could; forcing open his set jaws,
thrusting a thin rubber tube down past his windpipe into his gullet and
dropping through it a few ounces of the goat milk. Our own breakfasting
was silent enough.

We could not take Ruth with us upon our journey; that was certain; she
must stay here with her brother. She would be safer in Norhala's home
than where we were going, of course, and yet to leave her was most
distressing. After all, I wondered, was there any need of both of us
taking the journey; would not one do just as well?

Drake could stay--

“No use of putting all our eggs in one basket,” I broached the subject.
“I'll go down by myself while you stay and help Ruth. You can always
follow if I don't turn up in a reasonable time.”

His indignation at this proposal was matched only by her own.

“You'll go with him, Dick Drake,” she cried, “or I'll never look at or
speak to you again!”

“Good Lord! Did you think for a minute I wouldn't?” Pain and wrath
struggled on his face. “We go together or neither of us goes. Ruth will
be all right here, Goodwin. The only thing she has any cause to fear is
Yuruk--and he's had his lesson.

“Besides, she'll have the rifles and her pistols, and she knows how
to use them. What d'ye mean by making such a proposition as that?” His
indignation burst all bounds.

Lamely I tried to justify myself.

“I'll be all right,” said Ruth. “I'm not afraid of Yuruk. And none of
these Things will hurt me--not after--not after--” Her eyes fell, her
lips quivered, then she faced us steadily. “Don't ask me how I know
that,” she said quietly. “Believe me, I do know it. I am closer to--them
than you two are. And if I choose I can call upon that alien strength
their master gave me. It is for you two that I fear.”

“No fear for us,” Drake burst out hastily. “We're Norhala's little
playthings. We're tabu. Take it from me, Ruth, I'd bet my head there
isn't one of these Things, great or small, and no matter how many, that
doesn't by this time know all about us.

“We'll probably be received with demonstrations of interest by the
populace as welcome guests. Probably we'll find a sign--'Welcome to our
City'--hung up over the front gate.”

She smiled, a trifle tremulously.

“We'll come back,” he said. Suddenly he leaned forward, put his hands on
her shoulders. “Do you think there is anything that could keep me from
coming back?” he whispered.

She trembled, wide eyes searching deep into his.

“Well,” I broke in, a bit uncomfortably, “we'd better be starting.
I think as Drake does, that we're tabu. Barring accident there's
no danger. And if I guess right about these Things, accident is
impossible.”

“As inconceivable as the multiplication table going wrong,” he laughed,
straightening.

And so we made ready. Our rifles would be worse than useless, we knew;
our pistols we decided to carry as Drake put it, “for comfort.” Canteens
filled with water; a couple of emergency rations, a few instruments,
including a small spectroscope, a selection from the medical kit--all
these packed in a little haversack which he threw over his broad
shoulders.

I pocketed my compact but exceedingly powerful field-glasses. To my
poignant and everlasting regret my camera had been upon the bolting
pony, and Ventnor had long been out of films for his.

We were ready for our journey.


Our path led straight away, a smooth and dark-gray road whose surface
resembled cement packed under enormous pressure. It was all of fifty
feet wide and now, in daylight, glistened faintly as though overlaid
with some vitreous coating. It narrowed abruptly into a wedged way that
stopped at the threshold of Norhala's door.

Diminishing through the distance, it stretched straight as an arrow
onward and vanished between perpendicular cliffs which formed the
frowning gateway through which the night before we had passed upon the
coursing cubes from the pit of the city. Here, as then, a mistiness
checked the gaze.

Ruth with us, we made a brief inspection of the surroundings of
Norhala's house. It was set as though in the narrowest portion of
an hour-glass. The precipitous walls marched inward from the gateway
forming the lower half of the figure; at the back they swung apart at a
wider angle.

This upper part of the hour-glass was filled with a park-like forest. It
was closed, perhaps twenty miles away, by a barrier of cliffs.

How, I wondered, did the path which Yuruk had pointed out to me pierce
them? Was it by pass or tunnel; and why was it the armored men had not
found and followed it?

The waist between these two mountain wedges was a valley not more than
a mile wide. Norhala's house stood in its center; and it was like a
garden, dotted with flowering and fragrant lilies and here and there a
tiny green meadow. The great globe of blue that was Norhala's dwelling
seemed less to rest upon the ground than to emerge from it; as though
its basic curvatures were hidden in the earth.

What was its substance I could not tell. It was as though built of the
lacquer of the gems whose colors it held. And beautiful, wondrously,
incredibly beautiful it was--an immense bubble of froth of molten
sapphires and turquoises.

We had not time to study its beauties. A few last instructions to Ruth,
and we set forth down the gray road. Hardly had we taken a few steps
when there came a faint cry from her.

“Dick! Dick--come here!”

He sprang to her, caught her hands in his. For a moment, half frightened
it seemed, she considered him.

“Dick,” I heard her whisper. “Dick--come back safe to me!”

I saw his arms close about her, hers tighten around his neck; black hair
touched the silken brown curls, their lips met, clung. I turned away.

In a little time he joined me; head down, silent, he strode along beside
me, utterly dejected.

A hundred more yards and we turned. Ruth was still standing on the
threshold of the house of mystery, watching us. She waved her hands,
flitted in, was hidden from us. And Drake still silent, we pushed on.

The walls of the gateway were close. The sparse vegetation along the
base of the cliffs had ceased; the roadway itself had merged into the
smooth, bare floor of the canyon. From vertical edge to vertical edge
of the rocky portal stretched a curtain of shimmering mist. As we drew
nearer we saw that this was motionless, and less like vapor of water
than vapor of light; it streamed in oddly fixed lines like atoms of
crystals in a still solution. Drake thrust an arm within it, waved it;
the mist did not move. It seemed instead to interpenetrate the arm--as
though bone and flesh were spectral, without power to dislodge the
shining particles from position.

We passed within it--side by side.

Instantly I knew that whatever these veils were, they were not moisture.
The air we breathed was dry, electric. I was sensible of a decided
stimulation, a pleasant tingling along every nerve, a gaiety almost
light-headed. We could see each other quite plainly, the rocky floor on
which we trod as well. Within this vapor of light there was no ghost
of sound; it was utterly empty of it. I saw Drake turn to me, his mouth
open in a laugh, his lips move in speech--and although he bent close to
my ear, I heard nothing. He frowned, puzzled, and walked on.


Abruptly we stepped into an opening, a pocket of clear air. Our ears
were filled with a high, shrill humming as unpleasantly vibrant as the
shriek of a sand blast. Six feet to our right was the edge of the
ledge on which we stood; beyond it was a sheer drop into space. A shaft
piercing down into the void and walled with the mists.

But it was not that shaft that made us clutch each other. No! It was
that through it uprose a colossal column of the cubes. It stood a
hundred feet from us. Its top was another hundred feet above the level
of our ledge and its length vanished in the depths.

And its head was a gigantic spinning wheel, yards in thickness, tapering
at its point of contact with the cliff wall into a diameter half that
of the side closest the column, gleaming with flashes of green flame and
grinding with tremendous speed at the face of the rock.

Over it, attached to the cliff, was a great vizored hood of some pale
yellow metal, and it was this shelter that cutting off the vaporous
light like an enormous umbrella made the pocket of clarity in which we
stood, the shaft up which sprang the pillar.

All along the length of that column as far as we could see the
myriad tiny eyes of the Metal People shone out upon us, not twinkling
mischievously, but--grotesque as this may seem, I cannot help it--wide
with surprise.

Only an instant longer did the great wheel spin. I saw the screaming
rock melting beneath it, dropping like lava. Then, as though it had
received some message, abruptly its motion now ceased.

It tilted; looked down upon us!

I noted that its grinding surface was studded thickly with the smaller
pyramids and that the tips of these were each capped with what seemed
to be faceted gems gleaming with the same pale yellow radiance as the
Shrine of the Cones.

The column was bending; the wheel approaching.

Drake seized me by the arm, drew me swiftly back into the mists. We were
shrouded in their silences. Step by step we went on, peering for
the edge of the shelf, feeling in fancy that prodigious wheeled face
stealing upon us; afraid to look behind lest in looking we might step
too close to the unseen verge.

Yard after yard we slowly covered. Suddenly the vapors thinned; we
passed out of them--

A chaos of sound beat about us. The clanging of a million anvils; the
clamor of a million forges; the crashing of a hundred years of thunder;
the roarings of a thousand hurricanes. The prodigious bellowings of the
Pit beating against us now as they had when we had flown down the long
ramp into the depths of the Sea of Light.

Instinct with unthinkable power was that clamor; the very voice of
Force. Stunned, nay BLINDED, by it, we covered ears and eyes.

As before, the clangor died, leaving in its wake a bewildered silence.
Then that silence began to throb with a vast humming, and through that
humming rang a murmur as that of a river of diamonds.

We opened our eyes, felt awe grip our throats as though a hand had
clutched them.

Difficult, difficult almost beyond thought is it for me now to essay to
draw in words the scene before us then. For although I can set down what
it was we saw, I nor any man can transmute into phrases its essence, its
spirit, the intangible wonder that was its synthesis--the appallingly
beautiful, soul-shaking strangeness of it, its grandeur, its fantasy,
and its alien terror.

The Domain of the Metal Monster--it was filled like a chalice with Its
will; was the visible expression of that will.

We stood at the very rim of a wide ledge. We looked down into an immense
pit, shaped into a perfect oval, thirty miles in length I judged, and
half that as wide, and rimmed with colossal precipices. We were at the
upper end of this deep valley and on the tip of its axis; I mean that
it stretched longitudinally before us along the line of greatest length.
Five hundred feet below was the pit's floor. Gone were the clouds of
light that had obscured it the night before; the air crystal clear;
every detail standing out with stereoscopic sharpness.

First the eyes rested upon a broad band of fluorescent amethyst, ringing
the entire rocky wall. It girdled the cliffs at a height of ten thousand
feet, and from this flaming zone, as though it clutched them, fell the
curtains of sparkling mist, the enigmatic, sound-slaying vapors.

But now I saw that all of these veils were not motionless like those
through which we had just passed. To the northwest they were pulsing
like the aurora, and like the aurora they were shot through with swift
iridescences, spectrums, polychromatic gleamings. And always these were
ordered, geometric--like immense and flitting prismatic crystals flying
swiftly to the very edges of the veils, then darting as swiftly back.

From zone and veils the gaze leaped to the incredible City towering not
two miles away from us.

Blue black, shining, sharply cut as though from polished steel, it
reared full five thousand feet on high!

How great it was I could not tell, for the height of its precipitous
walls barred the vision. The frowning facade turned toward us was, I
estimated, five miles in length. Its colossal scarp struck the eyes
like a blow; its shadow, falling upon us, checked the heart. It was
overpowering--dreadful as that midnight city of Dis that Dante saw
rising up from another pit.

It was a metal city, mountainous.

Featureless, smooth, the immense wall of it heaved heavenward. It should
have been blind, that vast oblong face--but it was not blind. From it
radiated alertness, vigilance. It seemed to gaze toward us as though
every foot were manned with sentinels; guardians invisible to the eyes
whose concentration of watchfulness was caught by some subtle hidden
sense higher than sight.

It was a metal city, mountainous and--AWARE.

About its base were huge openings. Through and around these portals
swirled hordes of the Metal People; in units and in combinations coming
and going, streaming in and out, forming as they came and went patterns
about the openings like the fretted spume of great breakers surging
into, retreating from, ocean-bitten gaps in some iron-bound coast.

From the immensity of the City the eyes dropped back to the Pit in which
it lay. Its floor was plaquelike, a great plane smooth as though turned
by potter's wheel, broken by no mound nor hillock, slope nor terrace;
level, horizontal, flawlessly flat. On it was no green living thing--no
tree nor bush, meadow nor covert.

It was alive with movement. A ferment that was as purposeful as it was
mechanical, a ferment symmetrical, geometrical, supremely ordered--

The surging of the Metal Hordes.

There they moved beneath us, these enigmatic beings, in a countless
host. They marched and countermarched in battalions, in regiments, in
armies. Far to the south I glimpsed a company of colossal shapes like
mobile, castellated and pyramidal mounts. They were circling, weaving
about each other with incredible rapidity--like scores of great pyramids
crowned with gigantic turrets and dancing. From these turrets came vivid
flashes, lightning bright--on their wake the rolling echoes of faraway
thunder.

Out of the north sped a squadron of obelisks from whose tops flamed
and flared the immense spinning wheels, appearing at this distance like
fiery whirling disks.

Up from their setting the Metal People lifted themselves in a thousand
incredible shapes, shapes squared and globed and spiked and shifting
swiftly into other thousands as incredible. I saw a mass of them draw
themselves up into the likeness of a tent skyscraper high; hang so for
an instant, then writhe into a monstrous chimera of a dozen towering
legs that strode away like a gigantic headless and bodiless tarantula in
steps two hundred feet long. I watched mile-long lines of them shape and
reshape into circles, into interlaced lozenges and pentagons--then lift
in great columns and shoot through the air in unimaginable barrage.

Through all this incessant movement I sensed plainly purpose, knew
that it was definite activity toward a definite end, caught the clear
suggestion of drill, of maneuver.

And when the shiftings of the Metal Hordes permitted we saw that all
the flat floor of the valley was stripped and checkered, stippled and
tessellated with every color, patterned with enormous lozenges and
squares, rhomboids and parallelograms, pentagons and hexagons and
diamonds, lunettes, circles and spirals; harlequined yet harmonious;
instinct with a grotesque suggestion of a super-Futurism.

But always this patterning was ordered, always COHERENT. As though
it were a page on which was spelled some untranslatable other world
message.

Fourth Dimensional revelations by some Euclidean deity! Commandments
traced by some mathematical God!

Looping across the vale, emerging from the sparkling folds of the
southernmost curtainings and vanishing into the gleaming veils of the
easternmost, ran a broad ribbon of pale-green jade; not straightly but
with manifold convolutions and flourishes. It was like a sentence in
Arabic.

It was margined with sapphire blue. All along its twisting course two
broad bands of jet margined the cerulean shore. It was spanned by scores
of flashing crystal arches. Nor were these bridges--even from that
distance I knew they were no bridges. From them came the crystalline
murmurings.

Jade? This stream jade? If so then it must be in truth molten, for I
caught its swift and polished rushing! It was no jade. It was in truth a
river; a river running like a writing across a patterned plane.

I looked upward--up to the circling peaks. They were a stupendous
coronet thrusting miles deep into the dazzling sky. I raised my glasses,
swept them. In color they were an immense and variegated flower with
countless multiform petals of stone; in outline they were a ring of
fortresses built by fantastic unknown Gods.

Up they thrust--domed and arched, spired and horned, pyramided, fanged
and needled. Here were palisades of burning orange with barbicans of
incandescent bronze; there aiguilles of azure rising from bastions of
cinnabar red; turrets of royal purple, obelisks of indigo; titanic forts
whose walls were splashed with vermilion, with citron yellows and with
rust of rubies; watch towers of flaming scarlet.

Scattered among them were the flashing emeralds of the glaciers and the
immense pallid baroques of the snow fields.

Like a diadem the summits ringed the Pit. Below them ran the ring of
flashing amethyst with its aural mists. Between them lay the vast and
patterned flat covered with still symbol and inexplicable movement.
Under their summits brooded the blue black, metallic mass of the Seeing
City.

Within circling walls, over plain and from the City hovered a cosmic
spirit not to be understood by man. Like an emanation of stars and
space, it was yet gem fine and gem hard, crystalline and metallic,
lapidescent and--

Conscious!

Down from the ledge where we stood fell a steep ramp, similar to that by
which, in the darkness, we had descended. It dropped at an angle of at
least forty-five degrees; its surface was smooth and polished.

Through the mists at our back stole a shining block. It paused, seemed
to perk itself; spun so that in turn each of its six faces took us in.

I felt myself lifted upon it by multitudes of little invisible hands;
saw Drake whirling up beside me. I moved toward him--through the force
that held us. A block swept away from the ledge, swayed for a moment.
Under us, as though we were floating in air, the Pit lay stretched.
There was a rapid readjustment, a shifting of our two selves upon
another surface. I looked down upon a tremendous, slender pillar of the
cubes, dropping below, five hundred feet to the valley's floor a column
of which the block that held us was the top.

Gone was the whirling wheel that had crowned it, but I knew this for the
Grinding Thing from which we had fled; the questing block had been its
scout. As though curious to know more of us, the Shape had sought us out
through the mists, its messenger had caught us, delivered us to it.

The pillar leaned over--bent like that shining pillar that had bridged
for us, at Norhala's commands, the abyss. The floor of the valley arose
to meet us. Further and further leaned the pillar. Again there was a
rapid shifting of us to another surface of the crowning cube. Fast now
swept up toward us the valley floor. A dizziness clouded my sight. There
was a little shock, a rolling over the Thing that had held us--

We stood upon the floor of the Pit.

And breaking from the immense and prostrate shaft on whose top we had
ridden downward came score upon score of the cubes. They broke from it,
disintegrating it; circled about us, curiously, interestedly, twinkling
at us from their deep sparkling points of eyes.

Helplessly we gazed at those who circled around us. Then suddenly I felt
myself lifted once more, was tossed to the surface of the nearest block.
Upon it I spun while the tiny eyes searched me. Then like a human ball
it tossed me to another. I caught a glimpse of Drake's tall figure
drifting through the air.

The play became more rapid, breathtaking. It was play; I recognized
that. But it was perilous play for us. I felt myself as fragile as a
doll of glass in the hands of careless children.

I was tossed to a waiting cube. On the ground, not ten feet from me,
was Drake, swaying dizzily. Suddenly the cube that held me tightened its
grip; tightened it so that it drew me irresistibly flat down upon its
surface. Before I dropped, Drake's body leaped toward me as though drawn
by a lasso. He fell at my side.

Then pursued by scores of the Things and like some mischievous boy
bearing off the spoils, the block that held us raced away, straight for
an open portal. A blaze of incandescent blue flame blinded me; again
as the dazzlement faded I saw Drake beside me--a skeleton form. Swiftly
flesh melted back upon him, clothed him.

The cube stopped, abruptly; the hosts of little unseen hands raised
us, slid us gently over its edge, set us upright beside it. And it sped
away.

All about us stretched another of those vast halls in which on high
burned the pale-gilt suns. Between its colossal columns streamed
thousands of the Metal Folk; no longer hurriedly, but quietly,
deliberately, sedately.

We were within the City--even as Ventnor had commanded.




CHAPTER XIX. THE CITY THAT WAS ALIVE

Close beside us was one of the cyclopean columns. We crept to it;
crouched at its base opposite the drift of the Metal People; strove,
huddled there, to regain our shaken poise. Like bagatelles we felt in
that tremendous place, the weird luminaries gleaming above like garlands
of frozen suns, the enigmatic hosts of animate cubes and spheres and
pyramids trooping past.

They ranged in size from shapes yard-high to giants of thirty feet or
more. They paid no heed to us, did not stop; streaming on, engrossed in
whatever mysterious business was summoning them. And after a time their
numbers lessened; thinned down to widely separate groups, to stragglers;
then ceased. The hall was empty of them.

As far as the eye could reach the columned spaces stretched. I was
conscious once more of that unusual flow of energy through every vein
and nerve.

“Follow the crowd!” said Drake. “Do you feel just full of pep and
ginger, by the way?”

“I am aware of the most extraordinary vigor,” I answered.

“Some weird joint,” he mused, looking about him. “Wonder if they have
any windows? This whole place looked solid to me--what I could see of
it. Wonder if we'll get up against it for air? These Things don't need
it, that's sure. Wonder--”

He broke off staring fascinatedly at the pillar behind us.

“Look here, Goodwin!” There was a tremor in his voice. “What do you make
of THIS?”

I followed his pointing finger; looked at him inquiringly.

“The eyes!” he said impatiently. “Don't you see them? The eyes in the
column!”

And now I saw them. The pillar was a pale metallic blue, in color a
trifle darker than the Metal Folk. All within it were the myriads of
tiny crystalline points that we had grown to know were the receptors
of some strange sense of sight. But they did not sparkle as did those
others; they were dull, lifeless. I touched the surface. It was smooth,
cool--with none of that subtle, warm vitality that pulsed through all
the Things with which I had come in contact. I shook my head, realizing
as I did so what a shock the incredible possibility he had suggested had
given me.

“No,” I said. “There is a resemblance, yes. But there is no force about
this--stuff; no life. Besides, such a thing is utterly incredible.”

“They might be--dormant,” he suggested stubbornly. “Can you see any mark
of their joining--if they ARE the cubes?”

Together we scanned the pillar minutely. The faces seemed unbroken,
continuous; there was no trace of those thin and shining lines that
marked the juncture of the cubes when they had clicked together to form
the bridge of the abyss or that had gleamed, crosslike, upon the back of
the combined four upon which we had followed Norhala.

“It's a sheer impossibility. It's madness to think such a thing, Drake!”
 I exclaimed, and wondered at my own vehemence of denial.

“Maybe,” he shook his head doubtfully. “Maybe--but--well--let's be on
our way.”

We strode on, following the direction the Metal Folk had gone. Clearly
Drake was still doubtful; at each pillar he hesitated, scanning it
closely with troubled eyes.

But I, having determinedly dismissed the idea, was more interested
in the fantastic lights that flooded this columned hall with their
buttercup radiance. They were still and unwinking; not disks, I could
see now, but globes. Great and small, they floated motionless, their
rays extending rigidly and as still as the orb that shed them.

Yet rigid as they were there was nothing about either rays or orbs that
suggested either hardness or the metallic. They were vaporous, soft as
St. Elmo's fire, the witch lights that cling at times to the spars of
ships, weird gleaming visitors from the invisible ocean of atmospheric
electricity.

When they disappeared, as they did frequently, it was instantaneously,
completely, with a disconcerting sleight-of-hand finality. I noted,
though, that when they did vanish, immediately close to where they
had been other orbs swam forth with that same astonishing abruptness;
sometimes only one, larger it might be than that which had gone;
sometimes a cluster of smaller globes, their frozen, crocused rays
impinging.

What could they be, I wondered--how fixed, and what the source of
their light? Products of electro-magnetic currents and born of the
interpenetration of such streams flowing above us? Such a theory might
account for their disappearance, and reappearance, shiftings of the
flows that changed the light producing points of contact. Wireless
lights? If so here was an idea that human science might elaborate if
ever we returned to--

“Now which way?” Drake broke in upon my musing. The hall had ended. We
stood before a blank wall vanishing into the soft mists hiding the roof
of the chamber.

“I thought we had been going along the way They went,” I said in
amazement.

“So did I,” he answered. “We must have circled. They never went through
THAT unless--unless--” He hesitated.

“Unless what?” I asked sharply.

“Unless it opened and let them through,” he said. “Have you forgotten
those great ovals--like cat's eyes that opened in the outer walls?” he
added quietly.

I HAD forgotten. I looked again at the wall. Certainly it was smooth,
lineless. In one unbroken, shining surface it rose, a facade of polished
metal. Within it the deep set points of light were duller even than they
had been in the pillars; almost indeed indistinguishable.

“Go on to the left,” I said none too patiently. “And get that absurd
notion out of your head.”

“All right.” He flushed. “But you don't think I'm afraid, do you?”

“If what you're thinking were true, you'd have a right to be,” I replied
tartly. “And I want to tell you I'D be afraid. Damned afraid.”

For perhaps two hundred paces we skirted the base of the wall. We came
abruptly to an opening, an oblong passageway fully fifty foot wide by
twice as high. At its entrance the mellow, saffron light was cut off as
though by an invisible screen. The tunnel itself was filled with a dim
grayish blue luster. For an instant we contemplated it.

“I wouldn't care to be caught in there by any rush,” I hesitated.

“There's not much good in thinking of that now,” said Drake, grimly.
“A few chances more or less in a joint of this kind is nothing between
friends, Goodwin; take it from me. Come on.”

We entered. Walls, floor and roof were composed of the same substance as
the great pillars, the wall of the outer chamber; filled like them with
dimmed replicas of the twinkling eye points.

“Odd that all the places in here are square,” muttered Drake. “They
don't seem to have used any spherical or pyramidal ideas in their
building--if it is a building.”

It was true. All was mathematically straight up and down and across. It
was strange--still we had seen little as yet.

There was a warmth about this passageway we trod; a difference in the
air of it. The warmth grew, a dry and baking heat; but stimulative
rather than oppressive. I touched the walls; the warmth did not come
from them. And there was no wind. Yet as we went on the heat increased.

The passageway turned at a right angle, continuing in a corridor
half its former dimensions. Far away shone a high bar of pale yellow
radiance, rising like a pillar of light from floor to roof. Toward it,
perforce, we trudged. Its brilliancy grew greater.

A few paces away from it we stopped. The yellow luminescence streamed
through a slit not more than a foot wide in the wall. We were in a
cul-de-sac for the opening was not wide enough for either Drake or me
to push through. Through it with the light gushed the curious heat
enveloping us.

Drake walked to the opening, peered through. I joined him.

At first all that I could see was a space filled with the saffron
lambency. Then I saw that this was splashed with tiny flashes of the
jewel fires; little lances and javelin thrusts of burning emeralds and
rubies; darting gem hard flames rose scarlet and pale sapphire; quick
flares of violet.

Into my sight through the irised, crocus mist swam the radiant body of
Norhala!

She stood naked, clad only in the veils of her hair that glowed now
like spun silk of molten copper, her strange eyes wide and smiling, the
galaxies of tiny stars sparkling through their gray depths.

And all about her swirled a countless host of the Little Things!

From them came the gem fires piercing the aureate mists. They played
and frolicked about her in scores of swiftly forming, swiftly changing,
goblin shapes. They circled her feet in shining, elfin rings; then
opening into flaming disks and stars, shot up and spun about the white
miracle of her body in great girdles of multi-colored living fires.
Mingled with disk and star were tiny crosses gleaming with sullen, deep
crimsons and smoky orange.

A flash of blue incandescence and a slender pillared shape leaped from
the floor; became a coronet, a whirling, flashing halo toward which
streamed up the flaming tendrilings of her tresses. Other halos circled
her arms and breasts; they spun like bracelets about the outstretched
arms.

Then like a swiftly rushing wave a host of the Little Things thrust
themselves up, covered her, hid her in a coruscating cloud.

I saw an exquisite arm thrust itself from their clinging, wave gaily;
saw her glorious head emerge from the incredible, the seething draperies
of living jewels. I heard her laughter, sweet and golden and far away.

Goddess of the Inexplicable! Madonna of the Metal Babes!

The Nursery of the Metal People!

Norhala was gone, blotted out from our sight! Gone too were the bar of
light and the chamber into which we had been peering. We stared at a
smooth, blank wall. With that same ensorcelled swiftness the wall had
closed even as we had stared through it; closed so quickly that we had
not seen its motion.

I gripped Drake; shrank with him into the farthest corner--for on the
other side of us the wall was opening. First it was only a crack; then
rapidly it widened. There stretched another passageway, luminous and
long; far down it we glimpsed movement. Closer that movement came,
grew plainer. Out of the mistily luminous distances, three abreast and
filling the corridor from side to side, raced upon us a company of the
great spheres!

Back we cowered from their approach--back and back; arms outstretched,
pressing against the barrier, flattening ourselves against the shock of
the destroying impact menacing.

“It's all up,” muttered Drake. “No place to run. They're bound to smash
us. Stick close, Doc. Get back to Ruth. Maybe I can stop them!”

Before I could check him, he had leaped straight in the path of the
rushing globes, now a scant twoscore yards away.

The globes stopped--halted a few feet from him. They seemed to
contemplate us, astonished. They turned upon themselves, as though
consulting. Slowly they advanced. We were pushed forward and lifted
gently. Then as we hung suspended, held by that force which always I can
liken only to myriads of tiny invisible hands, the shining arcs of their
backs undulated beneath us.

Their files swung around the corner and marched down the passage by
which we had come from the immense hall. And when the last rank had
passed from under us we were dropped softly to our feet; stood swaying
in their wake.

A curious frenzy of helpless indignation shook me, a rage of humiliation
obscuring all gratitude I should have felt for our escape. Drake's eyes
blazed wrath.

“The insolent devils!” He raised clenched fists. “The insolent,
domineering devils!”

We stared after them.

Was the passage growing narrower--closing? Even as I gazed I saw it
shrink; saw its walls slide silently toward each other. I pushed Drake
into the newly opened way and sprang after him.

Behind us was an unbroken wall covering all that space in which but a
moment before we had stood!

Is it to be wondered that a panic seized us; that we began to run
crazily down the alley that still lay open before us, casting over
our shoulders quick, fearful glances to see whether that inexorable,
dreadful closing was continuing, threatening to crush us between these
walls like flies in a vise of steel?

But they did not close. Unbroken, silent, the way stretched before us
and behind us. At last, gasping, avoiding each other's gaze, we paused.

And at that very moment of pause a deeper tremor shook me, a trembling
of the very foundations of life, the shuddering of one who faces the
inconceivable knowing at last that the inconceivable--IS.

For, abruptly, walls and floor and roof broke forth into countless
twinklings!

As though a film had been withdrawn from them, as though they had
awakened from slumber, myriads of little points of light shone forth
upon us from the pale-blue surfaces--lights that considered us, measured
us--mocked us.

The little points of living light that were the eyes of the Metal
People!

This was no corridor cut through inert matter by mechanic art; its
opening had been caused by no hidden mechanisms! It was a living
Thing--walled and floored and roofed by the living bodies--of the Metal
People themselves.

Its opening, as had been the closing of that other passage, was the
conscious, coordinate and voluntary action of the Things that formed
these mighty walls.

An action that obeyed, was directed by, the incredibly gigantic,
communistic will which, like the spirit of the hive, the soul of the
formicary, animated every unit of them.

A greater realization swept us. If THIS were true, then those pillars in
the vast hall, its towering walls--all this City was one living Thing!

Built of the animate bodies of countless millions! Tons upon countless
tons of them shaping a gigantic pile of which every atom was sentient,
mobile--intelligent!

A Metal Monster!

Now I knew why it was that its frowning facade had seemed to watch us
Argus-eyed as the Things had tossed us toward it. It HAD watched us!

That flood of watchfulness pulsing about us had been actual
concentration of regard of untold billions of tiny eyes of the living
block which formed the City's cliff.

A City that Saw! A City that was Alive!

No secret mechanism then--back darted my mind to that first terror--had
closed the wall, shutting from our sight Norhala at play with the Little
Things. None had opened the way for, had closed the way behind, the
coursing spheres. It had been done by the conscious action of the
conscious Things of whose living bodies was built this whole tremendous
thinking pile!


I think that for a moment we both went a little mad as that staggering
truth came to us. I know we started to run once more, side by side,
gripping like frightened children each other's hands. Then Drake
stopped.

“By all the HELL of this place,” he said, solemnly, “I'll run no more.
After all--we're men. If they kill us, they kill us. But by the God who
made me I'll run from them no more. I'll die standing.”

His courage steadied me. Defiantly we marched on. Up from below us, down
from the roof, out from the walls of our way the hosts of eyes gleamed
and twinkled upon us.

“Who could have believed it?” he muttered, half to himself. “A living
city of them! A living nest of them; a prodigious living nest of metal!”

“A nest?” I caught the word. What did it suggest? That was it--the nest
of the army ants, the city of the army ants, that Beebe had studied in
the South American jungles and once described to me. After all, was this
more wonderful, more unbelievable than that--the city of ants which was
formed by their living bodies precisely as this was of the bodies of the
Cubes?

How had Beebe * phrased it--“the home, the nest, the hearth, the nursery,
the bridal suite, the kitchen, the bed and board of the army ants.”
 Built of and occupied by those blind and deaf and savage little insects
which by the guidance of smell alone carried on the most intricate
operations, the most complex activities. Nothing here was stranger than
that, I reflected--if once one could rid the mind of the paralyzing
influence of the shapes of the Metal Things. Whence came the stimuli
that moved THEM, the stimuli to which THEY reacted?

     * William Beebe, Atlantic Monthly, October, 1919.

Well then--whence and how came the orders to which the ANTS responded;
that bade them open THIS corridor in their nest, close THAT, form this
chamber, fill that one? Was one more mysterious than the other?

Breaking into my current of thoughts came consciousness that I was
moving with increased speed; that my body was fast growing lighter.

Simultaneously with this recognition I felt myself lifted from the
floor of the corridor and levitated with considerable rapidity forward;
looking down I saw that floor several feet below me. Drake's arm wound
itself around my shoulder.

“Closing up behind us,” he muttered. “They're putting us--out.”

It was, indeed, as though the passageway had wearied of our deliberate
progress. Had decided to--give us a lift. Rearward it was shutting. I
noted with interest how accurately this motion kept pace with our own
speed, and how fluidly the walls seemed to run together.

Our movement became accelerated. It was as though we floated buoyantly,
weightless, upon some swift stream. The sensation was curiously
pleasant, languorous--what was that word Ruth had used?--ELEMENTAL--and
free. The supporting force seemed to flow equally from walls and
floor; to reach down to us from the roof. It was slumberously even, and
effortless. I saw that in advance of us the living corridor was opening
even as behind us it was closing.

All around us the little eye points twinkled and--laughed.

There was no danger here--there could be none. Deeper and deeper dropped
my mind into the depths of that alien tranquillity. Faster and faster we
floated--onward.

Abruptly, ahead of us shone a blaze of daylight. We passed into it. The
force holding us withdrew its grip; I felt solidity beneath my feet;
stood and leaned back against a smooth wall.

The corridor had ended and--had shut us out from itself.

“Bounced!” exclaimed Drake.

And incongruous, flippant, colloquial as was that word, I know none that
would better describe my own feelings.

We were BOUNCED out upon a turret jutting from the barrier. And before
us lay spread the most amazing, the most extraordinary fantastic scene
upon which, I think, the vision of man has rested since the advent of
time.




CHAPTER XX. VAMPIRES OF THE SUN

It was a crater; a half mile on high and all of two thousand feet across
ran the circular lip of its vast rim. Above it was a circle of white and
glaring sky in whose center flamed the sun.

And instantly, before my vision could grasp a tithe of that panorama, I
knew that this place was the very heart of the City; its vital ganglion;
its soul.

Around the crater lip were poised thousands of concave disks, vernal
green, enormous. They were like a border of gigantic, upthrust shields;
and within each, emblazoned like a shield's device, was a blinding
flower of flame--the reflected, dilated face of the sun. Below this
diadem hung, pendent, clusters of other disks, swarmed like the globular
hiving of the constellation Hercules' captured stars. And each of these
prisoned the image of our sun.

A hundred feet below us was the crater floor.

Up from it thrust a mountainous forest of the pallidly radiant cones;
bristling; prodigious. Tier upon tier, thicket upon thicket, phalanx
upon phalanx they climbed. Up and up, pyramidically, they flung their
spiked hosts.

They drew together two thousand feet above us, clustering close about
the foot of a single huge spire which thrust itself skyward above them.
The crest of this spire was truncated. From its shorn tip radiated
scores of long and slender spokes holding in place a thousand feet wide
wheel of wan green disks whose concave surfaces, unlike those smooth
ones girding the crater, were curiously faceted.

This amazing structure rested upon a myriad-footed base of crystal,
even as had that other cornute fantasy beside which we had met the great
Disk. But it was in size to that as--as Leviathan to a minnow. From it
streamed the same baffling suggestion of invincible force transmuted
into matter; energy coalesced into the tangible; power made concentrate
in the vestments of substance.

Half-way between crater lip and floor began the hordes of the Metal
People.

In colossal animate cheveau-de-frise of hundred-foot girders they thrust
themselves out from the curving walls--walls, I knew, as alive as they!

From these Brobdignagian beams they swung in ropes and clusters--spheres
and cubes studded as thickly with the pyramids as ever Titan's mace with
spikes. Group after bizarre group they dropped; pendulous. Coppices
of slender columns of thistled globes sprang up to meet the festooned
joists.

Between the girders they draped themselves in long, stellated garlands;
grouped themselves in innumerable, kaleidoscopic patterns.

They clicked into place around the golden turret in which we crouched.

In fantastic arrases they swayed in front of us--now hiding by, now
revealing through their quicksilver interweavings the mounts of the
Cones.

And steadily those flowing in below added to their multitudes; gliding
up cable and pillar; building out still further the living girders,
stringing themselves upon living festoon and living garland, weaving in
among them, changing their shapes, rewriting their symbols.

They swung and threaded swiftly, in shifting arabesque, in Gothic
traceries, in lace-like fantasies; utterly bizarre, unutterably
beautiful--crystalline, geometric always.

Abruptly their movement ceased--so abruptly that the stoppage of all the
ordered turmoil had the quality of appalling silence.

An unimaginable tapestry bedight with incredible broidery, the Metal
People draped the vast cup.

Pillared it as though it were a temple.

Garnished it with their bodies as though it were a shrine.

Across the floor toward the Cones glided a palely lustrous sphere. In
shape only a globe like all its kind, yet it was invested with power; it
radiated power as a star does light; was clothed in unseen garments of
supernal force. In its wake drifted two great pyramids; after them ten
spheres but little smaller than the Shape which led.

“The Metal Emperor!” breathed Drake.

On they swept until they reached the base of the Cones. They paused at
the edge of the crystal tabling. They turned.

There was a flashing as of a meteor bursting. The globe had opened into
that splendor of jewel fires before which had floated Norhala and Ruth.

I saw again the luminous ovals of sapphire, studding its golden zone,
the mystic rose of pulsing, petal flame, the still core of incandescent
ruby that was the heart of that rose.

Strangely I felt my own heart veer toward this--Thing; bowing before its
beauty and its strength; almost worshiping!

A shock of revulsion went through me. I shot a quick, half frightened
glance at Drake. He was crouching dangerously close to the lip of the
ledge, hands clasped and knuckles white with the intensity of his grip,
eyes rapt, staring--upon the verge of worship even as I had been.

“Drake!” I thrust my elbow into his side brutally. “None of that!
Remember you're human! Guard yourself, man--guard yourself!”

“What?” he muttered; then, abruptly: “How did you know?”

“I felt it myself,” I answered: “For God's sake, Dick--hold fast to
yourself! Remember Ruth!”

He shook his head violently--as though to be rid of some clinging,
cloying thing.

“I'll not forget again,” he said.

He huddled down once more close to the edge of the shelf; peering over.
No one of the Metal People had moved; the silence, the stillness, was
unbroken.

Now the flanking pyramids shot forth into twin stars, blazing with
violet luminescences. And one by one after them the ten lesser spheres
expanded into flaming orbs; beautiful they were, but far less glorious
than that Disk of whom they were the counselors?--ministers?--what?

Still there was no movement among all the arrased, girdered, pillared
hosts.

There came a little wailing; far away it was and far. Nearer it drew.
Was that a tremor that passed through the crowded crater? A quick pulse
of--eagerness?

“Hungry!” whispered Drake. “They're HUNGRY!”


Closer was the wailing; again that faint tremor quivered over the place.
And now I caught it--a quick and avid pulsing.

“Hungry,” whispered Drake again. “Like a lot of lions with the keeper
coming along with meat.”

The wailing was below us. I felt, not a quiver this time, but an
unmistakable shock pass through the Horde. It throbbed--and passed.

Into the field of our vision, up to the flaming Disk rushed an immense
cube.

Thrice the height of a tall man--as I think I have noted before--when it
unfolded its radiance was that shape of mingled beauty and power I call
the Metal Emperor.

Yet this Thing eclipsed it. Black, uncompromising, in some indefinable
way BRUTAL, its square bulk blotted out the Disk's effulgence; shrouded
it. And a shadow seemed to fall upon the crater. The violet fires of the
flanking stars pulsed out--watchfully, threateningly.

For only an instant the darkening block loomed against the Disk;
blackened it.

There came another meteor burst of light. Where the cube had been was
now a tremendous, fiery cross--a cross inverted.

Its upper arm arose to twice the length either of its horizontals or
the square that was its foot. In its opening it must have turned, for
its--FACE--was toward us and away from the Cones, its body hid the Disk,
and almost all the surfaces of the two watchful Stars.

Eighty feet at least in height, this cruciform shape stood. It flamed
and flickered with angry, smoky crimsons and scarlets; with sullen
orange glowings and glitterings of sulphurous yellows. Within its fires
were none of those leaping, multicolored glories that were the Metal
Emperor's; no trace of the pulsing, mystic rose; no shadow of jubilant
sapphire; no purple royal; no tender, merciful greens nor gracious
opalescences. Nothing even of the blasting violet of the Stars.

All angry, smoky reds and ochres the cross blazed forth--and in its
lurid glowings was something sinister, something real, something cruel,
something--nearer to earth, closer to man.

“The Keeper of the Cones and the Metal Emperor!” muttered Drake. “I
begin to get it--yes--I begin to get--Ventnor!”

Once more the pulse, the avid throbbing shook the crater. And as swiftly
in its wake rushed back the stillness, the silence.

The Keeper turned--I saw its palely lustrous blue metallic back. I drew
out my little field-glasses, focussed them.

The Cross slipped sidewise past the Disk, its courtiers, its stellated
guardians. As it went by they swung about with it; ever facing it.

And now at last was clear a thing that had puzzled greatly--the
mechanism of that opening process by which sphere became oval disk,
pyramid a four-pointed star and--as I had glimpsed in the play of the
Little Things about Norhala, could see now so plainly in the Keeper--the
blocks took this inverted cruciform shape.

The Metal People were hollow!

Hollow metal--boxes!

In their enclosing sides dwelt all their vitality--their
powers--themselves!

And those sides were--everything that THEY were!

Folded, the oval disk became the sphere; the four points of the star,
the square from which those points radiated; shutting became the
pyramid; the six faces of the cubes were when opened the inverted cross.

Nor were these flexible, mobile walls massive. They were indeed,
considering the apparent mass of the Metal Folk, most astonishingly
fragile. Those of the Keeper, despite its eighty feet of height, could
not have been more than a yard in thickness. At the edges I thought I
could see groovings; noted the same appearances at the outlines of
the Stars. Seen sidewise, the body of the Metal Emperor showed as a
convexity; its surface smooth, with a suggestion of transparency.

The Keeper was bending; its oblong upper plane dropping forward as
though upon a hinge. Lower and lower this flange bent--in a grotesque,
terrifying obeisance; a horrible mockery of reverence.

Was this mountain of Cones then actually a shrine--an idol of the Metal
People--their God?

The oblong that was the upper half of the cruciform Shape extended now
at right angles to the horizontal arms. It hovered, a rectangle forty
feet long, as many feet over the floor at the base of the crystal
pedestal. It bent again, this time from the hinge that held the
outstretched arms to the base. And now it was a huge truncated cross, a
T-shaped figure, hovering only twenty feet above the pave.

Down from the Keeper writhed and flicked a tangle of tentacles;
serpentine, whiplike. Silvery white, they were dyed with the scarlet and
orange flaming of the surface now hidden from my eyes; reflected those
sullen and angry gleamings. Vermiceous, coiling, they seemed to drop
from every inch of the overhanging planes.

Something there was beneath them--something like an immense and luminous
tablet. The tentacles were moving over it--pressing here, thrusting
there, turning, pushing, manipulating--


A shuddering passed through the crowding cones. I saw the tremor shake
their bristling hosts, oscillate the great spire, set the faceted disks
quivering.

The trembling grew; a vibration in every separate cone that became even
more rapid. There was a faint, curiously oppressive humming--like the
distant echo of a tempest in chaos.

Faster, ever faster grew the vibration. Now the sharp outlines of the
cones were dissolving.

And now they were--gone.

The mount of the cones had become a mighty pyramid of pale green
radiance--one tremendous, pallid flame, of which the spire was the
tongue. Out from the disked wheel at its shorn tip gushed a flood of
light--light that gathered itself from the leaping radiance below it.

The tentacles of the Keeper moved more swiftly over the enigmatic
tablet; writhing cloudily; confusedly rapid. The faceted disks wavered;
turned upward; the wheel began to whirl--faster--faster--

Up from that flaming circle, out into the sky leaped a thick, pale green
column of intensest light.

With prodigious speed, as compact as water, CONCENTRATE, it
struck--straight out toward the face of the sun.

It thrust up with the speed of light--the speed of light? A thought came
to me; incredible I believed it even as I reacted to it. My pulse is
uniformly seventy to the minute. I sought my wrist, found the artery,
made allowance for its possible acceleration, began to count.

“What's the matter?” asked Drake.

“Take my glasses,” I muttered, trying to keep up, while speaking, my
tally. “Matches in my pocket. Smoke the lenses. I want to look at sun.”

With a look of stupefied amazement which, at another time I would have
found laughable, he obeyed.

“Hold them to my eyes,” I ordered.

Three minutes had gone by.

There it was--that for which I sought. Clear through the darkened lenses
I could see the sun spot, high up on the northern-most limb of the
sun. An unimaginable cyclone of incandescent gases; an unthinkably huge
dynamo pouring its floods of electro-magnetism upon all the circling
planets; that solar crater which we now know was, when at its maximum,
all of one hundred and fifty thousand miles across; the great sun spot
of the summer of 1919--the most enormous ever recorded by astronomical
science.

Five minutes had gone by.

Common sense whispered to me. There was no use keeping my eyes fixed
to the glasses. Even if that thought were true--even if that pillar
of radiance were a MESSENGER, an earth-hurled bolt flying to the sun
through atmosphere and outer space with the speed of light, even if it
were this stupendous creation of these Things, still between eight and
nine minutes must elapse before it could reach the orb; and as many
minutes must go by before the image of whatever its impact might produce
upon the sun could pass back over the bridge of light spanning the
ninety millions of miles between it and us.

And after all did not that hypothesis belong to the utterly impossible?
Even were it so--what was it that the Metal Monster expected to follow?
This radiant shaft, colossal as it was to us, was infinitesimal compared
to the target at which it was aimed.

What possible effect could that spear have upon the solar forces?

And yet--and yet--a gnat's bite can drive an elephant mad. And Nature's
balance is delicate; and what great happenings may follow the slightest
disturbance of her infinitely sensitive, her complex, equilibrium? It
might be--it might be--

Eight minutes had passed.

“Take the glasses,” I bade Drake. “Look up at the sun spot--the big
one.”

“I see it.” He had obeyed me. “What of it?”

Nine minutes.

The shaft, if I were right, had by now touched the sun. What was to
follow?

“I don't get you at all,” said Drake, and lowered the glasses.

Ten minutes.

“What's happening? Look at the Cones! Look at the Emperor!” gasped
Drake.


I peered down, then almost forgot to count.

The pyramidal flame that had been the mount of Cones was shrunken. The
pillar of radiance had not lessened--but the mechanism that was its
source had retreated whole yards within the field of its crystal base.

And the Metal Emperor! Dulled and faint were his fires, dimmed his
splendors; and fainter still were the violet luminescences of the
watching Stars, the shimmering livery of his court.

The Keeper of the Cones! Were not its outstretched planes hovering lower
and lower over the gleaming tablet; its tentacles moving aimlessly,
feebly--wearily?

I had a sense of force being withdrawn from all about me. It was as
though all the City were being drained of life--as though vitality were
being sucked from it to feed this pyramid of radiance; drained from it
to forge the thrusting spear piercing sunward.

The Metal People seemed to hang limply, inert; the living girders seemed
to sag; the living columns to bend; to droop and to sway.

Twelve minutes.

With a nerve-racking crash one of the laden beams fell; dragging down
with it others; bending, shattering in its fall a thicket of the
horned columns. Behind us the sparkling eyes of the wall were dimmed,
vacant--dying. Something of that hellish loneliness, that demoniac
desire for immolation that had assailed us in the haunted hollow of the
ruins began to creep over me.

The crowded crater was fainting. The life was going out of the City--its
magnetic life, draining into the shaft of green fire.

Duller grew the Metal Emperor's glories.

Fourteen minutes.

“Goodwin,” cried Drake, “the life's going out of these Things! Going out
with that ray they're shooting.”

Fifteen minutes.

I watched the tentacles of the Keeper grope over the tablet. Abruptly
the flaming pyramid darkened--WENT OUT.

The radiant pillar hurtled upward like a thunder-bolt; vanished in
space.

Before us stood the mount of cones, shrunken to a sixth of its former
size.

Sixteen minutes.

All about the crater-lip the ringed shields tilted; thrust themselves
on high, as though behind each was an eager lifting arm. Below them the
hived clusters of disks changed from globules into wide coronets.

Seventeen minutes.

I dropped my wrist; seized the glasses from Drake; raised them to the
sun. For a moment I saw nothing--then a tiny spot of white incandescence
shone forth at the lower edge of the great spot. It grew into a point of
radiance, dazzling even through the shadowed lenses.

I rubbed my eyes; looked again. It was still there, larger--blazing with
an ever increasing and intolerable intensity.

I handed the glasses to Drake, silently.

“I see it!” he muttered. “I see it! And THAT did it--that! Goodwin!”
 There was panic in his cry. “Goodwin! The spot! it's widening! It's
widening!”

I snatched the glasses from him. I caught again the dazzling flashing.
But whether Drake HAD seen the spot widen, change--to this day I do not
know.

To me it seemed unchanged--and yet--perhaps it was not. It may be that
under that finger of force, that spear of light, that wound in the side
of our sun HAD opened further--

That the sun had winced!

I do not to this day know. But whether it had or not--still shone the
intolerably brilliant light. And miracle enough that was for me.

Twenty minutes--subconsciously I had gone on counting--twenty minutes--

About the cratered girdle of the upthrust shields a glimmering mistiness
was gathering; a translucent mist, beryl pale and beryl clear. In a
heart-beat it had thickened into a vast and vaporous ring through whose
swarms of corpuscles the sun's reflected image upon each disk shone
clear--as though seen through clouds of transparent atoms of aquamarine.

Again the filaments of the Keeper moved--feebly. As one of the hosts of
circling shields shifted downward. Brilliant, ever more brilliant, waxed
the fast-thickening mists.

Abruptly, and again as one, the disks began to revolve. From every
concave surface, from the surfaces of the huge circlets below them,
flashed out a stream of green fire--green as the fire of green life
itself. Corpuscular, spun of uncounted rushing, dazzling ions the great
rays struck across, impinged upon the thousand-foot wheel that crowned
the cones; set it whirling.

Over it I saw form a limpid cloud of the brilliant vapors. Whence came
these sparkling nebulosities, these mists of light? It was as though the
clustered, spinning disks reached into the shadowless air, sucked from
it some unseen, rhythmic energy and transformed it into this visible,
coruscating flood.

For now it was a flood. Down from the immense wheel came pouring
cataracts of green fires. They cascaded over the cones; deluged them;
engulfed them.

Beneath that radiant inundation the cones grew. Perceptibly their volume
increased--as though they gorged themselves upon the light. No--it was
as though the corpuscles flew to them, coalesced and built themselves
into the structure.

Out and further out upon the base of crystal they crept. And higher and
higher soared their tips, thrusting, ever thrusting upward toward the
whirling wheel that fed them.

Now from the Keeper's planes writhed the Keeper's tangle of tentacles,
uncoiling eagerly, avidly, through the twenty feet of space between
their source and the enigmatic mechanism they manipulated. The crater's
disks tilted downward. Into the vast hollow shot their jets of green
radiance, drenching the Metal Hordes, splashing from the polished walls
wherever the Metal Hordes had left those living walls exposed.

All about us was a trembling, an accelerating pulse of life. Colossal,
rhythmic, ever quicker, ever more powerfully that pulse throbbed--a
prodigious vibration monstrously alive.

“Feeding!” whispered Drake. “Feeding! Feeding on the sun!”

Faster danced the radiant beams. The crater was a cauldron of green
fires through which the conical rays angled and interwove, crossed and
mingled. And where they mingled, where they crossed, flamed out suddenly
immense rayless orbs; palpitant for an instant, then dissolving in
spiralling, feathery spray of pallid emerald incandescences.

Stronger and stronger beat the pulse of returning life.

A jetting stream struck squarely upon the Metal Emperor. Out blazed his
splendors--jubilant. His golden zodiac, no longer tarnished and dull,
ran with sun flames; the wondrous rose was a racing, lambent miracle.

Up snapped the Keeper; towered behind him, all flickering scarlets and
leaping yellows--no longer wrathful or sullen.

The place dripped radiance; was filling like a chrisom with radiance.

Us, too, the sparkling mists bathed.

I was conscious of a curiously wild exhilaration; a quickening of the
pulse; an abnormally rapid breathing. I stooped to touch Drake; sparks
leaped from my outstretched fingers, great green sparks that crackled as
they impacted upon him. He gave them no heed; but stared with fascinated
eyes upon the crater.

Now from every side broke a tempest of gem fires. From every girder
and column, from every arras, pendent and looping, burst diamond
glitterings, ruby luminescences, lanced flames of molten emerald and
sapphires, flashings of amethyst and opal, meteoric iridescences,
dazzling spectrums.

The hollow was a cave of some Aladdin of the Titans ablaze with
enchanted hoards. It was a place of gems ensorcelled, gems in which
imprisoned hosts of the Jinns of Light beat sparkling against their
crystal walls to escape.

I thrust the fantasies from me. Fantastic enough was this reality--globe
and pyramid and cube of the Metal People opening wide, bathing in,
drinking from the radiant maelstrom that faster and ever faster swirled
about them.

“Feeding!” It was Drake's awed voice. “Feeding on the sun!”

The circling shields were raising themselves, lifting themselves higher
above the crater-lip. Into the crowded cylinder came now only the rays
from the high circlets, the streams from the huge wheel above the still
growing cones.

Up and up the shields rose, but by what mechanism raised I could not
see. Their motion ceased; in all their thousands they turned. Over the
City's top and out into the oval valley they poured their torrents of
light; flooding it, deluging it even as they had this pit that was the
City's heart. Feeding, I knew, those other Metal Hordes without.

And as though in answer, sweeping down upon us through the circles of
open sky, a clamor poured.

“If we'd but known!” Drake's voice came to me, thin and unreal through
the tumult. “It's what Ventnor meant! If we had got down there when they
were so weak--if we could have handled the Keeper--we could have smashed
that plate that works the Cones! We could have killed them!”

“There are other Cones,” I cried back to him.

“No,” he shook his head. “This is the master machine. It's what Ventnor
meant when he said to strike through the sun. And we've lost the
chance--”

Louder grew the hurricane without; and now within began its mate.
Through the mists flashed linked tempests of lightnings. Bolt upon
javelin bolt, and ever more thickly; lightnings green as the mists
themselves; lightning bolts of destroying violets, searing scarlets;
tearing chains of withering yellows, globes of exploding multicolored
electric incandescences.

The crater was threaded with the lightnings of the Metal People; was
broidered with them; was a Pit woven with vast and changing patterns of
electric flame.

What was it that Drake had said? That if but we could have known we
could have destroyed these--Things--Destroyed--Them? Things that could
thrust their will and power up through ninety million miles of space and
suck from the sun the honey of power! Drain it and hive it within these
great mountains of the cones!

Destroy Things that could feed their own life into a machine to draw
back from the sun a greater life--Things that could forge of their
strength a spear which, piercing the side of the sun, sent gushing back
upon them a tenfold, nay, a thousandfold strength!

Destroy this City that was one vast and living dynamo feeding upon the
magnetic life of earth and sun!

The clamor had grown stupendous, destroying--like armored Gods roaring
at sword play in a hundred Valhallas; like the war drums of battling
universe; like the smitings of warring suns.

And all the City was throbbing, beating with a gigantic pulse of
life--was fed and drunken with life. I felt that pulsing become my own;
I echoed to it; throbbed in unison. I saw Drake outlined in flame; that
around me a radiant nimbus was growing.

I thought I saw Norhala floating, clothed in shouting, flailing fires. I
strove to call out to her. By me slipped the body of Drake; lay flaming
at my feet upon the narrow ledge.

There was a roaring within my head--louder, far louder, than that which
beat against my ears. Something was drawing me forth; drawing me out of
my body into unimaginable depths of blackness. Something was hurling me
out into those cold depths of space that alone could darken the fires
that encircled me--the fires of which I was becoming a part.

I felt myself leap outward--outward and outward--into--oblivion.




CHAPTER XXI. PHANTASMAGORIA METALLIQUE.

Wearily I opened my eyes. Stiffly, painfully, I stirred. High above
me was the tremendous circle of sky, ringed with the hosts of feeding
shields. But the shields were now wanly gleaming and the sky was the sky
of night.

Night? How long had I lain here? And where was Drake? I struggled to
rise.

“Steady, old man,” his voice came from beside me. “Steady--and quiet.
How are you feeling?”

“Badly battered,” I groaned. “What happened?”

“We weren't used to the show,” he said. “We got all fed up at the orgy.
Too much magnetism--we had a sudden and violent attack of electrical
indigestion. Sh-h--look ahead of you.”

Gingerly I turned. I had been lying, I now saw, head toward and prone
at the base of one of the crater's walls. As my gaze swept away I noted
with a curious relief that the tiny eye-points were no longer sparkling
with their enigmatic life, that they were dulled and dim once more.

Before me, glimmering pallidly, bristled the mount of the Cones. Around
its crystal base glittered immense egg-shaped diamond incandescences.
They were both rayless and strangely--lightless; they threw no shadows
nor did their lambency lessen the dimness. Beside each of these curious
luminosities stood one of the sullen-fired, cruciform shapes--the Things
that now I knew for the opened cubes.

They were smaller than the Keeper, indeed less than half his height.
They were ranged in an almost unbroken crescent around the visible arc
of the immense pedestal--and now I saw that the lights were a few feet
closer to that pedestal than they. Egg-shaped as I have said, the wider
end was undermost, resting in a broad cup upheld by a slender pedicle
silvery-gray and metallic.

“They're building out the base,” whispered Drake. “The Cones got so big
they have to give them more room.”

“Magnetism,” I whispered in return. “Electricity--they drew down from
the sun spot. And it was more than that--I saw the Cones grow under it.
It fed them as it fed the Hordes--but the Cones grew. It was as though
the shields and the Cones turned pure energy into substance.”

“And if we hadn't been pretty thoroughly magnetized to start with it
would have done for us,” he said.

We watched the operation going on in front of us. The cross shapes had
bent, hinging above the transverse arms. They bowed in absolute unison
as at some signal. Down from the horizontal plane of each whipped the
long and writhing tentacles.

At the foot of every one I could now perceive a heap of some faintly
glistening material. The tendrils coiled among this, then drew up
something that looked like a thick rod of crystal. The bent planes
straightened; simultaneously they thrust the crystalline bars toward the
incandescences.

There came a curious, brittle hissing. The ends of the rods began to
dissolve into dazzling, diamond rain, atomically minute, that passing
through the egg-shaped lights poured upon the periphery of the pedestal.
Rapidly the bars melted. Heat there must be in these lights, terrific
heat--yet the Keeper's workers seemed impervious to it.

As the ends of the bars radiated into the annealing mist I saw the
tentacles creep closer and ever closer to the rayless flame through
which the mist flew. And at the last, as the ultimate atoms drove
through, the holding tendrils were thrust almost within it; touched it,
certainly.

A score of times they repeated this process while we watched. Unaware of
us they seemed, or--if aware, then indifferent. More rapid became their
movements, the glassy ingots streaming through the floating braziers
with hardly a pause in their passing. Abruptly, as though switched, the
incandescences lessened into candle-points; instantly, as at a signal,
the crescent of crosses closed into a crescent of cubes.

Motionless they stood, huge blocks blackened against the dim glowing
of the cones--sentient monoliths; a Druid curve; an arc of a metal
Stonehenge. And as at dusk and dawn the great menhirs of Stonehenge fill
with a mysterious, granitic life, seem to be praying priests of stone,
so about these gathered hierophantic illusion.


They quivered; the slender pedicles cupping, the waned lights swayed;
the lights lifted and soared, upright, to their backs.

Two by two with measured pace, solemnly the cubes glided off into the
encircling darkness. As they swept away there streamed behind them other
scores not until then visible to us, joining pair by pair from hidden
arcs.

Into the secret shadows they flowed, two by two, each bearing over it
the slim shaft holding the serene flame.

Grotesquely were they like a column of monks marching with dimmed
flambeau of their worship. Angled metal monks of some god of metal,
carrying tapers of electric fire, withdrawing slowly from a Holy of
Holies whose metallically divine Occupant knew nothing of man--nor cared
to know.

Grotesque--yes. But would that I had the power to crystallize in words
the underlying, alien terror every movement of the Metal Monster
when disintegrate, its every manifestation when combined, evoked; the
incredulous, amazed lurking always close behind the threshold of the
mind; the never lifting, thin-shuddering shadow.

Smaller, dimmer waned the lights--they were gone.

We crouched, motionless. Nothing stirred; there was no sound. Without
speaking we arose; crept together over the smooth floor toward the
cones.

As we crossed I saw that the pave, like the walls, was built of the
bodies of the Metal People; and, like the walls, they were dormant,
filmed eyes oblivious to our passing. Closer we crept--were only a scant
score of rods from that colossal mechanism. I noted that the crystal
foundation was set low; was not more than four feet above the floor.
The sturdy, dwarfed pilasters supporting it thrust up in crowded copses,
merging through distance into apparent solidity.

Now, too, I realized, as I had not when looking down from above, how
stupendous the structure rising from the crystal foundation was.

I began to wonder how so thin a support could bear the mount bristling
above it--then remembered what it was that at first had flown from them,
shrinking them, and at last had fed and swelled them.

Light! Weightless magnetic ions; swarms of electric ions; the misty
breath of the infinite energy breathing upon, condensing upon, them.
Could it be that the Cones for all their apparent mass had little,
if any, weight? Like ringed Saturn, thousands of times Earth's bulk,
flaunting itself in the Heavens--yet if transported to our world so
light that rings and all it would float like a bubble upon our oceans.
The Cones towered above me--close, so close.

The Cones were weightless. How I knew I cannot say--but now, almost
touching them, I did know. Nebulous, yet solid, were they; compact, yet
tenuous, dense and unsubstantial.

Again the thought came to me--they were force made visible; energy made
concentrate into matter.

We skirted, seeking for the tablet over which the Keeper had hovered;
the mechanism which, under his tentacles, had shifted the circling
shields, thrust the spear of green fire into the side of the wounded
sun. Hesitantly I touched the crystal base; the edge was warm, but
whether this warmth came from the dazzling rain which we had just
watched build it outward or whether it was a property inherent with the
substance itself I do not know.

Certainly there was no mark upon it to show where the molten mists had
fallen. It was diamond hard and smooth. The nearest cones were but a
scant nine feet from its rim.

Suddenly we saw the tablet; stood beside it. The shape of a great T,
glimmering with a faint and limpid violet phosphorescence, it might have
been, in shape and size, the palely shining shadow of the Keeper. It was
a foot above the floor, and had apparently no connection with the cones.

It was made of thousands of close-packed tiny octagonal rods the tops of
some of which were cupped, of others pointed; none was more than half
an inch in width. There was about it a suggestion of wedded crystal
and metal--as about its burden was the suggestion of mated energy and
matter.

The rods were movable; they formed a keyboard unimaginably complex;
a keyboard whose infinite combinations were like a Fourth Dimensional
chess game. I saw that only the swarms of tentacles that were the
Keeper's hands and these only could be masters of its incredible
intricacies. No Disk--not even the Emperor, no Star shape could play on
it, draw out its chords of power.

But why? Why had it been so made that sullen flaming Cross alone could
release its hidden meanings, made articulate its interwoven octaves?
And how were its messages conveyed? Up to its bases pressed the dormant
cubes--that under it they lay as well I did not doubt.

There was no visible copula of the tablet with cones; no antennae
between it and the circled shields. Could it be that the impulses
released by the Keeper's coilings passed through the Metal People of
the pave on the upthrust Metal People of the crater rim who held the
shields?

That WAS unthinkable--unthinkable because if so this mechanism was
superfluous.

The swift response to the communal will that we had observed showed that
the Metal Monster needed nothing of this kind for transmission of the
thought of any of its units.

There was some gap here--a gap that the grouped consciousness could not
bridge without other means. Clearly that was true--else why the tablet,
why the Keeper's travail?

Was each of these tiny rods a mechanism akin, in a fashion, to the
sending keys of the wireless; were they transmitters of subtle energy
in which was enfolded command? Spellers-out of a super-Morse carrying
to each responsive cell of the Metal Monster the bidding of those higher
units which were to It as the brain cells are to us? That, advanced
as the knowledge it implied might be, was closer to the heart of the
possible.

I bent, determined, despite the well-nigh unconquerable shrinking I
felt, to touch the tablet's rods.

A flickering shadow fell upon me; a flock of pulsating ochreous and
scarlet shadows--

The Keeper glowed above us!

In a life that has had its share of dangers, its need for quick
decisions, I recognize that few indeed of my reactions to peril have
been more than purely instinctive; no more consciously courageous
nor intellectually dissociate from the activating stimulus than the
shrinking of the burned hand from the brand, the will-to-live dictated
rush of the cornered animal upon the thing menacing it.

One such higher functioning was when I followed Larry O'Keefe and Lakla,
the Handmaiden, out to what we believed soul-destroying death in a place
almost as strange as this *; another was now. Deliberately, detachedly, I
studied the angrily flaming Shape.

     * See “The Moon Pool” and “The Conquest of the Moon Pool.”

Compared to it we were as a pair of Hop-o'-my-Thumbs to the Giant; had
it been man-shaped we would have come less than a third way up to its
knees. I focussed my attention upon the twenty-foot-wide square that was
the Keeper's foot. Its surface was jewel smooth, hyaline--yet beneath
it was a suggestion of granulation, of close-packed, innumerable,
microscopic crystals.

Within these grains whose existence was more sensed than seen glowed
dull red light, smoky and sullen. At each end of the square, close to
the bottom, was a diamond-shaped lozenge, cabochon, perhaps a yard in
width. These were dim yellow, translucent, with no suggestion of the
underlying crystallization. Sense organs I set them down to be--similar
to the great ovals within the Emperor's golden zone.


My gaze traveled up to the transverse arms. They stretched sixty feet
from tip to tip. At each tip were two more of the diamond figures, not
dull but burning angrily with orange-and-scarlet luster. In the center
of the beam was something that might have been a smoldering rubrous
reflection of the Emperor's pulsing multicolored rose had each of the
petals of the latter been clipped and squared.

It deepened toward its heart into a singular pattern of vermilion
latticings. Into the entire figure ran numerous tiny rivulets of angry
crimson and orange light, angling in interwoven patterns with never a
curve nor arching.

Set at intervals between them were what looked like octagonal rosettes
filled with slender silvery flutings, wan striations--like--it came to
me--immense chrysanthemum buds, half opened, and carved in gray jade.

Above towered the gigantic vertical beam. Toward its top I glimpsed a
huge square of flaring crimsons and bright topaz; two other diamonds
stared down upon us from just beneath it--like eyes. And over all its
height the striated octagons clustered.

I felt myself lifted, floated upward. Drake's hand shot out, clung to me
as together we drifted up the living wall. Opposite the latticed heart
of the square-petaled rose our flight was checked. There for an instant
we hung. Then the octagonal symbols stirred, unfolded like buds--

They were the nests of the Keeper's tentacles, and out from them the
whiplike tendrils uncoiled, shot out and writhed toward us.

My skin flinched from their touch; my body, held in the unseen grip, was
motionless. Yet when they touched their contact was not unpleasant. They
were like flexible strands of glass; their smooth tips questioned
us, passing through our hair, searching our faces, writhing over our
clothing.

There was a pulse in the great clipped rose, a rhythmic throbbing of
vermilion fire that ran into it from the angled veins, beat through the
latticed nucleus and throbbed back whence it had come. The huge, high
square of scarlet and yellow was liquid flame; the diamond organs
beneath it seemed to smoke, to send out swirls of orange red vapor.

Holding us so the Keeper studied us.

The rhythm of the square rose, became the rhythm of my own mind. But
here was none of the vast, serene and elemental calm that Ruth had
described as emanating from the Metal Emperor. Powerful it was, without
doubt, but in it were undertones of rage, of impatience, overtones of
revolt, something incomplete and struggling. Within the disharmonies I
seemed to sense a fettered force striving for freedom; energy battling
against itself.

Greater grew the swarms of the tentacles winding about us like slender
strands of glass, covering our faces, making breathing more and
more difficult. There was a coil of them around my throat and
tightening--tightening.

I heard Drake gasping, laboring for breath. I could not turn my head
toward him, could not speak. Was this then to be our end?

The strangling clutch relaxed, the mass of the tentacles lessened. I was
conscious of a surge of anger through the cruciform Thing that held us.

Its sullen fires blazed. I was aware of another light beating past
us--beating down the Keeper's. The hosts of tendrils drew back from me.
I felt myself picked from the unseen grasp, whirled in the air and drawn
away.

Drake beside me, I hung now before the Shining Disk--the Metal Emperor!

He it was who had plucked us from the Keeper--and even as I swung I saw
the Keeper's multitudinous, serpentine arms surge out toward us angrily
and then sullenly, slowly, draw back into their nests.

And out of the Disk, clothing me, permeating me, came an immense
tranquillity, a muting of all human thought, all human endeavor, an
unthinkable, cosmic calm into which all that was human of me seemed to
be sinking, drowning as in a fathomless abyss. I struggled against
it, desperately, striving in study of the Disk to erect a barrier of
preoccupation against the power pouring from it.

A dozen feet away from us the sapphire ovals centered upon us their
regard. They were limpid, pellucid as gems whose giant replicas they
seemed to be. The surface of the Disk ringed about by the aureate zodiac
in which the nine ovals shone was a maze of geometric symbols traced
in the lines of living gem fires; infinitely complex those patterns and
infinitely beautiful; an infinite number of symmetric forms in which I
seemed to trace all the ordered crystalline wonders of the snowflakes,
the groupings of all crystalline patternings, the soul of ordered beauty
that are the marvels of the Radiolaria, Nature's own miraculous book of
the soul of mathematical beauty.

The flashing, petaled heart was woven of living rainbows of cold flame.

Silently we floated there while the Disk--LOOKED--at us.

And as though I had been not an actor but an observer, the weird picture
of it all came to me--two men swinging like motes in mid air, on one
side the flickering scarlet and orange Cruciform shape, on the other
side the radiant Disk, behind the two manikins the pallid mount of the
bristling cones; and high above the wan circle of the shields.

There was a ringing about us--an elfin chiming, sweet and crystalline.
It came from the cones--and strangely was it their vocal synthesis,
their voice. Into the vast circle of sky pierced a lance of green fire;
swift in its wake uprose others.

We slid gently down, stood swaying at the Disk's base. The Keeper bent;
angled. Again the planes above the supporting square hovered over the
tablet. The tendrils swept down, pushed here and there, playing upon the
rods some unknown symphony of power.

Thicker pulsed the lances of the aurora; changed to vast billowing
curtains. The faceted wheel at the top of the central spire of the cones
swung upward; a light began to stream from the cones themselves--no
pillar now, but a vast circle that shot whirling into the heavens like a
noose.

And like a noose it caught the aurora, snared it!

Into it the coruscating mists of mysterious flame swirled; lost their
colors, became a torrent of light flying down through the ring as though
through a funnel top.

Down poured the radiant corpuscles, bathing the cones. They did not glow
as they had beneath the flood from the shields, and if they grew it was
too slowly for me to see; the shields were motionless. Now here, now
there, I saw the other rings whirl up--smaller mouths of lesser cones
hidden within the body of the Metal Monster, I knew, sucking down this
magnetic flux, these countless ions gushing forth from the sun.

Then as when first we had seen the phenomenon in the valley of the blue
poppies, the ring vanished, hidden by a fog of coruscations--as though
the force streaming through the rings became diffused after it had been
caught.

Crouching, forgetful of our juxtaposition to these two unhuman,
anomalous Things, we watched the play of the tentacles upon the upthrust
rods.

But if we forgot, we were not forgotten!

The Emperor slipped nearer; seemed to contemplate us--quizzically,
AMUSED; as a man would look down upon some curious and interesting
insect, a puppy, a kitten. I sensed this amusement in the Disk's regard
even as I had sensed its soul of awful tranquillity; as we had sensed
the playful malice in the eye stars of the living corridor, the
curiosity in the column that had dropped us into the valley.

I felt a push--a push that was filled with a colossal, GLITTERING
playfulness.

Under it I went spinning away for yards--Drake twirling close behind me.
The force, whatever it was, swept out from the Emperor, but in it was
no slightest hint of anger or of malice, no slightest shadow of the
sinister.

Rather it was as though one would blow away a feather; urge gently some
little lesser thing away.

The Disk watched our whirlings--with a sparkling, jeweled LAUGHTER in
its pulsing radiance.

Again came the push--farther yet we spun. Suddenly before us, across the
pave, shone out a twinkling trail--the wakened eyes of the cubes that
formed it, marking out a pathway for us to follow.

Immediately upon their gleaming forth I saw the Emperor turn--his
immense, oval, metallic back now black against the radiance of the
cones.

Up from the narrow gleaming path--a path opened I knew by some
command--lifted the hosts of tiny unseen hands; the sentient currents of
magnetic force that were the fingers and arms of the Metal Hordes. They
held us, thrust us along, passed us forward. Faster and faster we moved,
speeding on the wake of the long-vanished metal monks.

I turned my head--the cones were already far away. Over the tablet of
limpid violet phosphorescence still hovered the planes of the Keeper;
and still was the oval of the Emperor black against the radiance.

But the twinkling, sparkling path between us and them was gone--was
fading out close behind us as we swept onward.

Faster and faster grew our pace. The cylindrical wall loomed close. A
high oblong portal showed within it. Into this we were carried. Before
us stretched a corridor precisely similar to that which, closing upon
us, had forced us completely out into the hall.

Unlike that passage, its floor lifted steeply--a smooth and shining
slide up which no man could climb. A shaft, indeed, which thrust upward
straight as an arrow at an angle of at least thirty degrees and whose
end or turning we could not see. Up and up it cleared its way through
the City--through the Metal Monster--closed only by the inability of
the eye to pierce the faint luminosity that thickened by distance became
impenetrable.

For an instant we hovered upon its threshold. But the impulse, the
command, that had carried us thus far was not to stop here. Into it and
up it we were thrust, our feet barely touching the glimmering surface;
lifted by the force that emanated from its floor, carried on by the
force that pressed out from the sides.

Up and up we went--scores of feet--hundreds--




CHAPTER XXII. THE ENSORCELLED CHAMBER

“Goodwin!” Drake broke the silence; desperately he was striving to keep
his fear out of his voice. “Goodwin--this isn't the way to get out.
We're going up--farther away all the time from the--the gates!”

“What can we do?” My anxiety was no less than his, but my realization of
our helplessness was complete.

“If we only knew how to talk to these Things,” he said. “If we could
only have let the Disk know we wanted to get out--damn it, Goodwin, it
would have helped us.”

Grotesque as the idea sounded, I felt that he spoke the truth. The
Emperor meant no harm to us; in fact in speeding us away I was not at
all sure that he had not deliberately wished us well--there was that
about the Keeper--

Still up we sped along the shaft. I knew we must now be above the level
of the valley.

“We've got to get back to Ruth! Goodwin--NIGHT! And what may have
HAPPENED to her?”

“Drake, boy”--I dropped into his own colloquialism--“we're up against
it. We can't help it. And remember--she's there in Norhala's home. I
don't believe, I honestly don't believe, Dick, that there's any danger
as long as she remains there. And Ventnor ties her fast.”

“That's true,” he said, more hopefully. “That's true--and probably
Norhala is with her by now.”

“I don't doubt it,” I said cheerfully. An idea came to me--I half
believed it myself. “And another thing. There's not an action here
that's purposeless. We're being driven on by the command of that Thing
we call the Metal Emperor. It means us no harm. Maybe--maybe this IS the
way out.”

“Maybe so,” he shook his head doubtfully. “But I'm not sure. Maybe that
long push was just to get us away from THERE. And it strikes me that the
impulse has begun to weaken. We're not going anywhere near as fast as we
were.”

I had not realized it, but our speed was slackening. I looked
back--hundreds of feet behind us fell the slide. An unpleasant chill
went through me--should the magnetic grip upon us relax, withdraw,
nothing could stop us from falling back along that incline to be broken
like eggs at its end; that our breaths would be snuffed out by the
terrific descent long before we reached that end was scant comfort.

“There are other passages opening up along this shaft,” Drake said.
“I'm not for trusting the Emperor too far--he has other things on his
metallic mind, you know. The next one we get to, let's try to slip
into--if we can.”

I had noticed; there had been openings along the ascending shaft;
corridors running apparently transversely to its angled way.

Slower and slower became our pace. A hundred yards above I glimpsed one
of the apertures. Could we reach it? Slower and slower we arose. Now the
gap was but a yard off--but we were motionless--were tottering!

Drake's arms wrapped round me. With a tremendous effort he hurled me
into the portal. I dropped at its edge, writhed swiftly around, saw him
slipping, slipping down--thrust my hands out to him.

He caught them. There came a wrench that tortured my arm sockets as
though racked. But he held!

Slowly--I writhed back into the passage, dragging up his almost dead
weight. His head appeared, his shoulders; there was a convulsion of the
long body and he lay before me.


For a minute or two we lay, flat upon our backs resting. I sat up. The
passage was broad, silent; apparently as endless as that from which we
had just escaped.

Along it, above us, under us, the crystalline eyes were dim. It showed
no sign of movement--yet had it done so there was nothing we could do
save drop down the annihilating slant. Drake arose.

“I'm hungry,” he said, “and I'm thirsty. I move that we eat and drink
and approximately be merry.”

He slung aside the haversack. From it we took food; from the canteens
we drank. We did not talk. Each knew what the other was thinking;
infrequently, and thank the eternal law that some call God for that,
come crises in which speech seems not only petty but when against it the
mind rebels as a nauseous thing.

This was such a time. At last I drew myself to my feet.

“Let's be going,” I said.

The corridor stretched straight before us; along it we paced. How far we
walked I do not know; mile upon mile, it seemed. It broadened abruptly
into a vast hall.

And this hall was filled with the Metal Hordes--was a gigantic workshop
of them. In every shape, in every form, they seethed and toiled about
it. Upon its floor were heaps of shining ores, mounds of flashing gems,
piles of ingots, metallic and crystalline. High and low throughout
flamed the egg-shaped incandescences; floating furnaces both great and
small.

Before one of these forges, close to us, stood a Metal Thing. Its body
was a twelve-foot column of smaller cubes. Upon the top was a hollow
square formed of even lesser blocks--blocks hardly larger than the
Little Things themselves. In the center of the open rectangle was
another shaft, its top a two-foot square plate formed of a single cube.

From the sides of the hollow square sprang long arms of spheres, each
tipped by a tetrahedron. They moved freely, slipping about upon their
curved points of contact and like a dozen little thinking hammers,
the pyramid points at their ends beat down upon as many thimble shaped
objects which they thrust alternately into the unwinking brazier then
laid upon the central block to shape.

A goblin workman the Thing seemed, standing there, so intent upon and so
busy with its forgings.

There were scores of these animate machines; they paid no slightest
heed to us as we slipped by them, clinging as closely to the wall of the
immense workshop as we could.

We passed a company of other Shapes which stood two by two and close
together, their tops wide spinning wheels through which the tendrils
of an opened globe fed translucent, colorless ingots--the substance it
seemed to me of which Norhala's shadowy walls were made, the crystal of
which the bars that built out the base of the Cones were formed.

The ingots passed between the whirling faces; emerged from them as
slender, long cylinders; were seized as they slipped down by a crouching
block, whose place as it glided away was instantly taken by another. In
many bewildering forms, intent upon unknown activities directed toward
unguessable ends, the composite, animate mechanisms labored. And all the
place was filled with a goblin bustle, trollish racketings, ringing of
gnomish anvils, clanging of kobold forges--a clamorous cavern filled
with metal Nibelungens.

We came to the opening of another passage, a doorway piercing the walls
of the workshop. Its incline, though steep, was not dangerous.

Into it we stepped; climbed onward it seemed interminably. Far ahead
of us at last appeared the outline of its further entrance, silhouetted
against and filled with a brighter luminosity. We drew near; stopped
cautiously at its threshold, peering out.

Well it was that we had hesitated. Before us was open space--an abyss in
the body of the Metal Monster.

The corridor opened into it like a window. Thrusting out our heads,
we saw an unbroken wall both above and below. Half a mile away was
its opposite side. Over this pit was a misty sky and not more than a
thousand feet above and black against the heavens was the lip of it--the
cornices of this chasm within the City.

Far, far beneath us we watched the Hordes throw themselves across the
abyss in webs of curving arches and girder-straight bridges; gigantic
we knew these spans must be yet dwarfed to slender footways by
distance. Over them moved hurrying companies; from them came flashings,
glitterings--prismatic, sun golden; plutonic scarlets, molten blues;
javelins of colored light piercing upward from unfolded cubes and globes
and pyramids crossing them or from busy bearers of the shining fruits of
the mysterious workshops.

And as they passed the bridges swung up, coiled and thrust themselves
from sight through openings that closed behind them. Ever, as they
passed, close on their going whipped out other spans so that always
across that abyss a sentient, shifting web was hung.

We drew back, stared into each other's white face. Panic swept through
me, in quick, alternate pulse of ice and fire. For crushingly, no longer
to be denied, came certainty that we were lost within the mazes of this
incredible City--lost in the body of the Metal Monster which that City
was. There was a sick despair in my heart as we turned and slowly made
our way back along the sloping corridor.

A hundred yards, perhaps, we had gone in silence before we stopped,
gazing stupidly at an opening in the wall beside us. The portal had not
been there when we had passed--of that I was certain.

“It's opened since we went by,” whispered Drake.

We peered through it. The passage was narrow; its pave led downward.
For a moment we hesitated, the same foreboding in both our minds. And
yet--among the perils that crowded in upon us what choice had we? There
could be no more danger there than here.

Both ways were--ALIVE, both obedient to impulses over which we had
no more control and no more way of predetermining than mice in some
complex, man-made trap. Furthermore, this shaft also ran downward, and
although its pitch was less and it did not therefore drop as quickly
toward that level we sought and wherein lay the openings of escape into
the outer valley, it fell at right angles to the corridor through which
we had come.

We knew that to retrace our steps now would but take us back to the
forges and thence to the hall of the Cones and the certain peril waiting
for us there.

We stepped into this opened way. For a little distance it ran
straightly, then turned and sloped gently upward; and a little distance
more we climbed. Then suddenly, not a hundred yards from us, gushed out
a flood of soft radiance, opalescent, filled with pearly glimmerings and
rosy shadows of light.

It was as though a door had opened into some world of luminescence. From
it the lambent torrent poured; billowed down upon us. In its wake
came music--if music the mighty harmonies, the sonorous chords, the
crystalline themes and the linked chaplet of notes that were like
spiralings of tiny golden star bells could be named.

Toward source of light and sound we moved, nor could we have halted nor
withdrawn had we willed; the radiance drew us to it as the sun the water
drop, and irresistibly the sweet, unearthly music called. Closer we
came--it was a narrow alcove from which sound and light poured--into it
we crept--and went no further.

We peered into a vast and columnless vault, a limitless temple of light.
High up in it, strewn manifold, danced and shone soft orbs like tender
suns. No pale gilt luminaries of frozen rays were these. Effulgent,
jubilant, they flamed--orbs red as wine of rubies that Djinns of Al
Shiraz press from his enchanted vineyards of jewels; twin orbs
rosy white as breasts of pampered Babylonian maids; orbs of pulsing
opalescences and orbs of the murmuring green of bursting buds of spring,
crocused orbs and orbs of royal coral; suns that throbbed with singing
rays of wedded rose and pearl and of sapphires and topazes amorous; orbs
born of cool virginal dawns and of imperial sunsets and orbs that were
the tuliped fruit of mating rainbows of fire.

They danced, these countless aureoles; they swung and threaded in
radiant choral patterns, in linked harmonies of light. And as they
danced their gay rays caressed and bathed myriads of the Metal Folk open
beneath them. Under the rays the jewel fires of disk and star and cross
leaped and pulsed and danced to the same bright rhythm.

We sought the source of the music--a tremendous thing of shimmering
crystal pipes like some colossal organ. Out of the radiance around it
great flames gathered, shook into sight with streamings and pennonings,
in bannerets and bandrols, leaped upon the crystal pipes, and merged
within them.

And as the pipes drank them the flames changed into sound!

Throbbing bass viols of roaring vernal winds, diapasons of waterfall
and torrents--these had been flames of emerald; flaming trumpetings of
desire that had been great streamers of scarlet--rose flames that had
dissolved into echoes of fulfillment; diamond burgeonings that melted
into silver symphonies like mist entangled Pleiades transmuted into
melodies; chameleon harmonies to which the strange suns danced.

And now I saw--realizing with a clutch of indescribable awe, with
a sense of inexplicable profanation the secret of this ensorcelled
chamber.

Within every pulsing rose of irised fire that was the heart of a disk,
from every rubrous, clipped rose of a cross, and from every rayed purple
petaling of a star there nestled a tiny disk, a tiny cross, a tiny star,
luminous and symboled even as those that cradled them.

The Metal Babes building like crystals from hearts of radiance beneath
the play of jocund orbs!

Incredible blossomings of crystal and of metal whose lullabies and
cradle songs were singing symphonies of flame.

It was the birth chamber of the City!

The womb of the Metal Monster!

Abruptly the walls of the niche sparkled out, the glittering eye points
regarding us with a most disquieting suggestion of sentinels who,
slumbering, had been caught unaware, and now awakening challenged us.
Swiftly the niche closed--so swiftly that barely had we time to spring
over its threshold into the corridor.

The corridor was awake--alive!

The power darted out; gripped us. Up it swept us and on. Far away a
square of light appeared, grew quickly larger. Framed in it was the
amethystine burning of the great ring that girdled the encircling
cliffs.

I turned my head--behind us the corridor was closing!

Now the opening was so close that through it I could see the vast
panorama of the valley. The wall behind us touched us; pushed us on.
We thrust ourselves against it, despairingly. As well might flies have
tried to press back a moving mountain.

Resistingly, inexorably we were pressed forward. Now we cowered within a
yard-deep niche; now we trembled upon a foot-wide ledge.

Shuddering, gasping, we glared down the sheer drop of the City's wall.
The smooth and glimmering scarp fell thousands of feet straight to the
valley floor. And there were no merciful mists to hide what awaited us
there; no mists anywhere. In that brief, agonized glance every detail of
the Pit was disclosed with an abnormal clarity.

We tottered on the brink. The ledge melted.

Down, down we plunged, locked in each other's arms, hurtling to the
shattering death so far below!




CHAPTER XXIII. THE TREACHERY OF YURUK

Was it true that Time is within ourselves--that like Space, its twin, it
is only a self-created illusion of the human mind? There are hours that
flash by on hummingbird wings; there are seconds that shuffle on shod in
leaden shoes.

Was it true that when death faces us the consciousness finds power
through its will to live to conquer the illusion--to prolong Time? That,
recoiling from oblivion, we can recreate in a fractional moment whole
years gone past, years yet to come--striving to lengthen our existence,
stretching out our apperception beyond the phantom boundaries,
overdrawing upon a Barmecide deposit of minutes, staking fresh claims
upon a mirage?

How else explain the seeming slowness with which we were falling--the
seeming leisureness with which the wall drifted up past us?

And was this punishment--a sentence meted out for profaning with our
eyes a forbidden place; a penalty for touching with our gaze the ark of
the Metal Tribes--their holy of holies--the budding place of the Metal
Babes?

The valley was swinging--swinging in slow broad curves; was oscillating
dizzily.

Slowly the colossal wall slipped upward.

Realization swept me; left me amazed; only half believing. This was no
illusion. After that first swift plunge our fall had been checked. We
were swinging--not the valley.

Deliberately, in wide arcs like pendulums, we were swinging across the
City's scarp; three feet out from it, and as we swung, slowly sinking.

And now I saw the countless eyes of the watching wall again were
twinkling, regarding us with impish mockery.

It was the grip of the living wall that held us; that rocked us from
side to side as though giving greater breadths of it chance to behold
us; that was dropping us gently, carefully, to the valley floor now a
scant two thousand feet below.

A storm of rage, of intensest resentment swept me; as once before any
gratitude I should have felt for escape was submerged in the utter
humiliation with which it was charged.

I shook my fists at the twinkling wall, strove to kick and smite it like
an angry child, cursed it--not childishly. Dared it to hurl me down to
death.

I felt Drake's hand touch mine.

“Steady,” he said. “Steady, old boy. It's no use. Steady. Look down.”

Hot with shame for my outburst, weak from its violence, I obeyed. The
valley floor was not more than a thousand feet away. Thronging about
where we must at last touch, clustered and seething, was a multitude of
the Metal Things. They seemed to be looking up at us, watching, waiting
for us.

“Reception committee,” grinned Drake.

I glanced away; over the valley. It was luminously clear; yet the sky
was overcast, no stars showing. The light was no stronger than that of
the moon at full, but it held a quality unfamiliar to me. It cast no
shadows; though soft, it was piercing, revealing all it bathed with the
distinctness of bright sunshine. The illumination came, I thought, from
the encircling veils falling from the band of amethyst.

And, as I peered, out of the veils and far away sped a violet spark.
With meteor speed it flew toward us. Close to the base of the vast
facade it landed with a flashing of blue incandescence. I knew it
for one of the Flying Things, the Mark Makers--one of the incredible
messengers.

Close upon its fall came increase in the turmoil of the crowding throng
awaiting us. Came, too, an abrupt change in our own motion. The long
arcs lessened. We were dropped more swiftly.

Far away in the direction from which the Flying Thing had flown I
sensed another movement; something coming that carried with it subtle
suggestion of unlikeness to all the other incessant, linked movement
over the pit. Closer it drew.

“Norhala!” gasped Drake.

Robed in her silken amber swathings, red-copper hair streaming, woven
with elfin sparklings, she was racing toward the City like some lovely
witch, riding upon the back of a steed of huge cubes.

Nearer she raced. More direct became our fall. Now we were dropping as
though at the end of an unreeling plummet cord; the floor of the valley
was no more than two hundred feet below.

“Norhala!” we shouted; and again and again--again “Norhala!”

Before our cries could have reached her the cubes swerved; came to a
halt beneath us. Through the hundred feet of space between I caught the
brilliancy of the weird constellations in Norhala's great eyes--saw with
a vague but no less dire foreboding that on her face dwelt a terrifying,
a blasting wrath.

As softly as though by the hand of a giant of cloud we were lifted out
from the wall, and were set with no perceptible shock beside her on the
back of the cubes.

“Norhala--” I stopped. For this was no Norhala whom we had known. Gone
was all calm, vanished every trace of unearthly tranquillity. It was a
Norhala awakened at last--all human.

Yet in the still rage that filled her I sensed a force, an intensity,
more than human. Over the blazing eyes the brows were knit in a rigid,
golden bar; the delicate nostrils were pinched; the sweet red mouth was
white and merciless. It was as though in its long sleep her human
self had gathered more than human strength, and that now, awakened and
unleashed, the violence of its rage touched the vibrant zenith of that
sphere of which her quiet had been the nadir.


She was like an urn filled and flaming with the fires of the Gods of
wrath.

What was it that had awakened her--what in awakening had changed the
inpouring human consciousness into this flood of fury? Foreboding
gripped me.

“Norhala!” My voice was shaking. “Those we left--”

“They are gone!” The golden voice was octaves deeper, vibrant, throbbing
with that muffled, menacing note that must have pulsed from the
golden tambours that summoned to battle Timur's fierce hordes. “They
were--taken.”

“Taken!” I gasped. “Taken by what--these?” I swept my hands out toward
the Metal Things milling around us.

“No! THESE are mine. These are they who obey me.” The golden voice now
shrilled with her passion. “Taken by--men!”

Drake had read my face although he could not understand our words.

“Ruth--”

“Taken,” I said. “Both Ruth and Ventnor. Taken by the armored men--the
men of Cherkis!”

“Cherkis!” She had caught the word. “Yes--Cherkis! And now he and all
his men--and all his women--and every living thing he rules shall pay.
And fear not--you two. For I, Norhala, will bring back my own.

“Woe, woe to you, Cherkis, and to all of yours! For I, Norhala, am
awake, and I, Norhala, remember. Woe to you, Cherkis, woe--for now all
ends for you!

“Not by the gods of my mother who turned their strength against her do
I promise this. I, Norhala, have no need for them--I, Norhala, who have
strength greater than they. And would I could crush those gods as I
shall crush you, Cherkis--and every living thing of yours! Yea--and
every UNLIVING thing as well!”

Not halting now was Norhala's speech; it poured from the ruthless
lips--flamingly.

“We go,” she cried. “And something of vengeance I have saved for you--as
is your right.”

She tossed her arms high; stamped upon the back of the Metal Thing that
held us.

It quivered and sped away. Swiftly dwindled the City's bulk; fast faded
its glimmering watchful face.

Not toward the veils of light but out over the plain we flew. Above us,
crouching against the blast of our going, streamed like a silken banner
Norhala's hair, gemmed with the witch lights.

We were far out now, the City far away. The cube slowed. Norhala threw
high her head. From the arched, exquisite throat pealed a trumpet
call--golden, summoning, imperious. Thrice it rang forth--and all the
surrounding valley seemed to halt and listen.

Followed upon its ending, a chanting as goldenly sonorous. Wild,
peremptory, triumphant. It was like a mustering shouting to adventurous
stars, buglings to buccaneering winds, cadenced beckonings to restless
ranks of viking waves, signaling to all the corsairs and picaroons of
the elemental.

A cosmic call to slay!

The gigantic block upon which we rode quivered; I myself felt a thousand
needle-pointed roving arrows prick me, urging me on to some jubilant,
reckless orgy of destruction.

Obeying that summoning there swirled to us cube and globe and pyramid
by the score--by the hundreds. They swept into our wake and
followed--lifting up behind us, an ever-rising sea.

Higher and higher arose the metal wave--mounting, ever mounting as other
score upon score leaped upon it, rushed up it and swelled its crest. And
soon so great it was that it shadowed us, hung over us.

The cubes we rode angled in their course; raced now with ever-increasing
speed toward the spangled curtains.

And still Norhala's golden chant lured; higher and even higher reached
the following wave. Now we were rising upon a steep slope; now the
amethystine, gleaming ring was almost overheard.

Norhala's song ceased. One breathless, soundless moment and we had
pierced the veils. A globule of sapphire shone afar, the elfin bubble of
her home. We neared it.


Heart leaping, I saw three ponies, high and empty saddles turquoise
studded, lift their heads from their roadway browsing. For a moment they
stood, stiff with terror; then whimpering raced away.

We were at Norhala's door; were lifted down; stood close to its
threshold. Slaves to a single thought, Drake and I sprang to enter.

“Wait!” Norhala's white hands caught us. “There is peril there--without
me! Me you must--follow!”

Upon the exquisite face was no unshadowing of wrath, no diminishing of
rage, no weakening of dreadful determination. The star-flecked eyes were
not upon us; they looked over and beyond--coldly, calculatingly.

“Not enough,” I heard her whisper. “Not enough--for that which I will
do.”

We turned, following her gaze. A hundred feet on high, stretching nearly
across the gorge, an incredible curtain was flung. Over its folds was
movement--arms of spinning globes that thrust forth like paws and down
upon which leaped pyramid upon pyramid stiffening as they clung like
bristling spikes of hair; great bars of clicking cubes that threw
themselves from the shuttering--shook and withdrew. The curtain was a
ferment--shifting, mercurial; it throbbed with desire, palpitated with
eagerness.

“Not enough!” murmured Norhala.

Her lips parted; from them came another trumpeting--tyrannic, arrogant
and clangorous. Under it the curtaining writhed--out from it spurted
thin cascades of cubes. They swarmed up into tall pillars that shook and
swayed and gyrated.

With blinding flash upon flash the sapphire incandescences struck forth
at their feet. A score of flaming columned shapes leaped up and curved
in meteor flight over the tumultuous curtain. Streaming with violet
fires they shot back to the valley of the City.

“Hai!” shouted Norhala as they flew. “Hai!”

Up darted her arms; the starry galaxies of her eyes danced madly, shot
forth visible rays. The mighty curtain of the Metal Things pulsed and
throbbed; its units interweaving--block and globe and pyramid of which
it was woven, each seeming to strain at leash.

“Come!” cried Norhala--and led the way through the portal.

Close behind her we pressed. I stumbled, nearly fell, over a
brown-faced, leather-cuirassed body that lay half over, legs barring the
threshold.

Contemptuously Norhala stepped over it. We were within that chamber of
the pool. About it lay a fair dozen of the armored men. Ruth's defense,
I thought with a grim delight, had been most excellent--those who had
taken her and Ventnor had not done so without paying full toll.

A violet flashing drew my eyes away. Close to the pool wherein we had
first seen the white miracle of Norhala's body, two immense, purple
fired stars blazed. Between them, like a suppliant cast from black iron,
was Yuruk.

Poised upon their nether tips the stars guarded him. Head touching his
knees, eyes hidden within his folded arms, the black eunuch crouched.

“Yuruk!”

There was an unearthly mercilessness in Norhala's voice.

The eunuch raised his head; slowly, fearfully.

“Goddess!” he whispered. “Goddess! Mercy!”

“I saved him,” she turned to us, “for you to slay. He it was who brought
those who took the maid who was mine and the helpless one she loved.
Slay him.”

Drake understood--his hand twitched down to his pistol, drew it. He
leveled the gun at the black eunuch. Yuruk saw it--shrieked and cowered.
Norhala laughed--sweetly, ruthlessly.

“He dies before the stroke falls,” she said. “He dies doubly
therefore--and that is well.”

Drake slowly lowered the automatic; turned to me.

“I can't,” he said. “I can't--do it--”

“Masters!” Upon his knees the eunuch writhed toward us. “Masters--I
meant no wrong. What I did was for love of the Goddess. Years upon years
I have served her. And her mother before her.

“I thought if the maid and the blasted one were gone, that you would
follow. Then I would be alone with the Goddess once more. Cherkis will
not slay them--and Cherkis will welcome you and give the maid and the
blasted one back to you for the arts that you can teach him.

“Mercy, Masters, I meant no harm--bid the Goddess be merciful!”


The ebon pools of eyes were clarified of their ancient shadows by his
terror; age was wiped from them by fear, even as it was wiped from his
face. The wrinkles were gone. Appallingly youthful, the face of Yuruk
prayed to us.

“Why do you wait?” she asked us. “Time presses, and even now we should
be on the way. When so many are so soon to die, why tarry over one? Slay
him!”

“Norhala,” I answered, “we cannot slay him so. When we kill, we kill in
fair fight--hand to hand. The maid we both love has gone, taken with her
brother. It will not bring her back if we kill him through whom she was
taken. We would punish him--yes, but slay him we cannot. And we would be
after the maid and her brother quickly.”

A moment she looked at us, perplexity shading the high and steady anger.

“As you will,” she said at last; then added, half sarcastically,
“Perhaps it is because I who am now awake have slept so long that I
cannot understand you. But Yuruk has disobeyed ME. That of MINE which
I committed to his care he has given to the enemies of me and those who
were mine. It matters nothing to me what YOU would do. Matters to me
only what I will to do.”

She pointed to the dead.

“Yuruk”--the golden voice was cold--“gather up these carrion and pile
them together.”

The eunuch arose, stole out fearfully from between the two stars. He
slithered to body after body, dragging them one after the other to the
center of the chamber, lifting them and forming of them a heap. One
there was who was not dead. His eyes opened as the eunuch seized him,
the blackened mouth opened.

“Water!” he begged. “Give me drink. I burn!”

I felt a thrill of pity; lifted my canteen and walked toward him.

“You of the beard,” the merciless chime rang out, “he shall have no
water. But drink he shall have, and soon--drink of fire!”

The soldier's fevered eyes rolled toward her, saw and read aright the
ruthlessness in the beautiful face.

“Sorceress!” he groaned. “Cursed spawn of Ahriman!” He spat at her.

The black talons of Yuruk stretched around his throat

“Son of unclean dogs!” he whined. “You dare blaspheme the Goddess!”

He snapped the soldier's neck as though it had been a rotten twig.

At the callous cruelty I stood for an instant petrified; I heard Drake
swear wildly, saw his pistol flash up.

Norhala struck down his arm.

“Your chance has passed,” she said, “and not for THAT shall you slay
him.”

And now Yuruk had cast that body upon the others; the pile was complete.

“Mount!” commanded Norhala, and pointed. He cast himself at her feet,
writhing, moaning, imploring. She looked at one of the great Shapes;
something of command passed from her, something it understood plainly.

The star slipped forward--there was an almost imperceptible movement of
its side points. The twitching form of the black seemed to leap up from
the floor, to throw itself like a bag upon the mound of the dead.

Norhala threw up her hands. Out of the violet ovals beneath the upper
tips of the Things spurted streams of blue flame. They fell upon Yuruk
and splashed over him upon the heap of the slain. In the mound was a
dreadful movement, a contortion; the bodies stiffened, seemed to try to
rise, to push away--dead nerves and muscles responding to the blasting
energy passing through them.

Out from the stars rained bolt upon bolt. In the chamber was the sound
of thunder, crackling like broken glass. The bodies flamed, crumbled.
There was a little smoke--nauseous, feebly protesting, beaten out by the
consuming fires almost before it could rise.

Where had been the heap of slain capped by the black eunuch there was
but a little whirling cloud of sad gray dust. Caught by a passing
draft, it eddied, slipped over the floor, vanished through the doorway.
Motionless stood the blasting stars, contemplating us. Motionless
stood Norhala, her wrath no whit abated by the ghastly sacrifice. And
paralyzed by what we had beheld, motionless stood we.

“Listen,” she said. “You two who love the maid. What you have seen is
nothing to that which you SHALL see--a wisp of mist to the storm cloud.”

“Norhala”--I found speech--“can you tell us when it was that the maid
was captured?”

Perhaps there was still time to overtake the abductors before Ruth was
thrust into the worse peril waiting where she was being carried. Crossed
this thought another--puzzling, baffling. The cliffs Yuruk had pointed
out to me as those through which the hidden way passed were, I had
estimated then, at least twenty miles away. And how long was the pass,
the tunnel, through them? And then how far this place of the armored
men? It had been past dawn when Drake had frightened the black eunuch
with his pistol. It was not yet dawn now. How could Yuruk have made his
way to the Persians so swiftly--how could they so swiftly have returned?

Amazingly she answered the spoken question and the unspoken.

“They came long before dusk,” she said. “By the night before Yuruk had
won to Ruszark, the city of Cherkis; and long before dawn they were on
their way hither. This the black dog I slew told me.”

“But Yuruk was with us here at dawn yesterday,” I gasped.

“A night has passed since then,” she said, “and another night is almost
gone.”

Stunned, I considered this. If this were true--and not for an instant
did I doubt her--then not for a few hours had we lain there at the foot
of the living wall in the Hall of the Cones--but for the balance of that
day and that night, and another day and part of still another night.

“What does she say?” Drake stared anxiously into my whitened face. I
told him.

“Yes.” Norhala spoke again. “The dusk before the last dusk that has
passed I returned to my house. The maid was there and sorrowing. She
told me you had gone into the valley, prayed me to help you and to bring
you back. I comforted her, and something of--the peace--I gave her; but
not all, for she fought against it. A little we played together, and I
left her sleeping. I sought you and found you also sleeping. I knew no
harm would come to you, and I went my ways--and forgot you. Then I came
here again--and found Yuruk and these the maid had slain.”

The great eyes flashed.

“Now do I honor the maid for the battle that she did,” she said, “though
how she slew so many strong men I do not know. My heart goes out to her.
And therefore when I bring her back she shall no more be plaything to
Norhala, but sister. And with you it shall be as she wills. And woe to
those who have taken her!”

She paused, listening. From without came a rising storm of thin
wailings, insistent and eager.

“But I have an older vengeance than this to take,” the golden voice
tolled somberly. “Long have I forgotten--and shame I feel that I
had forgot. So long have I forgotten all hatreds, all lusts, all
cruelty--among--these--” She thrust a hand forth toward the hidden
valley. “Forgot--dwelling in the great harmonies. Save for you and what
has befallen I would never have stirred from them, I think. But now
awakened, I take that vengeance. After it is done”--she paused--“after
it is over I shall go back again. For this awakening has in it nothing
of the ordered joy I love--it is a fierce and slaying fire. I shall go
back--”

The shadow of her far dreaming flitted over, softened the angry
brilliancy of her eyes.

“Listen, you two!” The shadow of dream fled. “Those that I am about to
slay are evil--evil are they all, men and women. Long have they been
so--yea, for cycles of suns. And their children grow like them--or
if they be gentle and with love for peace they are slain or die of
heartbreak. All this my mother told me long ago. So no more children
shall be born from them either to suffer or to grow evil.”

Again she paused, nor did we interrupt her musing.

“My father ruled Ruszark,” she said at last. “Rustum he was named, of
the seed of Rustum the Hero even as was my mother. They were gentle and
good, and it was their ancestors who built Ruszark when, fleeing from
the might of Iskander, they were sealed in the hidden valley by the
falling mountain.

“Then there sprang from one of the families of the nobles--Cherkis.
Evil, evil was he, and as he grew he lusted for rule. On a night of
terror he fell upon those who loved my father and slew; and barely had
my father time to fly from the city with my mother, still but a bride,
and a handful of those loyal to him.

“They found by chance the way to this place, hiding in the cleft which
is its portal. They came, and they were taken by--Those who are now my
people. Then my mother, who was very beautiful, was lifted before him
who rules here and she found favor in his sight and he had built for her
this house, which now is mine.

“And in time I was born--but not in this house. Nay--in a secret place
of light where, too, are born my people.”

She was silent. I shot a glance at Drake. The secret place of light--was
it not that vast vault of mystery, of dancing orbs and flames transmuted
into music into which we had peered and for which sacrilege, I had
thought, had been thrust from the City? And did in this lie the
explanation of her strangeness? Had she there sucked in with her
mother's milk the enigmatic life of the Metal Hordes, been transformed
into half human changeling, become true kin to them? What else could
explain--


“My mother showed me Ruszark,” her voice, taking up once more her tale,
checked my thoughts. “Once when I was little she and my father bore me
through the forest and through the hidden way. I looked upon Ruszark--a
great city it is and populous, and a caldron of cruelty and of evil.

“Not like me were my father and mother. They longed for their kind and
sought ever for means to regain their place among them. There came a
time when my father, driven by his longing, ventured forth to Ruszark,
seeking friends to help him regain that place--for these who obey me
obeyed not him as they obey me; nor would he have marched them--as I
shall--upon Ruszark if they had obeyed him.

“Cherkis caught him. And Cherkis waited, knowing well that my mother
would follow. For Cherkis knew not where to seek her, nor where they
had lain hid, for between his city and here the mountains are great,
unscalable, and the way through them is cunningly hidden; by chance
alone did my mother's mother and those who fled with her discover it:
And though they tortured him, my father would not tell. And after a
while forthwith those who still remained of hers stole out with my
mother to find him. They left me here with Yuruk. And Cherkis caught my
mother.”

The proud breasts heaved, the eyes shot forth visible flames.

“My father was flayed alive and crucified,” she said. “His skin they
nailed to the City's gates. And when Cherkis had had his will with my
mother he threw her to his soldiers for their sport.

“All of those who went with them he tortured and slew--and he and his
laughed at their torment. But one there was who escaped and told me--me
who was little more than a budding maid. He called on me to bring
vengeance--and he died. A year passed--and I am not like my mother and
my father--and I forgot--dwelling here in the great tranquillities,
barred from and having no thought for men and their way.

“AIE, AIE!” she cried; “woe to me that I could forget! But now I shall
take my vengeance--I, Norhala, will stamp them flat--Cherkis and his
city of Ruszark and everything it holds! I, Norhala, and my servants
shall stamp them into the rock of their valley so that none shall know
that they have been! And would that I could meet their gods with all
their powers that I might break them, too, and stamp them into the rock
under the feet of my servants!”

She threw out white arms.

Why had Yuruk lied to me? I wondered as I watched her. The Disk had not
slain her mother. Of course! He had lied to play upon our terrors; had
lied to frighten us away.

The wailings were rising in a sustained crescendo. One of the slaying
stars slipped over the chamber floor, folded its points and glided out
the door.

“Come!” commanded Norhala, and led the way. The second star closed,
followed us. We stepped over the threshold.

For one astounded, breathless moment we paused. In front of us reared a
monster--a colossal, headless Sphinx. Like forelegs and paws, a ridge of
pointed cubes, and globes thrust against each side of the canyon walls.
Between them for two hundred feet on high stretched the breast.

And this was a shifting, weaving mass of the Metal Things; they formed
into gigantic cuirasses, giant bucklers, corselets of living mail. From
them as they moved--nay, from all the monster--came the wailings. Like a
headless Sphinx it crouched--and as we stood it surged forward as though
it sprang a step to greet us.

“HAI!” shouted Norhala, battle buglings ringing through the golden
voice. “HAI! my companies!”

Out from the summit of the breast shot a tremendous trunk of cubes and
spinning globes. And like a trunk it nuzzled us, caught us up, swept
us to the crest. An instant I tottered dizzily; was held; stood beside
Norhala upon a little, level twinkling eyed platform; upon her other
side swayed Drake.

Now through the monster I felt a throbbing, an eager and impatient
pulse. I turned my head. Still like some huge and grotesque beast
the back of the clustered Things ran for half a mile at least behind,
tapering to a dragon tail that coiled and twisted another full mile
toward the Pit. And from this back uprose and fell immense spiked and
fan-shaped ruffs, thickets of spikes, whipping knouts of bristling
tentacles, fanged crests. They thrust and waved, whipped and fell
constantly; and constantly the great tail lashed and snapped, fantastic,
long and living.

“HAI!” shouted Norhala once more. From her lifted throat came again the
golden chanting--but now a relentless, ruthless song of slaughter.

Up reared the monstrous bulk. Into it ran the dragon tail. Into it
poured the fanged and bristling back.

Up, up we were thrust--three hundred feet, four hundred, five hundred.
Over the blue globe of Norhala's house bent a gigantic leg. Spiderlike
out from each side of the monster thrust half a score of others.

Overhead the dawn began to break. Through it with ever increasing speed
we moved, straight to the line of the cliffs behind which lay the city
of the armored men--and Ruth and Ventnor.




CHAPTER XXIV. RUSZARK

Smoothly moved the colossal shape; on it we rode as easily as though
cradled. It did not glide--it strode.

The columned legs raised themselves, bending from a thousand joints. The
pedestals of the feet, huge and massive as foundations for sixteen-inch
guns, fell with machinelike precision, stamping gigantically.

Under their tread the trees of the forest snapped, were crushed like
reeds beneath the pads of a mastodon. From far below came the sound of
their crashing. The thick forest checked the progress of the Shape less
than tall grass would that of a man.

Behind us our trail was marked by deep, black pits in the forest's
green, clean cut and great as the Mark upon the poppied valley. They
were the footprints of the Thing that carried us.

The wind streamed and whistled. A flock of the willow warblers arose,
sworled about us with manifold beating of little frightened wings.
Norhala's face softened, her eyes smiled.

“Go--foolish little ones,” she cried, and waved her arms. They flew
away, scolding.

A lammergeier swooped down on wide funereal wings; it peered at us;
darted away toward the cliffs.

“There will be no carrion there for you, black eater of the dead, when I
am through,” I heard Norhala whisper, eyes again somber.

Steadily grew the dawn light; from Norhala's lips came again the
chanting. And now that paean, the reckless pulse of the monster we rode,
began to creep through my own veins. Into Drake's too, I knew, for his
head was held high and his eyes were clear and bright as hers who sang.

The jubilant pulse streamed through the hands that held us, throbbed
through us. The pulse of the Thing--sang!

Closer and closer grew the cliffs. Down and crashing down fell the
trees, the noise of their fall accompanying the battle chant of the
Valkyr beside me like wild harp chords of storm-lashed surf. Up to the
precipices the forest rolled, unbroken. Now the cliffs loomed overhead.
The dawn had passed. It was full day.

Cutting up through the towering granite scarps was a rift. In it the
black shadows clustered thickly. Straight toward that cleft we sped.
As we drew near, the crest of the Shape began swiftly to lower. Down we
sank and down--a hundred feet, two hundred; now we were two score yards
above the tree tops.

Out shot a neck, a tremendous serpent body. Crested it was with
pyramids; crested with them, too, was its immense head. Thickly the head
bristled with them, poised motionless upon spinning globes as huge as
they. For hundreds of feet that incredible neck stretched ahead of us
and for twice as far behind a monstrous, lizard-shaped body writhed.

We rode now upon a serpent, a glittering blue metal dragon, spiked
and knobbed and scaled. It was the weird steed of Norhala flattening,
thrusting out to pierce the rift.

And still as when it had reared on high beat through it the wild,
triumphant, questing pulse. Still rang out Norhala's chanting.

The trees parted and fell upon each side of us as though we were some
monster of the sea and they the waves we cleft.

The rift enclosed us. Lower we dropped; were not more than fifty feet
above its floor. The Thing upon which we rode was a torrent roaring
through it.

A deeper blackness enclosed us--a tunneling.

Through that we flowed. Out of it we darted into a widening filled with
wan light drifting down through a pinnacle fanged mouth miles on high.
Again the cleft shrunk. A thousand feet ahead was a crack, a narrowing
of the cleft so small that hardly could a man pass through it.

Abruptly the metal dragon halted.

Norhala's chanting changed; became again the arrogant clarioning. And
close below us the huge neck split. It came to me then that it was as
though Norhala were the overspirit of this chimera--as though it caught
and understood and obeyed each quick thought of hers.

As though, indeed, she was a PART of it--as IT was in reality a part
of that infinitely greater Thing, crouching there in its lair of the
Pit--the Metal Monster that had lent this living part of itself to her
for a steed, a champion. Little time had I to consider such matters.

Up thrust the Shape before us. Into it raced and spun Things angled,
Things curved and Things squared. It gathered itself into a Titanic
pillar out of which, instantly, thrust scores of arms.

Over them great globes raced; after these flew other scores of huge
pyramids, none less than ten feet in height, the mass of them twenty
and thirty. The manifold arms grew rigid. Quiet for a moment, a Titanic
metal Briareous, it stood.

Then at the tips of the arms the globes began to spin--faster, faster.
Upon them I saw the hosts of the pyramids open--as one into a host of
stars. The cleft leaped out in a flood of violet light.

Now for another instant the stars which had been motionless, poised upon
the whirling spheres, joined in their mad spinning. Cyclopean pin wheels
they turned; again as one they ceased. More brilliant now was their
light, dazzling; as though in their whirling they had gathered greater
force.

Under me I felt the split Thing quiver with eagerness.

From the stars came a hurricane of lightning! A cataract of electric
flame poured into the crack, splashed and guttered down the granite
walls. We were blinded by it; were deafened with thunders.

The face of the precipice smoked and split; was whirled away in clouds
of dust.

The crack widened--widened as a gulley in a sand bank does when a
swift stream rushes through it. Lightnings these were--and more than
lightnings; lightnings keyed up to an invincible annihilating weapon
that could rend and split and crumble to atoms the living granite.


Steadily the cleft expanded. As its walls melted away the Blasting Thing
advanced, spurting into it the flaming torrents. Behind it we crept.
The dust of the shattered rocks swirled up toward us like angry
ghosts--before they reached us they were blown away as though by strong
winds streaming from beneath us.

On we went, blinded, deafened. Interminably, it seemed, poured forth the
hurricane of blue fire; interminably the thunder bellowed.

There came a louder clamor--volcanic, chaotic, dulling the thunders.
The sides of the cleft quivered, bent outward. They split; crashed down.
Bright daylight poured in upon us, a flood of light toward which the
billows of dust rushed as though seeking escape; out it poured like the
smoke of ten thousand cannon.

And the Blasting Thing shook--as though with laughter!

The stars closed. Back into the Shape ran globe and pyramid. It slid
toward us--joined the body from which it had broken away. Through
all the mass ran a wave of jubilation, a pulse of mirth--a colossal,
metallic--SILENT--roar of laughter.

We glided forward--out of the cleft. I felt a shifting movement.

Up and up we were thrust. Dazed I looked behind me. In the face of a
sky climbing wall of rock, smoked a wide chasm. Out of it the billowing
clouds of dust still streamed, pursuing, threatening us. The whole
granite barrier seemed to quiver with agony. Higher we rose and higher.

“Look,” whispered Drake, and whirled me around.

Less than five miles away was Ruszark, the City of Cherkis. And it was
like some ancient city come into life out of long dead centuries. A
page restored from once conquering Persia's crumbled book. A city of the
Chosroes transported by Jinns into our own time.

Built around and upon a low mount, it stood within a valley but little
larger than the Pit. The plain was level, as though once it had been
the floor of some primeval lake; the hill of the City was its only
elevation.

Beyond, I caught the glinting of a narrow stream, meandering. The valley
was ringed with precipitous cliffs falling sheer to its floor.

Slowly we advanced.

The city was almost square, guarded by double walls of hewn stone. The
first raised itself a hundred feet on high, turreted and parapeted and
pierced with gates. Perhaps a quarter of a mile behind it the second
fortification thrust up.

The city itself I estimated covered about ten square miles. It ran
upward in broad terraces. It was very fair, decked with blossoming
gardens and green groves. Among the clustering granite houses, red and
yellow roofed, thrust skyward tall spires and towers. Upon the mount's
top was a broad, flat plaza on which were great buildings, marble white
and golden roofed; temples I thought, or palaces, or both.

Running to the city out of the grain fields and steads that surrounded
it, were scores of little figures, rat-like. Here and there among them
I glimpsed horsemen, arms and armor glittering. All were racing to the
gates and the shelter of the battlements.

Nearer we drew. From the walls came now a faint sound of gongs, of
drums, of shrill, flutelike pipings. Upon them I could see hosts
gathering; hosts of swarming little figures whose bodies glistened, from
above whom came gleamings--the light striking upon their helms, their
spear and javelin tips.

“Ruszark!” breathed Norhala, eyes wide, red lips cruelly smiling. “Lo--I
am before your gates. Lo--I am here--and was there ever joy like this!”

The constellations in her eyes blazed. Beautiful, beautiful was
Norhala--as Isis punishing Typhon for the murder of Osiris; as avenging
Diana; shining from her something of the spirit of all wrathful
Goddesses.

The flaming hair whirled and snapped. From all her sweet body came
white-hot furious force, a withering perfume of destruction. She pressed
against me, and I trembled at the contact.


Lawless, wild imaginings ran through me. Life, human life, dwindled. The
City seemed but a thing of toys.

On--let us crush it! On--on!

Again the monster shook beneath us. Faster we moved. Louder grew the
clangor of the drums, the gongs, the pipes. Nearer came the walls; and
ever more crowded with the swarming human ants that manned them.

We were close upon the heels of the last fleeing stragglers. The Thing
slackened in its stride; waited patiently until they were close to the
gates. Before they could reach them I heard the brazen clanging of their
valves. Those shut out beat frenziedly upon them; dragged themselves
close to the base of the battlements, cowered there or crept along them
seeking some hole in which to hide.

With a slow lowering of its height the Thing advanced. Now its form was
that of a spindle a full mile in length on whose bulging center we three
stood.

A hundred feet from the outer wall we halted. We looked down upon it not
more than fifty feet above its broad top. Hundreds of the soldiers were
crouching behind the parapets, companies of archers with great bows
poised, arrows at their cheeks, scores of leather jerkined men with
stands of javelins at their right hands, spearsmen and men with long,
thonged slings.

Set at intervals were squat, powerful engines of wood and metal beside
which were heaps of huge, rounded boulders. Catapults I knew them to be
and around each swarmed a knot of soldiers, fixing the great stones in
place, drawing back the thick ropes that, loosened, would hurl forth
the projectiles. From each side came other men, dragging more of these
balisters; assembling a battery against the prodigious, gleaming monster
that menaced their city.

Between outer wall and inner battlements galloped squadrons of mounted
men. Upon this inner wall the soldiers clustered as thickly as on the
outer, preparing as actively for its defense.

The city seethed. Up from it arose a humming, a buzzing, as of some
immense angry hive.

Involuntarily I visualized the spectacle we must present to those
who looked upon us--this huge incredible Shape of metal alive with
quicksilver shifting. This--as it must have seemed to them--hellish
mechanism of war captained by a sorceress and two familiars in form of
men. There came to me dreadful visions of such a monster looking
down upon the peace-reared battlements of New York--the panic rush of
thousands away from it.

There was a blaring of trumpets. Up on the parapet leaped a man clad all
in gleaming red armor. From head to feet the close linked scales covered
him. Within a hood shaped somewhat like the tight-fitting head coverings
of the Crusaders a pallid, cruel face looked out upon us; in the fierce
black eyes was no trace of fear.

Evil as Norhala had said these people of Ruszark were, wicked and
cruel--they were no cowards, no!

The red armored man threw up a hand.

“Who are you?” he shouted. “Who are you three, you three who come
driving down upon Ruszark through the rocks? We have no quarrel with
you?”

“I seek a man and a maid,” cried Norhala. “A maid and a sick man your
thieves took from me. Bring him forth!”

“Seek elsewhere for them then,” he answered. “They are not here. Turn
now and seek elsewhere. Go quickly, lest I loose our might upon you and
you go never.”

Mockingly rang her laughter--and under its lash the black eyes grew
fiercer, the cruelty on the white face darkened.

“Little man whose words are so big! Fly who thunders! What are you
called, little man?”

Her raillery bit deep--but its menace passed unheeded in the rage it
called forth.

“I am Kulun,” shouted the man in scarlet armor. “Kulun, the son of
Cherkis the Mighty, and captain of his hosts. Kulun--who will cast your
skin under my mares in stall for them to trample and thrust your red
flayed body upon a pole in the grain fields to frighten away the crows!
Does that answer you?”

Her laughter ceased; her eyes dwelt upon him--filled with an infernal
joy.

“The son of Cherkis!” I heard her murmur. “He has a son--”

There was a sneer on the cruel face; clearly he thought her awed. Quick
was his disillusionment.

“Listen, Kulun,” she cried. “I am Norhala--daughter of another Norhala
and of Rustum, whom Cherkis tortured and slew. Now go, you lying spawn
of unclean toads--go and tell your father that I, Norhala, am at his
gates. And bring back with you the maid and the man. Go, I say!”




CHAPTER XXV. CHERKIS

There was stark amazement on Kulun's face; and fear now enough. He
dropped from the parapet among his men. There came one loud trumpet
blast.

Out from the battlements poured a storm of arrows, a cloud of javelins.
The squat catapults leaped forward. From them came a hail of boulders.
Before that onrushing tempest of death I flinched.

I heard Norhala's golden laughter and before they could reach us arrow
and javelin and boulder were checked as though myriads of hands reached
out from the Thing under us and caught them. Down they dropped.

Forth from the great spindle shot a gigantic arm, hammer tipped with
cubes. It struck the wall close to where the scarlet armored Kulun had
vanished.

Under its blow the stones crumbled. With the fragments fell the
soldiers; were buried beneath them.

A hundred feet in width a breach gaped in the battlements. Out shot the
arm again; hooked its hammer tip over the parapet, tore away a stretch
of the breastwork as though it had been cardboard. Beside the breach an
expanse of the broad flat top lay open like a wide platform.

The arm withdrew, and out from the whole length of the spindle thrust
other arms, hammer tipped, held high aloft, menacing.

From all the length of the wall arose panic outcry. Abruptly the storm
of arrows ended; the catapults were still. Again the trumpets sounded;
the crying ceased. Down fell a silence, terrified, stifling.

Kulun stepped forth again, both hands held high. Gone was his arrogance.

“A parley,” he shouted. “A parley, Norhala. If we give you the maid and
man, will you go?”

“Go get them,” she answered. “And take with you this my command to
Cherkis--that HE return with the two!”

For an instant Kulun hesitated. Up thrust the dreadful arms, poised
themselves to strike.

“It shall be so,” he shouted. “I carry your command.”

He leaped back, his red mail flashed toward a turret that held, I
supposed, a stairway. He was lost to sight. In silence we waited.

On the further side of the city I glimpsed movement. Little troops of
mounted men, pony drawn wains, knots of running figures were fleeing
from the city through the opposite gates.

Norhala saw them too. With that incomprehensible, instant obedience
to her unspoken thought a mass of the Metal Things separated from us;
whirled up into a dozen of those obelisked forms I had seen march from
the cat eyes of the City of the Pit.

In but a breath, it seemed, their columns were far off, herding back the
fugitives.

They did not touch them, did not offer to harm--only, grotesquely,
like dogs heading off and corraling frightened sheep, they circled and
darted. Rushing back came those they herded.

From the watching terraces and walls arose shrill cries of terror, a
wailing. Far away the obelisks met, pirouetted, melted into one thick
column. Towering, motionless as we, it stood, guarding the further
gates.

There was a stir upon the wall, a flashing of spears, of drawn blades.
Two litters closed with curtainings, surrounded by triple rows of
swordsmen fully armored, carrying small shields and led by Kulun were
being borne to the torn battlement.

Their bearers stopped well within the platform and gently lowered their
burdens. The leader of those around the second litter drew aside its
covering, spoke.

Out stepped Ruth and after her--Ventnor!

“Martin!” I could not keep back the cry; heard mingled with it Drake's
own cry to Ruth. Ventnor raised his hand in greeting; I thought he
smiled.

The cubes on which we stood shot forward; stopped within fifty feet of
them. Instantly the guard of swordsmen raised their blades, held them
over the pair as though waiting the signal to strike.

And now I saw that Ruth was not clad as she had been when we had left
her. She stood in scanty kirtle that came scarcely to her knees, her
shoulders were bare, her curly brown hair unbound and tangled. Her face
was set with wrath hardly less than that which beat from Norhala. On
Ventnor's forehead was a blood red scar, a line that ran from temple to
temple like a brand.

The curtains of the first litter quivered; behind them someone spoke.
That in which Ruth and Ventnor had ridden was drawn swiftly away. The
knot of swordsmen drew back.

Into their places sprang and knelt a dozen archers. They ringed in the
two, bows drawn taut, arrows in place and pointing straight to their
hearts.

Out of the litter rolled a giant of a man. Seven feet he must have been
in height; over the huge shoulders, the barreled chest and the bloated
abdomen hung a purple cloak glittering with gems; through the thick and
grizzled hair passed a flashing circlet of jewels.

The scarlet armored Kulun beside him, swordsmen guarding them, he walked
to the verge of the torn gap in the wall. He peered down it, glancing
imperturbably at the upraised, hammer-banded arms still threatening;
examined again the breach. Then still with Kulun he strode over to
the very edge of the broken battlement and stood, head thrust a little
forward, studying us in silence.


“Cherkis!” whispered Norhala--the whisper was a hymn to Nemesis. I felt
her body quiver from head to foot.

A wave of hatred, a hot desire to kill, passed through me as I scanned
the face staring at us. It was a great gross mask of evil, of cold
cruelty and callous lusts. Unwinking, icily malignant, black slits of
eyes glared at us between pouches that held them half closed. Heavy
jowls hung pendulous, dragging down the corners of the thick lipped,
brutal mouth into a deep graven, unchanging sneer.

As he gazed at Norhala a flicker of lust shot like a licking tongue
through his eyes.

Yet from him pulsed power; sinister, instinct with evil, concentrate
with cruelty--but power indomitable. Such was Cherkis, descendant
perhaps of that Xerxes the Conqueror who three millenniums gone ruled
most of the known world.

It was Norhala who broke the silence.

“Tcherak! Greeting--Cherkis!” There was merciless mirth in the buglings
of her voice. “Lo, I did but knock so gently at your gates and you
hastened to welcome me. Greetings--gross swine, spittle of the toads,
fat slug beneath my sandals.”

He passed the insults by, unmoved--although I heard a murmuring go up
from those near and Kulun's hard eyes blazed.

“We will bargain, Norhala,” he answered calmly; the voice was deep,
filled with sinister strength.

“Bargain?” she laughed. “What have you with which to bargain, Cherkis?
Does the rat bargain with the tigress? And you, toad, have nothing.”

He shook his head.

“I have these,” he waved a hand toward Ruth and her brother. “Me you may
slay--and mayhap many of mine. But before you can move my archers will
feather their hearts.”

She considered him, no longer mocking.

“Two of mine you slew long since, Cherkis,” she said, slowly. “Therefore
it is I am here.”

“I know,” he nodded heavily. “Yet now that is neither here nor there,
Norhala. It was long since, and I have learned much during the years.
I would have killed you too, Norhala, could I have found you. But now I
would not do as then--quite differently would I do, Norhala; for I have
learned much. I am sorry that those that you loved died as they did. I
am in truth sorry!”

There was a curious lurking sardonicism in the words, an undertone of
mockery. Was what he really meant that in those years he had learned
to inflict greater agonies, more exquisite tortures? If so, Norhala
apparently did not sense that interpretation. Indeed, she seemed to be
interested, her wrath abating.

“No,” the hoarse voice rumbled dispassionately. “None of that is
important--now. YOU would have this man and girl. I hold them. They die
if you stir a hand's breadth toward me. If they die, I prevail against
you--for I have cheated you of what you desire. I win, Norhala, even
though you slay me. That is all that is now important.”

There was doubt upon Norhala's face and I caught a quick gleam of
contemptuous triumph glint through the depths of the evil eyes.

“Empty will be your victory over me, Norhala,” he said; then waited.

“What is your bargain?” she spoke hesitatingly; with a sinking of my
heart I heard the doubt tremble in her throat.

“If you will go without further knocking upon my gates”--there was a
satiric grimness in the phrase--“go when you have been given them, and
pledge yourself never to return--you shall have them. If you will not,
then they die.”

“But what security, what hostages, do you ask?” Her eyes were troubled.
“I cannot swear by your gods, Cherkis, for they are not my gods--in
truth I, Norhala, have no gods. Why should I not say yes and take the
two, then fall upon you and destroy--as you would do in my place, old
wolf?”

“Norhala,” he answered, “I ask nothing but your word. Do I not know
those who bore you and the line from which they sprung? Was not always
the word they gave kept till death--unbroken, inviolable? No need
for vows to gods between you and me. Your word is holier than they--O
glorious daughter of kings, princess royal!”


The great voice was harshly caressing; not obsequious, but as though
he gave her as an equal her rightful honor. Her face softened; she
considered him from eyes far less hostile.

A wholesome respect for this gross tyrant's mentality came to me; it
did not temper, it heightened, the hatred I felt for him. But now I
recognized the subtlety of his attack; realized that unerringly he
had taken the only means by which he could have gained a hearing; have
temporized. Could he win her with his guile?

“Is it not true?” There was a leonine purring in the question.

“It IS true!” she answered proudly. “Though why YOU should dwell upon
this, Cherkis, whose word is steadfast as the running stream and whose
promises are as lasting as its bubbles--why YOU should dwell on this I
do not know.”

“I have changed greatly, Princess, in the years since my great
wickedness; I have learned much. He who speaks to you now is not he you
were taught--and taught justly then--to hate.”

“You may speak truth! Certainly you are not as I have pictured you.” It
was as though she were more than half convinced. “In this at least you
do speak truth--that IF I promise I will go and molest you no more.”

“Why go at all, Princess?” Quietly he asked the amazing question--then
drew himself to his full height, threw wide his arms.

“Princess?” the great voice rumbled forth. “Nay--Queen! Why leave us
again--Norhala the Queen? Are we not of your people? Am I not of your
kin? Join your power with ours. What that war engine you ride may be,
how built, I know not. But this I do know--that with our strengths
joined we two can go forth from where I have dwelt so long, go forth
into the forgotten world, eat its cities and rule.

“You shall teach our people to make these engines, Norhala, and we will
make many of them. Queen Norhala--you shall wed my son Kulun, he who
stands beside me. And while I live you shall rule with me, rule equally.
And when I die you and Kulun shall rule.

“Thus shall our two royal lines be made one, the old feud wiped out, the
long score be settled. Queen--wherever it is you dwell it comes to
me that you have few men. Queen--you need men, many men and strong to
follow you, men to gather the harvests of your power, men to bring to
you the fruit of your smallest wish--young men and vigorous to amuse
you.

“Let the past be forgotten--I too have wrongs to forget, O Queen. Come
to us, Great One, with your power and your beauty. Teach us. Lead us.
Return, and throned above your people rule the world!”

He ceased. Over the battlements, over the city, dropped a vast expectant
silence--as though the city knew its fate was hanging upon the balance.

“No! No!” It was Ruth crying. “Do not trust him, Norhala! It's a trap!
He shamed me--he tortured--”

Cherkis half turned; before he swung about I saw a hell shadow darken
his face. Ventnor's hand thrust out, covered Ruth's mouth, choking her
crying.

“Your son”--Norhala spoke swiftly; and back flashed the cruel face of
Cherkis, devouring her with his eyes. “Your son--and Queenship here--and
Empire of the World.” Her voice was rapt, thrilled. “All this you offer?
Me--Norhala?”

“This and more!” The huge bulk of his body quivered with eagerness. “If
it be your wish, O Queen, I, Cherkis, will step down from the throne for
you and sit beneath your right hand, eager to do your bidding.”

A moment she studied him.

“Norhala,” I whispered, “do not do this thing. He thinks to gain your
secrets.”

“Let my bridegroom stand forth that I may look upon him,” called
Norhala.

Visibly Cherkis relaxed, as though a strain had been withdrawn. Between
him and his crimson-clad son flashed a glance; it was as though a
triumphant devil sped from them into each other's eyes.

I saw Ruth shrink into Ventnor's arms. Up from the wall rose a jubilant
shouting, was caught by the inner battlements, passed on to the crowded
terraces.

“Take Kulun,” it was Drake, pistol drawn and whispering across to me.
“I'll handle Cherkis. And shoot straight.”




CHAPTER XXVI. THE VENGEANCE OF NORHALA

Norhala's hand that had gone from my wrist dropped down again; the other
fell upon Drake's.

Kulun loosed his hood, let it fall about his shoulders.

He stepped forward, held out his arms to Norhala.

“A strong man!” she cried approvingly. “Hail--my bridegroom! But
stay--stand back a moment. Stand beside that man for whom I came to
Ruszark. I would see you together!”

Kulun's face darkened. But Cherkis smiled with evil understanding,
shrugged his shoulders and whispered to him. Sullenly Kulun stepped
back. The ring of the archers lowered their bows; they leaped to their
feet and stood aside to let him pass.

Quick as a serpent's tongue a pyramid tipped tentacle flicked out
beneath us. It darted through the broken circle of the bowmen.

It LICKED up Ruth and Ventnor and--Kulun!

Swiftly as it had swept forth it returned, coiled and dropped those two
I loved at Norhala's feet.

It flashed back on high with the scarlet length of Cherkis's son
sprawled along its angled end.

The great body of Cherkis seemed to wither.

Up from all the wall went a tempestuous sigh of horror.

Out rang the merciless chimes of Norhala's laughter.

“Tchai!” she cried. “Tchai! Fat fool there. Tchai--you Cherkis! Toad
whose wits have sickened with your years!

“Did you think to catch me, Norhala, in your filthy web? Princess!
Queen! Empress of Earth! Ho--old fox I have outplayed and beaten, what
now have you to trade with Norhala?”

Mouth sagging open, eyes glaring, the tyrant slowly raised his arms--a
suppliant.

“You would have back the bridegroom you gave me?” she laughed. “Take
him, then.”

Down swept the metal arm that held Kulun. The arm dropped Cherkis's son
at Cherkis's feet; and as though Kulun had been a grape--it crushed him!

Before those who had seen could stir from their stupor the tentacle
hovered over Cherkis, glaring down at the horror that had been his son.

It did not strike him--it drew him up to it as a magnet draws a pin.

And as the pin swings from the magnet when held suspended by the head,
so swung the great body of Cherkis from the under side of the pyramid
that held him. Hanging so he was carried toward us, came to a stop not
ten feet from us--

Weird, weird beyond all telling was that scene--and would I had the
power to make you who read see it as we did.

The animate, living Shape of metal on which we stood, with its forest of
hammer-handed arms raised menacingly along its mile of spindled length;
the great walls glistening with the armored hosts; the terraces of that
fair and ancient city, their gardens and green groves and clustering
red and yellow-roofed houses and temples and palaces; the swinging gross
body of Cherkis in the clutch of the unseen grip of the tentacle, his
grizzled hair touching the side of the pyramid that held him, his arms
half outstretched, the gemmed cloak flapping like the wings of a jeweled
bat, his white, malignant face in which the evil eyes were burning slits
flaming hell's own blackest hatred; and beyond the city, from which
pulsed almost visibly a vast and hopeless horror, the watching
column--and over all this the palely radiant white sky under whose light
the encircling cliffs were tremendous stony palettes splashed with a
hundred pigments.

Norhala's laughter had ceased. Somberly she looked upon Cherkis, into
the devil fires of his eyes.

“Cherkis!” she half whispered. “Now comes the end for you--and for all
that is yours! But until the end's end you shall see.”

The hanging body was thrust forward; was thrust up; was brought down
upon its feet on the upper plane of the prostrate pyramid tipping the
metal arm that held him. For an instant he struggled to escape; I
think he meant to hurl himself down upon Norhala, to kill her before he
himself was slain.

If so, after one frenzied effort he realized the futility, for with
a certain dignity he drew himself upright, turned his eyes toward the
city.

Over that city a dreadful silence hung. It was as though it cowered, hid
its face, was afraid to breathe.

“The end!” murmured Norhala.

There was a quick trembling through the Metal Thing. Down swung its
forest of sledges. Beneath the blow down fell the smitten walls,
shattered, crumbling, and with it glittering like shining flies in a
dust storm fell the armored men.

Through that mile-wide breach and up to the inner barrier I glimpsed
confusion chaotic. And again I say it--they were no cowards, those men
of Cherkis. From the inner battlements flew clouds of arrows, of huge
stones--as uselessly as before.

Then out from the opened gates poured regiments of horsemen, brandishing
javelins and great maces, and shouting fiercely as they drove down upon
each end of the Metal Shape. Under cover of their attack I saw cloaked
riders spurring their ponies across the plain to shelter of the cliff
walls, to the chance of hiding places within them. Women and men of
the rich, the powerful, flying for safety; after them ran and scattered
through the fields of grain a multitude on foot.


The ends of the spindle drew back before the horsemen's charge,
broadening as they went--like the heads of monstrous cobras withdrawing
into their hoods. Abruptly, with a lightning velocity, these broadenings
expanded into immense lunettes, two tremendous curving and crablike
claws. Their tips flung themselves past the racing troops; then like
gigantic pincers began to contract.

Of no avail now was it for the horsemen to halt dragging their mounts on
their haunches, or to turn to fly. The ends of the lunettes had met,
the pincer tips had closed. The mounted men were trapped within
half-mile-wide circles. And in upon man and horse their living
walls marched. Within those enclosures of the doomed began a frantic
milling--I shut my eyes--

There was a dreadful screaming of horses, a shrieking of men. Then
silence.

Shuddering, I looked. Where the mounted men had been was--nothing.

Nothing? There were two great circular spaces whose floors were
glistening, wetly red. Fragments of man or horse--there was none.
They had been crushed into--what was it Norhala had promised--had been
stamped into the rock beneath the feet of her--servants.

Sick, I looked away and stared at a Thing that writhed and undulated
over the plain; a prodigious serpentine Shape of cubes and spheres
linked and studded thick with the spikes of the pyramid. Through the
fields, over the plain its coils flashed.

Playfully it sped and twisted among the fugitives, crushing them,
tossing them aside broken, gliding over them. Some there were who
hurled themselves upon it in impotent despair, some who knelt before it,
praying. On rolled the metal convolutions, inexorable.

Within my vision's range there were no more fugitives. Around a corner
of the broken battlements raced the serpent Shape. Where it had writhed
was now no waving grain, no trees, no green thing. There was only smooth
rock upon which here and there red smears glistened wetly.

Afar there was a crying, in its wake a rumbling. It was the column, it
came to me, at work upon the further battlements. As though the sound
had been a signal the spindle trembled; up we were thrust another
hundred feet or more. Back dropped the host of brandished arms, threaded
themselves into the parent bulk.

Right and left of us the spindle split into scores of fissures. Between
these fissures the Metal Things that made up each now dissociate and
shapeless mass geysered; block and sphere and tetrahedron spike spun and
swirled. There was an instant of formlessness.

Then right and left of us stood scores of giant, grotesque warriors.
Their crests were fully fifty feet below our living platform. They
stood upon six immense, columnar stilts. These sextuple legs supported
a hundred feet above their bases a huge and globular body formed of
clusters of the spheres. Out from each of these bodies that were at one
and the same time trunks and heads, sprang half a score of colossal arms
shaped like flails; like spike-studded girders, Titanic battle maces,
Cyclopean sledges.

From legs and trunks and arms the tiny eyes of the Metal Hordes flashed,
exulting.

There came from them, from the Thing we rode as well, a chorus of thin
and eager wailings and pulsed through all that battle-line, a jubilant
throbbing.

Then with a rhythmic, JOCUND stride they leaped upon the city.

Under the mallets of the smiting arms the inner battlements fell as
under the hammers of a thousand metal Thors. Over their fragments and
the armored men who fell with them strode the Things, grinding stone and
man together as we passed.

All of the terraced city except the side hidden by the mount lay open to
my gaze. In that brief moment of pause I saw crazed crowds battling
in narrow streets, trampling over mounds of the fallen, surging over
barricades of bodies, clawing and tearing at each other in their flight.

There was a wide, stepped street of gleaming white stone that climbed
like an immense stairway straight up the slope to that broad plaza at
the top where clustered the great temples and palaces--the Acropolis of
the city. Into it the streets of the terraces flowed, each pouring out
upon it a living torrent, tumultuous with tuliped, sparkling little
waves, the gay coverings and the arms and armor of Ruszark's desperate
thousands seeking safety at the shrines of their gods.

Here great carven arches arose; there slender, exquisite towers capped
with red gold--there was a street of colossal statues, another over
which dozens of graceful, fretted bridges threw their spans from
feathery billows of flowering trees; there were gardens gay with
blossoms in which fountains sparkled, green groves; thousands upon
thousands of bright multicolored pennants, banners, fluttered.

A fair, a lovely city was Cherkis's stronghold of Ruszark.

Its beauty filled the eyes; out from it streamed the fragrance of its
gardens--the voice of its agony was that of the souls in Dis.

The row of destroying shapes lengthened, each huge warrior of metal
drawing far apart from its mates. They flexed their manifold arms,
shadow boxed--grotesquely, dreadfully.

Down struck the flails, the sledges. Beneath the blows the buildings
burst like eggshells, their fragments burying the throngs fighting for
escape in the thoroughfares that threaded them. Over their ruins we
moved.

Down and ever down crashed the awful sledges. And ever under them the
city crumbled.

There was a spider Shape that crawled up the wide stairway hammering
into the stone those who tried to flee before it.

Stride by stride the Destroying Things ate up the city.


I felt neither wrath nor pity. Through me beat a jubilant roaring
pulse--as though I were a shouting corpuscle of the rushing hurricane,
as though I were one of the hosts of smiting spirits of the bellowing
typhoon.

Through this stole another thought--vague, unfamiliar, yet seemingly
of truth's own essence. Why, I wondered, had I never recognized this
before? Why had I never known that these green forms called trees were
but ugly, unsymmetrical excrescences? That these high projections of
towers, these buildings were deformities?

That these four-pronged, moving little shapes that screamed and ran
were--hideous?

They must be wiped out! All this misshapen, jumbled, inharmonious
ugliness must be wiped out! It must be ground down to smooth unbroken
planes, harmonious curvings, shapeliness--harmonies of arc and line and
angle!

Something deep within me fought to speak--fought to tell me that this
thought was not human thought, not my thought--that it was the reflected
thought of the Metal Things!

It told me--and fiercely it struggled to make me realize what it was
that it told. Its insistence was borne upon little despairing, rhythmic
beatings--throbbings that were like the muffled sobbings of the drums of
grief. Louder, closer came the throbbing; clearer with it my perception
of the inhumanness of my thought.

The drum beat tapped at my humanity, became a dolorous knocking at my
heart.

It was the sobbing of Cherkis!

The gross face was shrunken, the cheeks sagging in folds of woe; cruelty
and wickedness were wiped from it; the evil in the eyes had been washed
out by tears. Eyes streaming, bull throat and barrel chest racked by his
sobbing, he watched the passing of his people and his city.

And relentlessly, coldly, Norhala watched him--as though loath to lose
the faintest shadow of his agony.

Now I saw we were close to the top of the mount. Packed between us
and the immense white structures that crowned it were thousands of the
people. They fell on their knees before us, prayed to us. They tore at
each other, striving to hide themselves from us in the mass that was
themselves. They beat against the barred doors of the sanctuaries; they
climbed the pillars; they swarmed over the golden roofs.

There was a moment of chaos--a chaos of which we were the heart.
Then temple and palace cracked, burst; were shattered; fell. I caught
glimpses of gleaming sculptures, glitterings of gold and of silver,
flashing of gems, shimmering of gorgeous draperies--under them a
weltering of men and women.

We closed down upon them--over them!

The dreadful sobbing ceased. I saw the head of Cherkis swing heavily
upon a shoulder; the eyes closed.

The Destroying Things touched. Their flailing arms coiled back, withdrew
into their bodies. They joined, forming for an instant a tremendous
hollow pillar far down in whose center we stood. They parted; shifted
in shape? rolled down the mount over the ruins like a widening
wave--crushing into the stone all over which they passed.

Afar away I saw the gleaming serpent still at play--still writhing
along, still obliterating the few score scattered fugitives that some
way, somehow, had slipped by the Destroying Things.

We halted. For one long moment Norhala looked upon the drooping body of
him upon whom she had let fall this mighty vengeance.

Then the metal arm that held Cherkis whirled. Thrown from it, the
cloaked form flew like a great blue bat. It fell upon the flattened
mound that had once been the proud crown of his city. A blue blot upon
desolation the broken body of Cherkis lay.

A black speck appeared high in the sky; grew fast--the lammergeier.

“I have left carrion for you--after all!” cried Norhala.

With an ebon swirling of wings the vulture dropped beside the blue
heap--thrust in it its beak.




CHAPTER XXVII. “THE DRUMS OF DESTINY”

Slowly we descended that mount of desolation; lingeringly, as though the
brooding eyes of Norhala were not yet sated with destruction. Of human
life, of green life, of life of any kind there was none.

Man and tree, woman and flower, babe and bud, palace, temple and
home--Norhala had stamped flat. She had crushed them within the
rock--even as she had promised.

The tremendous tragedy had absorbed my every faculty; I had had no time
to think of my companions; I had forgotten them. Now in the painful
surges of awakening realization, of full human understanding of that
inhuman annihilation, I turned to them for strength. Faintly I wondered
again at Ruth's scantiness of garb, her more than half nudity; dwelt
curiously upon the red brand across Ventnor's forehead.

In his eyes and in Drake's I saw reflected the horror I knew was in
my own. But in the eyes of Ruth was none of this--sternly, coldly
triumphant, indifferent to its piteousness as Norhala herself, she
scanned the waste that less than an hour since had been a place of
living beauty.

I felt a shock of repulsion. After all, those who had been destroyed
so ruthlessly could not ALL have been wholly evil. Yet mother and
blossoming maid, youth and oldster, all the pageant of humanity within
the great walls were now but lines within the stone. According to their
different lights, it came to me, there had been in Ruszark no greater
number of the wicked than one could find in any great city of our own
civilization.

From Norhala, of course, I looked for no perception of any of this. But
from Ruth--

My reaction grew; the pity long withheld racing through me linked with
a burning anger, a hatred for this woman who had been the directing soul
of that catastrophe.

My gaze fell again upon the red brand. I saw that it was a deep
indentation as though a thong had been twisted around Ventnor's head
biting the bone. There was dried blood on the edges, a double ring of
swollen white flesh rimming the cincture. It was the mark of--torture!

“Martin,” I cried. “That ring? What did they do to you?”

“They waked me with that,” he answered quietly. “I suppose I ought to be
grateful--although their intentions were not exactly--therapeutic--”

“They tortured him,” Ruth's voice was tense, bitter; she spoke in
Persian--for Norhala's benefit I thought then, not guessing a deeper
reason. “They tortured him. They gave him agony until he--returned. And
they promised him other agonies that would make him pray long for death.

“And me--me”--she raised little clenched hands--“me they stripped like a
slave. They led me through the city and the people mocked me. They
took me before that swine Norhala has punished--and stripped me
before him--like a slave. Before my eyes they tortured my brother.
Norhala--they were evil, all evil! Norhala--you did well to slay them!”

She caught the woman's hands, pressed close to her. Norhala gazed at her
from great gray eyes in which the wrath was dying, into which the old
tranquillity, the old serenity was flowing. And when she spoke the
golden voice held more than returning echoes of the far-away, faint
chimings.

“It is done,” she said. “And it was well done--sister. Now you and I
shall dwell together in peace--sister. Or if there be those in the world
from which you came that you would have slain, then you and I shall go
forth with our companies and stamp them out--even as I did these.”

My heart stopped beating--for from the depths of Ruth's eyes shining
shadows were rising, wraiths answering Norhala's calling; and, as they
rose, steadily they drew life from the clear radiance summoning--drew
closer to the semblance of that tranquil spirit which her vengeance
had banished but that had now returned to its twin thrones of Norhala's
eyes.

And at last it was twin sister of Norhala who looked upon her from the
face of Ruth!

The white arms of the woman encircled her; the glorious head bent over
her; flaming tresses mingled with tender brown curls.

“Sister!” she whispered. “Little sister! These men you shall have as
long as it pleases you--to do with as you will. Or if it is your wish
they shall go back to their world and I will guard them to its gates.

“But you and I, little sister, will dwell together--in the
vastnesses--in the peace. Shall it not be so?”

With no faltering, with no glance toward us three--lover, brother, old
friend--Ruth crept closer to her, rested her head upon the virginal,
royal breasts.

“It shall be so!” she murmured. “Sister--it shall be so. Norhala--I am
tired. Norhala--I have seen enough of men.”

An ecstasy of tenderness, a flame of unearthly rapture, trembled over
the woman's wondrous face. Hungrily, defiantly, she pressed the girl to
her; the stars in the lucid heavens of her eyes were soft and gentle and
caressing.

“Ruth!” cried Drake--and sprang toward them. She paid no heed; and even
as he leaped he was caught, whirled back against us.

“Wait,” said Ventnor, and caught him by the arm as wrathfully,
blindedly, he strove against the force that held him. “Wait. No
use--now.”

There was a curious understanding in his voice--a curious sympathy,
too, in the patient, untroubled gaze that dwelt upon his sister and this
weirdly exquisite woman who held her.

“Wait!” exclaimed Drake. “Wait--hell! The damned witch is stealing her
away from us!”

Again he threw himself forward; recoiled as though swept back by an
invisible arm; fell against us and was clasped and held by Ventnor. And
as he struggled the Thing we rode halted. Like metal waves back into it
rushed the enigmatic billows that had washed over the fragments of the
city.

We were lifted; between us and the woman and girl a cleft appeared; it
widened into a rift. It was as though Norhala had decreed it as a symbol
of this her second victory--or had set it between us as a barrier.


Wider grew the rift. Save for the bridge of our voices it separated us
from Ruth as though she stood upon another world.

Higher we rose; the three of us now upon the flat top of a tower upon
whose counterpart fifty feet away and facing the homeward path, Ruth and
Norhala stood with white arms interlaced.

The serpent shape flashed toward us; it vanished beneath, merging into
the waiting Thing.

Then slowly the Thing began to move; quietly it glided to the chasm it
had blasted in the cliff wall. The shadow of those walls fell upon us.
As one we looked back; as one we searched out the patch of blue with the
black blot at its breast.

We found it; then the precipices hid it. Silently we streamed through
the chasm, through the canyon and the tunnel--speaking no word, Drake's
eyes fixed with bitter hatred upon Norhala, Ventnor brooding upon her
always with that enigmatic sympathy. We passed between the walls of the
further cleft; stood for an instant at the brink of the green forest.

There came to us as though from immeasurable distances, a faint,
sustained thrumming--like the beating of countless muffled drums. The
Thing that carried us trembled--the sound died away. The Thing quieted;
it began its steady, effortless striding through the crowding trees--but
now with none of that speed with which it had come, spurred forward by
Norhala's awakened hate.

Ventnor stirred; broke the silence. And now I saw how wasted was his
body, how sharpened his face; almost ethereal; purged not only by
suffering but by, it came to me, some strange knowledge.

“No use, Drake,” he said dreamily. “All this is now on the knees of the
gods. And whether those gods are humanity's or whether they are--Gods of
Metal--I do not know.

“But this I do know--only one way or another can the balance fall; and
if it be one way, then you and we shall have Ruth back. And if it falls
the other way--then there will be little need for us to care. For man
will be done!”

“Martin! What do you mean?”

“It is the crisis,” he answered. “We can do nothing, Goodwin--nothing.
Whatever is to be steps forth now from the womb of Destiny.”

Again there came that distant rolling--louder, now. Again the Thing
trembled.

“The drums,” whispered Ventnor. “The drums of destiny. What is it they
are heralding? A new birth of Earth and the passing of man? A new child
to whom shall be given dominion--nay, to whom has been given dominion?
Or is it--taps--for Them?”

The drumming died as I listened--fearfully. About us was only the
swishing, the sighing of the falling trees beneath the tread of the
Thing. Motionless stood Norhala; and as motionless Ruth.

“Martin,” I cried once more, a dreadful doubt upon me. “Martin--what do
you mean?”

“Whence did--They--come?” His voice was clear and calm, the eyes beneath
the red brand clear and quiet, too. “Whence did They come--these Things
that carry us? That strode like destroying angels over Cherkis's
city? Are they spawn of Earth--as we are? Or are they foster
children--changelings from another star?

“These creatures that when many still are one--that when one still are
many. Whence did They come? What are They?”

He looked down upon the cubes that held us; their hosts of tiny eyes
shone up at him, enigmatically--as though they heard and understood.

“I do not forget,” he said. “At least not all do I forget of what I saw
during that time when I seemed an atom outside space--as I told you,
or think I told you, speaking with unthinkable effort through lips that
seemed eternities away from me, the atom, who strove to open them.

“There were three--visions, revelations--I know not what to call them.
And though each seemed equally real, of two of them, only one, I think,
can be true; and of the third--that may some time be true but surely is
not yet.”


Through the air came a louder drum roll--in it something ominous,
something sinister. It swelled to a crescendo; abruptly ceased. And now
I saw Norhala raise her head; listen.

“I saw a world, a vast world, Goodwin, marching stately through space.
It was no globe--it was a world of many facets, of smooth and polished
planes; a huge blue jewel world, dimly luminous; a crystal world cut
out from Aether. A geometric thought of the Great Cause, of God, if you
will, made material. It was airless, waterless, sunless.

“I seemed to draw closer to it. And then I saw that over every facet
patterns were traced; gigantic symmetrical designs; mathematical
hieroglyphs. In them I read unthinkable calculations, formulas of
interwoven universes, arithmetical progressions of armies of stars,
pandects of the motions of the suns. In the patterns was an appalling
harmony--as though all the laws from those which guide the atom to those
which direct the cosmos were there resolved into completeness--totalled.

“The faceted world was like a cosmic abacist, tallying as it marched the
errors of the infinite.

“The patterned symbols constantly changed form. I drew nearer--the
symbols were alive. They were, in untold numbers--These!”

He pointed to the Thing that bore us.

“I was swept back; looked again upon it from afar. And a fantastic
notion came to me--fantasy it was, of course, yet built I know around
a nucleus of strange truth. It was”--his tone was half whimsical,
half apologetic--“it was that this jeweled world was ridden by some
mathematical god, driving it through space, noting occasionally with
amused tolerance the very bad arithmetic of another Deity the reverse
of mathematical--a more or less haphazard Deity, the god, in fact, of us
and the things we call living.

“It had no mission; it wasn't at all out to do any reforming; it wasn't
in the least concerned in rectifying any of the inaccuracies of the
Other. Only now and then it took note of the deplorable differences
between the worlds it saw and its own impeccably ordered and tidy temple
with its equally tidy servitors.

“Just an itinerant demiurge of supergeometry riding along through space
on its perfectly summed-up world; master of all celestial mechanics;
its people independent of all that complex chemistry and labor for
equilibrium by which we live; needing neither air nor water, heeding
neither heat nor cold; fed with the magnetism of interstellar space and
stopping now and then to banquet off the energy of some great sun.”

A thrill of amazement passed through me; fantasy all this might be
but--how, if so, had he gotten that last thought? He had not seen, as
we had, the orgy in the Hall of the Cones, the prodigious feeding of the
Metal Monster upon our sun.

“That passed,” he went on, unnoticing. “I saw vast caverns filled with
the Things; working, growing, multiplying. In caverns of our Earth--the
fruit of some unguessed womb? I do not know.

“But in those caverns, under countless orbs of many colored
lights”--again the thrill of amaze shook me--“they grew. It came to me
that they were reaching out toward sunlight and the open. They burst
into it--into yellow, glowing sunlight. Ours? I do not know. And that
picture passed.”

His voice deepened.

“There came a third vision. I saw our Earth--I knew, Goodwin,
indisputably, unmistakably that it was our earth. But its rolling
hills were leveled, its mountains were ground and shaped into cold and
polished symbols--geometric, fashioned.

“The seas were fettered, gleaming like immense jewels in patterned
settings of crystal shores. The very Polar ice was chiseled. On the
ordered plains were traced the hieroglyphs of the faceted world. And on
all Earth, Goodwin, there was no green life, no city, no trace of man.
On this Earth that had been ours were only--These.

“Visioning!” he said. “Don't think that I accept them in their entirety.
Part truth, part illusion--the groping mind dazzled with light of
unfamiliar truths and making pictures from half light and half shadow to
help it understand.

“But still--SOME truth in them. How much I do not know. But this I
do know--that last vision was of a cataclysm whose beginnings we face
now--this very instant.”

The picture flashed behind my own eyes--of the walled city, its
thronging people, its groves and gardens, its science and its art; of
the Destroying Shapes trampling it flat--and then the dreadful, desolate
mount.

And suddenly I saw that mount as Earth--the city as Earth's cities--its
gardens and groves as Earth's fields and forests--and the vanished
people of Cherkis seemed to expand into all humanity.

“But Martin,” I stammered, fighting against choking, intolerable terror,
“there was something else. Something of the Keeper of the Cones and of
our striking through the sun to destroy the Things--something of them
being governed by the same laws that govern us and that if they broke
them they must fall. A hope--a PROMISE, that they would NOT conquer.”

“I remember,” he replied, “but not clearly. There WAS something--a
shadow upon them, a menace. It was a shadow that seemed to be born of
our own world--some threatening spirit of earth hovering over them.

“I cannot remember; it eludes me. Yet it is because I remember but a
little of it that I say those drums may not be--taps--for us.”


As though his words had been a cue, the sounds again burst forth--no
longer muffled nor faint. They roared; they seemed to pelt through air
and drop upon us; they beat about our ears with thunderous tattoo like
covered caverns drummed upon by Titans with trunks of great trees.

The drumming did not die; it grew louder, more vehement; defiant and
deafening. Within the Thing under us a mighty pulse began to throb,
accelerating rapidly to the rhythm of that clamorous roll.

I saw Norhala draw herself up, sharply; stand listening and alert. Under
me, the throbbing turned to an uneasy churning, a ferment.

“Drums?” muttered Drake. “THEY'RE no drums. It's drum fire. It's like a
dozen Marnes, a dozen Verduns. But where could batteries like those come
from?”

“Drums,” whispered Ventnor. “They ARE drums. The drums of Destiny!”

Louder the roaring grew. Now it was a tremendous rhythmic cannonading.
The Thing halted. The tower that upheld Ruth and Norhala swayed, bent
over the gap between us, touched the top on which we rode.

Gently the two were plucked up; swiftly they were set beside us.

Came a shrill, keen wailing--louder than ever I had heard before. There
was an earthquake trembling; a maelstrom swirling in which we spun; a
swift sinking.

The Thing split in two. Up before us rose a stupendous, stepped pyramid;
little smaller it was than that which Cheops built to throw its shadows
across holy Nile. Into it streamed, over it clicked, score upon score of
cubes, building it higher and higher. It lurched forward--away from us.

From Norhala came a single cry--resonant, blaring like a wrathful,
golden trumpet.

The speeding shape halted, hesitated; it seemed about to return. Crashed
down upon us an abrupt crescendo of the distant drumming; peremptory,
commanding. The shape darted forward; raced away crushing to straw the
trees beneath it in a full quarter-mile-wide swath.

Great gray eyes wide, filled with incredulous wonder, stunned disbelief,
Norhala for an instant faltered. Then out of her white throat, through
her red lips pelted a tempest of staccato buglings.

Under them what was left of the Thing leaped, tore on. Norhala's flaming
hair crackled and streamed; about her body of milk and pearl--about
Ruth's creamy skin--a radiant nimbus began to glow.

In the distance I saw a sapphire spark; knew it for Norhala's home. Not
far from it now was the rushing pyramid--and it came to me that within
that shape was strangely neither globe nor pyramid. Nor except for
the trembling cubes that made the platform on which we stood, did the
shrunken Thing carrying us hold any unit of the Metal Monster except its
spheres and tetrahedrons--at least within its visible bulk.

The sapphire spark had grown to a glimmering azure marble. Steadily we
gained upon the pyramid. Never for an instant ceased that scourging hail
of notes from Norhala--never for an instant lessened the drumming clamor
that seemed to try to smother them.

The sapphire marble became a sapphire ball, a great globe. I saw the
Thing we sought to join lift itself into a prodigious pillar; the
pillar's base thrust forth stilts; upon them the Thing stepped over the
blue dome of Norhala's house.

The blue bubble was close; now it curved below us. Gently we were lifted
down; were set before its portal. I looked up at the bulk that had
carried us.

I had been right--built it was only of globe and pyramid; an
inconceivably grotesque shape, it hung over us.

Throughout the towering Shape was awful movement; its units writhed
within it. Then it was lost to sight in the mists through which the
Thing we had pursued had gone.

In Norhala's face as she watched it go was a dismay, a poignant
uncertainty, that held in it something indescribably pitiful.

“I am afraid!” I heard her whisper.

She tightened her grasp upon dreaming Ruth; motioned us to go within.
We passed, silently; behind us she came, followed by three of the great
globes, by a pair of her tetrahedrons.

Beside a pile of the silken stuffs she halted. The girl's eyes dwelt
upon hers trustingly.

“I am afraid!” whispered Norhala again. “Afraid--for you!”

Tenderly she looked down upon her, the galaxies of stars in her eyes
soft and tremulous.

“I am afraid, little sister,” she whispered for the third time. “Not yet
can you go as I do--among the fires.” She hesitated. “Rest here until I
return. I shall leave these to guard you and obey you.”

She motioned to the five shapes. They ranged themselves about Ruth.
Norhala kissed her upon both brown eyes.

“Sleep till I return,” she murmured.

She swept from the chamber--with never a glance for us three. I heard a
little wailing chorus without, fast dying into silence.

Spheres and pyramids twinkled at us, guarding the silken pile whereon
Ruth lay asleep--like some enchanted princess.

Beat down upon the blue globe like hollow metal worlds, beaten and
shrieking.

The drums of Destiny!

The drums of Doom!

Beating taps for the world of men?




CHAPTER XXVIII. THE FRENZY OF RUTH

For many minutes we stood silent, in the shadowy chamber, listening,
each absorbed in his own thoughts. The thunderous drumming was
continuous; sometimes it faded into a background for clattering storms
as of thousands of machine guns, thousands of riveters at work at once
upon a thousand metal frameworks; sometimes it was nearly submerged
beneath splitting crashes as of meeting meteors of hollow steel.

But always the drumming persisted, rhythmic, thunderous. Through it
all Ruth slept, undisturbed, cheek pillowed in one rounded arm, the two
great pyramids erect behind her, watchful; a globe at her feet, a globe
at her head, the third sphere poised between her and us, and, like the
pyramids--watchful.

What was happening out there--over the edge of the canyon, beyond the
portal of the cliffs, behind the veils, in the Pit of the Metal Monster?
What was the message of the roaring drums? What the rede of their
clamorous runes?

Ventnor stepped by the sentinel globe, bent over the tranced girl.
Sphere nor pointed pair stirred; only they watched him--like a palpable
thing one felt their watchfulness. He listened to her heart, caught up
a wrist, took note of her pulse of life. He drew a deep breath, stood
upright, nodded reassuringly.

Abruptly Drake turned, walked out through the open portal, his strain
and a very deep anxiety written plainly in deep lines that ran from
nostrils to firm young mouth.

“Just went out to look for the pony,” he muttered when he returned.
“It's safe. I was afraid it had been stepped on. It's getting dusk.
There's a big light down the canyon--over in the valley.”

Ventnor drew back past the globe; rejoined us.

The blue bower trembled under a gust of sound. Ruth stirred; her brows
knitted; her hands clenched. The sphere that stood before her spun on
its axis, swept up to the globe at her head, glided from it to the globe
at her feet--as though whispering. Ruth moaned--her body bent upright,
swayed rigidly. Her eyes opened; they stared through us as though upon
some dreadful vision; and strangely was it as though she were seeing
with another's eyes, were reflecting another's sufferings.

The globes at her feet and at her head swirled out, clustering against
the third sphere--three weird shapes in silent consultation. On
Ventnor's face I saw pity--and a vast relief. With shocked amaze I
realized that Ruth's agony--for in agony she clearly was--was calling
forth in him elation. He spoke--and I knew why.

“Norhala!” he whispered. “She is seeing with Norhala's eyes--feeling
what Norhala feels. It's not going well with--That--out there. If we
dared leave Ruth--could only, see--”

Ruth leaped to her feet; cried out--a golden bugling that might have
been Norhala's own wrathful trumpet notes. Instantly the two pyramids
flamed open, became two gleaming stars that bathed her in violet
radiance. Beneath their upper tips I saw the blasting ovals
glitter--menacingly.

The girl glared at us--more brilliant grew the glittering ovals as
though their lightnings trembled on their lips.

“Ruth!” called Ventnor softly.

A shadow softened the intolerable, hard brilliancy of the brown eyes. In
them something struggled to arise, fighting its way to the surface like
some drowning human thing.

It sank back--upon her face dropped a cloud of heartbreak, appalling
woe; the despair of a soul that, having withdrawn all faith in its
own kind to rest all faith, as it thought, on angels--sees that faith
betrayed.

There stared upon us a stripped spirit, naked and hopeless and terrible.

Despairing, raging, she screamed once more. The central globe swam to
her; it raised her upon its back; glided to the doorway. Upon it she
stood poised like some youthful, anguished Victory--a Victory who faced
and knew she faced destroying defeat; poised upon that enigmatic orb
on bare slender feet, one sweet breast bare, hands upraised, virginally
archaic, nothing about her of the Ruth we knew.

“Ruth!” cried Drake; despair as great as that upon her face was in his
voice. He sprang before the globe that held her; barred its way.

For an instant the Thing paused--and in that instant the human soul of
the girl rushed back.

“No!” she cried. “No!”

A weird call issued from the white lips--stumbling, uncertain, as though
she who sent it forth herself wondered whence it sprang. Abruptly the
angry stars closed. The three globes spun--doubting, puzzled! Again she
called--now a tremulous, halting cadence. She was lifted; dropped gently
to her feet.

For an instant the globes and pyramids whirled and danced before
her--then sped away through the portal.

Ruth swayed, sobbing. Then as though drawn, she ran to the doorway,
fled through it. As one we sprang after her. Rods ahead her white
body flashed, speeding toward the Pit. Like fleet-footed Atalanta she
fled--and far, far behind us was the blue bower, the misty barrier of
the veils close, when Drake with a last desperate burst reached her
side, gripped her. Down the two fell, rolling upon the smooth roadway.
Silently she fought, biting, tearing at Drake, struggling to escape.

“Quick!” gasped Ventnor, stretching out to me an arm. “Cut off the
sleeve. Quick!”

Unquestioningly, I drew my knife, ripped the garment at the shoulder. He
snatched the sleeve, knelt at Ruth's head; rapidly he crumpled an end,
thrust it roughly into her mouth; tied it fast, gagging her.

“Hold her!” he ordered Drake; and with a sob of relief sprang up. The
girl's eyes blazed at him, filled with hate.

“Cut that other sleeve,” he said; and when I had done so, he knelt
again, pinned Ruth down with a knee at her throat, turned her over and
knotted her hands behind her. She ceased struggling; gently now he drew
up the curly head; swung her upon her back.

“Hold her feet.” He nodded to Drake, who caught the slender bare ankles
in his hands.


She lay there, helpless, being unable to use her hands or feet.

“Too little Ruth, and too much Norhala,” said Ventnor, looking up at me.
“If she'd only thought to cry out! She could have brought a regiment of
those Things down to blast us. And would--if she HAD thought. You don't
think THAT is Ruth, do you?”

He pointed to the pallid face glaring at him, the eyes from which cold
fires flamed.

“No, you don't!” He caught Drake by the shoulder, sent him spinning a
dozen feet away. “Damn it, Drake--don't you understand!”

For suddenly Ruth's eyes softened; she had turned them on Dick
pitifully, appealingly--and he had loosed her ankles, had leaned forward
as though to draw away the band that covered her lips.

“Your gun,” whispered Ventnor to me; before I had moved he had snatched
the automatic from my holster; had covered Drake with it.

“Drake,” he said, “stand where you are. If you take another step toward
this girl I'll shoot you--by God, I will!”

Drake halted, shocked amazement in his face; I myself felt resentful,
wondering at his outburst.

“But it's hurting her,” he muttered, Ruth's eyes, soft and pleading,
still dwelt upon him.

“Hurting her!” exclaimed Ventnor. “Man--she's my sister! I know what I'm
doing. Can't you see? Can't you see how little of Ruth is in that body
there--how little of the girl you love? How or why I don't know--but
that it is so I DO know. Drake--have you forgotten how Norhala beguiled
Cherkis? I want my sister back. I'm helping her to get back. Now let be.
I know what I'm doing. Look at her!”

We looked. In the face that glared up at Ventnor was nothing of
Ruth--even as he had said. There was the same cold, awesome wrath that
had rested upon Norhala's as she watched Cherkis weep over the eating up
of his city. Swiftly came a change--like the sudden smoothing out of the
rushing waves of a hill-locked, wind-lashed lake.

The face was again Ruth's face--and Ruth's alone; the eyes were Ruth's
eyes--supplicating, adjuring.

“Ruth!” Ventnor cried. “While you can hear--am I not right?”

She nodded vigorously, sternly; she was lost, hidden once more.

“You see.” He turned to us grimly.

A shattering shaft of light flashed upon the veils; almost pierced them.
An avalanche of sound passed high above us. Yet now I noted that where
we stood the clamor was lessened, muffled. Of course, it came to me, it
was the veils.

I wondered why--for whatever the quality of the radiant mists, their
purpose certainly had to do with concentration of the magnetic flux. The
deadening of the noise must be accidental, could have nothing to do with
their actual use; for sound is an air vibration solely. No--it must be a
secondary effect. The Metal Monster was as heedless of clamor as it was
of heat or cold--

“We've got to see,” Ventnor broke the chain of thought. “We've got to
get through and see what's happening. Win or lose--we've got to KNOW.”

“Cut off your sleeve, as I did,” he motioned to Drake. “Tie her ankles.
We'll carry her.”

Quickly it was done. Ruth's light body swinging between brother and
lover, we moved forward into the mists; we crept cautiously through
their dead silences.

Passed out and fell back into them from a searing chaos of light,
chaotic tumult.

From the slackened grip of Ventnor and Drake the body of Ruth dropped
while we three stood blinded, deafened, fighting for recovery. Ruth
twisted, rolled toward the brink; Ventnor threw himself upon her, held
her fast.


Dragging her, crawling on our knees, we crept forward; we stopped when
the thinning of the mists permitted us to see through them yet still
interposed a curtaining which, though tenuous, dimmed the intolerable
brilliancy that filled the Pit, muffled its din to a degree we could
bear.

I peered through them--and nerve and muscle were locked in the grip of
a paralyzing awe. I felt then as one would feel set close to warring
regiments of stars, made witness to the death-throes of a universe, or
swept through space and held above the whirling coils of Andromeda's
nebula to watch its birth agonies of nascent suns.

These are no figures of speech, no hyperboles--speck as our whole
planet would be in Andromeda's vast loom, pinprick as was the Pit to
the cyclone craters of our own sun, within the cliff-cupped walls of the
valley was a tangible, struggling living force akin to that which
dwells within the nebula and the star; a cosmic spirit transcending all
dimensions and thrusting its confines out into the infinite; a sentient
emanation of the infinite itself.

Nor was its voice less unearthly. It used the shell of the earth valley
for its trumpetings, its clangors--but as one hears in the murmurings
of the fluted conch the great voice of ocean, its whispering and
its roarings, so here in the clamorous shell of the Pit echoed the
tremendous voices of that illimitable sea which laps the shores of the
countless suns.

I looked upon a mighty whirlpool miles and miles wide. It whirled with
surges whose racing crests were smiting incandescences; it was threaded
with a spindrift of lightnings; it was trodden by dervish mists of
molten flame thrust through with forests of lances of living light. It
cast a cadent spray high to the heavens.

Over it the heavens glittered as though they were a shield held by
fearful gods. Through the maelstrom staggered a mountainous bulk; a
gleaming leviathan of pale blue metal caught in the swirling tide of
some incredible volcano; a huge ark of metal breasting a deluge of
flame.

And the drumming we heard as of hollow beaten metal worlds, the shouting
tempests of cannonading stars, was the breaking of these incandescent
crests, the falling of the lightning spindrift, the rhythmic impact of
the lanced rays upon the glimmering mountain that reeled and trembled as
they struck it.

The reeling mountain, the struggling leviathan, was--the City!

It was the mass of the Metal Monster itself, guarded by, stormed by,
its own legions that though separate from it were still as much of it as
were the cells that formed the skin of its walls, its carapace.

It was the Metal Monster tearing, rending, fighting for, battling
against--itself.

Mile high as when I had first beheld it was the inexplicable body that
held the great heart of the cones into which had been drawn the magnetic
cataracts from our sun; that held too the smaller hearts of the lesser
cones, the workshops, the birth chamber and manifold other mysteries
unguessed and unseen. By a full fourth had its base been shrunken.

Ranged in double line along the side turned toward us were hundreds of
dread forms--Shapes that in their intensity bore down upon, oppressed
with a nightmare weight, the consciousness.

Rectangular, upon their outlines no spike of pyramid, no curve of globe
showing, uncompromisingly ponderous, they upthrust. Upon the tops of the
first rank were enormous masses, sledge shaped--like those metal fists
that had battered down the walls of Cherkis's city but to them as the
human hand is to the paw of the dinosaur.

Conceive this--conceive these Shapes as animate and flexible; beating
down with the prodigious mallets, smashing from side to side as though
the tremendous pillars that held them were thousand jointed upright
pistons; that as closely as I can present it in images of things we know
is the picture of the Hammering Things.


Behind them stood a second row, high as they and as angular. From them
extended scores of girdered arms. These were thickly studded with the
flaming cruciform shapes, the opened cubes gleaming with their angry
flares of reds and smoky yellows. From the tentacles of many swung
immense shields like those which ringed the hall of the great cones.

And as the sledges beat, ever over their bent heads poured from the
crosses a flood of crimson lightnings. Out of the concave depths of
the shields whipped lashes of blinding flame. With ropes of fire
they knouted the Things the sledges struck, the sullen crimson levins
blasted.

Now I could see the Shapes that attacked. Grotesque; spined and tusked,
spiked and antlered, wenned and breasted; as chimerically angled, cusped
and cornute as though they were the superangled, supercornute gods of
the cusped and angled gods of the Javanese, they strove against the
sledge-headed and smiting, the multiarmed and blasting square towers.

High as them, as huge as they, incomparably fantastic, in dozens of
shifting forms they battled.

More than a mile from the stumbling City stood ranged like sharpshooters
a host of solid, bristling-legged towers. Upon their tops spun gigantic
wheels. Out of the centers of these wheels shot the radiant lances,
hosts of spears of intensest violet light. The radiance they volleyed
was not continuous; it was broken, so that the javelin rays shot out in
rhythmic flights, each flying fast upon the shafts of the others.

It was their impact that sent forth the thunderous drumming. They struck
and splintered against the walls, dropping from them in great gouts of
molten flame. It was as though before they broke they pierced the wall,
the Monster's side, bled fire.

With the crashing of broadsides of massed batteries the sledges smashed
down upon the bristling attackers. Under the awful impact globes and
pyramids were shattered into hundreds of fragments, rocket bursts of
blue and azure and violet flame, flames rainbowed and irised.

The hammer ends split, flew apart, were scattered, were falling showers
of sulphurous yellow and scarlet meteors. But ever other cubes swarmed
out and repaired the broken smiting tips. And always where a tusked and
cornute shape had been battered down, disintegrated, another arose
as huge and as formidable pouring forth upon the squared tower its
lightnings, tearing at it with colossal spiked and hooked claws, beating
it with incredible spiked and globular fists that were like the clenched
hands of some metal Atlas.

As the striving Shapes swayed and wrestled, gave way or thrust forward,
staggered or fell, the bulk of the Monster stumbled and swayed, advanced
and retreated--an unearthly motion wedded to an amorphous immensity that
flooded the watching consciousness with a deathly nausea.

Unceasingly the hail of radiant lances poured from the spinning wheels,
falling upon Towered Shapes and City's wall alike. There arose a
prodigious wailing, an unearthly thin screaming. About the bases of the
defenders flashed blinding bursts of incandescence--like those which had
heralded the flight of the Flying Thing dropping before Norhala's house.

Unlike them they held no dazzling sapphire brilliancies; they were
ochreous, suffused with raging vermilion. Nevertheless they were factors
of that same inexplicable action--for from thousands of gushing lights
leaped thousands of gigantic square pillars; unimaginable projectiles
hurled from the flaming mouths of earth-hidden, titanic mortars.

They soared high, swerved and swooped upon the lance-throwers. Beneath
their onslaught those chimerae tottered, I saw living projectiles and
living target fuse where they met--melt and weld in jets of lightnings.

But not all. There were those that tore great gaps in the horned
giants--wounds that instantly were healed with globes and pyramids
seething out from the Cyclopean trunk. Ever the incredible projectiles
flashed and flew as though from some inexhaustible store; ever uprose
that prodigious barrage against the smiting rays.

Now to check them soared from the ranks of the besiegers clouds of
countless horned dragons, immense cylinders of clustered cubes studded
with the clinging tetrahedrons. They struck the cubed projectiles head
on; aimed themselves to meet them.

Bristling dragon and hurtling pillar stuck and fused or burst with
intolerable blazing. They fell--cube and sphere and pyramid--some half
opened, some fully, in a rain of disks, of stars, huge flaming crosses;
a storm of unimaginable pyrotechnics.

Now I became conscious that within the City--within the body of the
Metal Monster--there raged a strife colossal as this without. From it
came a vast volcanic roaring. Up from its top shot tortured flames,
cascades and fountains of frenzied Things that looped and struggled,
writhed over its edge, hurled themselves back; battling chimerae which
against the glittering heavens traced luminous symbols of agony.

Shrilled a stronger wailing. Up from behind the ray hurling Towers shot
hosts of globes. Thousands of palely azure, metal moons they soared;
warrior moons charging in meteor rush and streaming with fluttering
battle pennons of violet flame. High they flew; they curved over the
mile high back of the Monster; they dropped upon it.

Arose to meet them immense columns of the cubes; battered against
the spheres; swept them over and down into the depths. Hundreds fell,
broken--but thousands held their place. I saw them twine about the
pillars--writhing columns of interlaced cubes and globes straining
like monstrous serpents while all along their coils the open disks and
crosses smote with the scimitars of their lightnings.

In the wall of the City appeared a shining crack; from top to bottom it
ran; it widened into a rift from which a flood of radiance gushed. Out
of this rift poured a thousand-foot-high torrent of horned globes.

Only for an instant they flowed. The rift closed upon them, catching
those still emerging in a colossal vise. It CRUNCHED them. Plain through
the turmoil came a dreadful--bursting roar.

Down from the closing jaws of the vise dripped a stream of fragments
that flashed and flickered--and died. And now in the wall was no trace
of the breach.

A hurricane of radiant lances swept it. Under them a mile wide section
of the living scarp split away; dropped like an avalanche. Its fall
revealed great spaces, huge vaults and chambers filled with warring
lightnings--out from them came roaring, bellowing thunders. Swiftly from
each side of the gap a metal curtaining of the cubes joined. Again the
wall was whole.

I turned my stunned gaze from the City--swept over the valley.
Everywhere, in towers, in writhing coils, in whipping flails, in waves
that smote and crashed, in countless forms and combinations the Metal
Hordes battled. Here were pillars against which metal billows rushed
and were broken; there were metal comets that crashed high above the mad
turmoil.

From streaming silent veil to veil--north and south, east and west the
Monster slew itself beneath its racing, flaming banners, the tempests of
its lightnings.

The tortured hulk of the City lurched; it swept toward us. Before it
blotted out from our eyes the Pit I saw that the crystal spans upon the
river of jade were gone; that the wondrous jeweled ribbons of its banks
were broken.

Closer came the reeling City.

I fumbled for my lenses, focussed them upon it. Now I saw that where
the radiant lances struck they--killed the blocks blackened under them,
became lustreless; the sparkling of the tiny eyes--went out; the metal
carapaces crumbled.

Closer to the City--came the Monster; shuddering I lowered the glasses
that it might not seem so near.

Down dropped the bristling Shapes that wrestled with the squared Towers.
They rose again in a single monstrous wave that rushed to overwhelm
them. Before they could strike the City swept closer; had hidden them
from me.

Again I raised the glasses. They brought the metal scarp not fifty feet
away--within it the hosts of tiny eyes glittered, no longer mocking nor
malicious, but insane.

Nearer drew the Monster--nearer.

A thousand feet away it checked its movement, seemed to draw itself
together. Then like the roar of a falling world that whole side facing
us slid down to the valley's floor.




CHAPTER XXIX. THE PASSING OF NORHALA

Hundreds of feet through must have been the fallen mass--within it who
knows what chambers filled with mysteries? Yes, thousands of feet thick
it must have been, for the debris of it splintered and lashed to the
very edge of the ledge on which we crouched; heaped it with the dimming
fragments of the bodies that had formed it.

We looked into a thousand vaults, a thousand spaces. There came another
avalanche roaring--before us opened the crater of the cones.

Through the torn gap I saw them, clustering undisturbed about the base
of that one slender, coroneted and star pointing spire, rising serene
and unshaken from a hell of lightnings. But the shields that had rimmed
the crater were gone.

Ventnor snatched the glasses from my hand, leveled and held them long to
his eyes.

He thrust them back to me. “Look!”

Through the lenses the great hall leaped into full view apparently only
a few yards away. It was a cauldron of chameleon flame. It seethed with
the Hordes battling over the remaining walls and floor. But around the
crystal base of the cones was an open zone into which none broke.

In that wide ring, girdling the shimmering fantasy like a circled
sanctuary, were but three forms. One was the wondrous Disk of jeweled
fires I have called the Metal Emperor; the second was the sullen fired
cruciform of the Keeper.

The third was Norhala!

She stood at the side of that weird master of hers--or was it after all
the servant? Between them and the Keeper's planes gleamed the gigantic
T-shaped tablet of countless rods which controlled the activities of the
cones; that had controlled the shifting of the vanished shields; that
manipulated too, perhaps, the energies of whatever similar but smaller
cornute ganglia were scattered throughout the City and one of which we
had beheld when the Emperor's guards had blasted Ventnor.

Close was Norhala in the lenses--so close that almost, it seemed, I
could reach out and touch her. The flaming hair streamed and billowed
above her glorious head like a banner of molten floss of coppery gold;
her face was a mask of wrath and despair; her great eyes blazed upon the
Keeper; her exquisite body was bare, stripped of every shred of silken
covering.

From streaming tresses to white feet an oval of pulsing, golden light
nimbused her. Maiden Isis, virgin Astarte she stood there, held in the
grip of the Disk--like a goddess betrayed and hopeless yet thirsting for
vengeance.

For all their stillness, their immobility, it came to me that Emperor
and Keeper were at grapple, locked in death grip; the realization was as
definite as though, like Ruth, I thought with Norhala's mind, saw with
her eyes.

Clearly too it came to me that in this contest between the two was
epitomized all the vast conflict that raged around them; that in it was
fast ripening that fruit of destiny of which Ventnor had spoken, and
that here in the Hall of the Cones would be settled--and soon--the fate
not only of Disk and Cross, but it might be of humanity.

But with what unknown powers was that duel being fought? They cast no
lightnings, they battled with no visible weapons. Only the great planes
of the inverted cruciform Shape smoked and smoldered with their sullen
flares of ochres and of scarlets; while over all the face of the
Disk its cold and irised fires raced and shone, beating with a rhythm
incredibly rapid; its core of incandescent ruby blazed, its sapphire
ovals were cabochoned pools of living, lucent radiance.

There was a splitting roar that arose above all the clamor, deafening
us even in the shelter of the silent veils. On each side of the crater
whole masses of the City dropped away. Fleetingly I was aware of scores
of smaller pits in which uprose lesser replicas of the Coned Mount,
lesser reservoirs of the Monster's force.

Neither the Emperor nor the Keeper moved, both seemingly indifferent to
the catastrophe fast developing around them.

Now I strained forward to the very thinnest edge of the curtainings.
For between the Disk and Cross began to form fine black mist. It was
transparent. It seemed spun of minute translucent ebon corpuscles. It
hung like a black shroud suspended by unseen hands. It shook and wavered
now toward the Disk, now toward the Cross.

I sensed a keying up of force within the two; knew that each was
striving to cast like a net that hanging mist upon the other.

Abruptly the Emperor flashed forth, blindingly. As though caught upon a
blast, the black shroud flew toward the Keeper--enveloped it. And as the
mist covered and clung I saw the sulphurous and crimson flares dim. They
were snuffed out.

The Keeper fell!


Upon Norhala's face flamed a wild triumph, banishing despair. The
outstretched planes of the Cross swept up as though in torment. For an
instant its fires flared and licked through the clinging blackness; it
writhed half upright, threw itself forward, crashed down prostrate upon
the enigmatic tablet which only its tentacles could manipulate.

From Norhala's face the triumph fled. On its heels rushed stark,
incredulous horror.

The Mount of Cones shuddered. From it came a single mighty throb of
force--like a prodigious heart-beat. Under that pulse of power the
Emperor staggered, spun--and spinning, swept Norhala from her feet,
swung her close to its flashing rose.

A second throb pulsed from the cones, and mightier.

A spasm shook the Disk--a paroxysm.

Its fires faded; they flared out again, bathing the floating, unearthly
figure of Norhala with their iridescences.

I saw her body writhe--as though it shared the agony of the Shape that
held her. Her head twisted; the great eyes, pools of uncomprehending,
unbelieving horror, stared into mine.

With a spasmodic, infinitely dreadful movement the Disk closed--

And closed upon her!

Norhala was gone--was shut within it. Crushed to the pent fires of its
crystal heart.

I heard a sobbing, agonized choking--knew it was I who sobbed. Against
me I felt Ruth's body strike, bend in convulsive arc, drop inert.

The slender steeple of the cones drooped sending its faceted coronet
shattering to the floor. The Mount melted. Beneath the flooding radiance
sprawled Keeper and the great inert Globe that was the Goddess woman's
sepulcher.

The crater filled with the pallid luminescence. Faster and ever faster
it poured down into the Pit. And from all the lesser craters of the
smaller cones swept silent cataracts of the same pale radiance.

The City began to crumble--the Monster to fall.

Like pent-up waters rushing through a broken dam the gleaming deluge
swept over the valley; gushing in steady torrents from the breaking
mass. Over the valley fell a vast silence. The lightnings ceased. The
Metal Hordes stood rigid, the shining flood lapping at their bases,
rising swiftly ever higher.

Now from the sinking City swarmed multitudes of its weird luminaries.

Out they trooped, swirling from every rent and gap--orbs scarlet and
sapphire, ruby orbs, orbs tuliped and irised--the jocund suns of the
birth chamber and side by side with them hosts of the frozen, pale gilt,
stiff rayed suns.

Thousands upon thousands they marched forth and poised themselves
solemnly over all the Pit that now was a fast rising lake of yellow
froth of sun flame.

They swept forth in squadrons, in companies, in regiments, those
mysterious orbs. They floated over all the valley; they separated and
swung motionless above it as though they were mysterious multiple souls
of fire brooding over the dying shell that had held them.

Beneath, thrusting up from the lambent lake like grotesque towers of
some drowned fantastic metropolis, the great Shapes stood, black against
its glowing.

What had been the City--that which had been the bulk of the Monster--was
now only a vast and shapeless hill from which streamed the silent
torrents of that released, unknown force which, concentrate and bound,
had been the cones.

As though it was the Monster's shining life-blood it poured, raising
ever higher in its swift flooding the level radiant lake.

Lower and lower sank the immense bulk; squattered and spread, ever
lowering--about its helpless, patient crouching something ineffably
piteous, something indescribably, COSMICALLY tragic.

Abruptly the watching orbs shook under a hail of sparkling atoms
streaming down from the glittering sky; raining upon the lambent lake.
So thick they fell that now the brooding luminaries were dim aureoles
within them.

From the Pit came a blinding, insupportable brilliancy. From every
rigid tower gleamed out jeweled fires; their clinging units opened into
blazing star and disk and cross. The City was a hill of living gems over
which flowed torrents of pale molten gold.

The Pit blazed.


There followed an appalling tensity; a prodigious gathering of force;
a panic stirring concentration of energy. Thicker fell the clouds of
sparkling atoms--higher rose the yellow flood.

Ventnor cried out. I could not hear him, but I read his purpose--and
so did Drake. Up on his broad shoulders he swung Ruth as though she had
been a child. Back through the throbbing veils we ran; passed out of
them.

“Back!” shouted Ventnor. “Back as far as you can!”

On we raced; we reached the gateway of the cliffs; we dashed on and
on--up the shining roadway toward the blue globe now a scant mile before
us; ran sobbing, panting--ran, we knew, for our lives.

Out of the Pit came a sound--I cannot describe it!

An unutterably desolate, dreadful wail of despair, it shuddered past us
like the groaning of a broken-hearted star--anguished and awesome.

It died. There rushed upon us a sea of that incredible loneliness, that
longing for extinction that had assailed us in the haunted hollow where
first we had seen Norhala. But its billows were resistless, invincible.
Beneath them we fell; were torn by desire for swift death.

Dimly, through fainting eyes, I saw a dazzling brilliancy fill the sky;
heard with dying ears a chaotic, blasting roar. A wave of air thicker
than water caught us up, hurled us hundreds of yards forward. It dropped
us; in its wake rushed another wave, withering, scorching.

It raced over us. Scorching though it was, within its heat was
energizing, revivifying force; something that slew the deadly despair
and fed the fading fires of life.

I staggered to my feet; looked back. The veils were gone. The precipice
walled gateway they had curtained was filled with a Plutonic glare as
though it opened into the incandescent heart of a volcano.

Ventnor clutched my shoulder, spun me around. He pointed to the sapphire
house, started to run to it. Far ahead I saw Drake, the body of the girl
clasped to his breast. The heat became blasting, insupportable; my lungs
burned.

Over the sky above the canyon streaked a serpentine chain of lightnings.
A sudden cyclonic gust swept the cleft, whirling us like leaves toward
the Pit.

I threw myself upon my face, clutching at the smooth rock. A volley of
thunder burst--but not the thunder of the Metal Monster or its Hordes;
no, the bellowing of the levins of our own earth.

And the wind was cold; it bathed the burning skin; laved the fevered
lungs.

Again the sky was split by the lightnings. And roaring down from it in
solid sheets came the rain.

From the Pit arose a hissing as though within it raged Babylonian
Tiamat, Mother of Chaos, serpent dweller in the void; Midgard-snake of
the ancient Norse holding in her coils the world.

Buffeted by wind, beaten down by rain, clinging to each other like
drowning men, Ventnor and I pushed on to the elfin globe. The light was
dying fast. By it we saw Drake pass within the portal with his burden.
The light became embers; it went out; blackness clasped us. Guided by
the lightnings, we beat our way to the door; passed through it.

In the electric glare we saw Drake bending over Ruth. In it I saw
a slide draw over the open portal through which shrieked the wind,
streamed the rain.

As though its crystal panel was moved by unseen, gentle hands, the
portal closed; the tempest shut out.

We dropped beside Ruth upon a pile of silken stuffs--awed, marveling,
trembling with pity and--thanksgiving.

For we knew--each of us knew with an absolute definiteness as we
crouched there among the racing, dancing black and silver shadows with
which the lightnings filled the blue globe--that the Metal Monster was
dead.

Slain by itself!




CHAPTER XXX. BURNED OUT

Ruth sighed and stirred. By the glare of the lightnings, now almost
continuous, we saw that her rigidity, and in fact all the puzzling
cataleptic symptoms, had disappeared. Her limbs relaxed, her skin
faintly flushed, she lay in deepest but natural slumber undisturbed by
the incessant cannonading of the thunder under which the walls of the
blue globe shuddered. Ventnor passed through the curtains of the central
hall; he returned with one of Norhala's cloaks; covered the girl with
it.

An overwhelming sleepiness took possession of me, a weariness ineffable.
Nerve and brain and muscle suddenly relaxed, went slack and numb.
Without a struggle I surrendered to an overpowering stupor and cradled
deep in its heart ceased consciously to be.


When my eyes unclosed the chamber of the moonstone walls was filled
with a silvery, crepuscular light. I heard the murmuring and laughing of
running water, the play, I lazily realized, of the fountained pool.

I lay for whole minutes unthinking, luxuriating in the sense of tension
gone and of security; lay steeped in the aftermath of complete rest.
Memory flooded me.

Quietly I sat up; Ruth still slept, breathing peacefully beneath the
cloak, one white arm stretched over the shoulder of Drake--as though in
her sleep she had drawn close to him.

At her feet lay Ventnor, as deep in slumber as they. I arose and
tip-toed over to the closed door.

Searching, I found its key; a cupped indentation upon which I pressed.

The crystalline panel slipped back; it was moved, I suppose, by some
mechanism of counterbalances responding to the weight of the hand.
It must have been some vibration of the thunder which had loosed that
mechanism and had closed the panel upon the heels of our entrance--so I
thought--then seeing again in memory that uncanny, deliberate shutting
was not at all convinced that it had been the thunder.

I looked out. How many hours the sun had been up there was no means of
knowing.

The sky was low and slaty gray; a fine rain was falling. I stepped out.

The garden of Norhala was a wreckage of uprooted and splintered trees
and torn masses of what had been blossoming verdure.

The gateway of the precipices beyond which lay the Pit was hidden in the
webs of the rain. Long I gazed down the canyon--and longingly; striving
to picture what the Pit now held; eager to read the riddles of the
night.

There came from the valley no sound, no movement, no light.

I reentered the blue globe and paused on the threshold--staring into
the wide and wondering eyes of Ruth bolt upright in her silken bed
with Norhala's cloak clutched to her chin like a suddenly awakened and
startled child. As she glimpsed me she stretched out her hand. Drake,
wide awake on the instant, leaped to his feet, his hand jumping to his
pistol.

“Dick!” called Ruth, her voice tremulous, sweet.

He swung about, looked deep into the clear and fearless brown eyes in
which--with leaping heart I realized it--was throned only that spirit
which was Ruth's and Ruth's alone; Ruth's clear unshadowed eyes glad and
shy and soft with love.

“Dick!” she whispered, and held soft arms out to him. The cloak fell
from her. He swung her up. Their lips met.

Upon them, embraced, the wakening eyes of Ventnor dwelt; they filled
with relief and joy, nor was there lacking in them a certain amusement.

She drew from Drake's arms, pushed him from her, stood for a moment
shakily, with covered eyes.

“Ruth,” called Ventnor softly.

“Oh!” she cried. “Oh, Martin--I forgot--” She ran to him, held him
tight, face hidden in his breast. His hand rested on the clustering
brown curls, tenderly.

“Martin.” She raised her face to him. “Martin, it's GONE! I'm--ME again!
All ME! What happened? Where's Norhala?”

I started. Did she not know? Of course, lying bound as she had in the
vanished veils, she could have seen nothing of the stupendous tragedy
enacted beyond them--but had not Ventnor said that possessed by the
inexplicable obsession evoked by the weird woman Ruth had seen with her
eyes, thought with her mind?

And had there not been evidence that in her body had been echoed the
torments of Norhala's? Had she forgotten? I started to speak--was
checked by Ventnor's swift, warning glance.

“She's--over in the Pit,” he answered her quietly. “But do you remember
nothing, little sister?”

“There's something in my mind that's been rubbed out,” she replied.
“I remember the City of Cherkis--and your torture, Martin--and my
torture--”

Her face whitened; Ventnor's brow contracted anxiously. I knew for what
he watched--but Ruth's shamed face was all human; on it was no shadow
nor trace of that alien soul which so few hours since had threatened us.

“Yes,” she nodded, “I remember that. And I remember how Norhala
repaid them. I remember that I was glad, fiercely glad, and then I was
tired--so tired. And then--I come to the rubbed-out place,” she ended
perplexedly.

Deliberately, almost banally had I not realized his purpose, he changed
the subject. He held her from him at arm's length.

“Ruth!” he exclaimed, half mockingly, half reprovingly. “Don't you think
your morning negligee is just a little scanty even for this Godforsaken
corner of the earth?”

Lips parted in sheer astonishment, she looked at him. Then her eyes
dropped to her bare feet, her dimpled knees. She clasped her arms across
her breasts; rosy red turned all her fair skin.

“Oh!” she gasped. “Oh!” And hid from Drake and me behind the tall figure
of her brother.

I walked over to the pile of silken stuffs, took the cloak and tossed it
to her. Ventnor pointed to the saddlebags.

“You've another outfit there, Ruth,” he said. “We'll take a turn through
the place. Call us when you're ready. We'll get something to eat and go
see what's happening--out there.”

She nodded. We passed through the curtains and out of the hall into the
chamber that had been Norhala's. There we halted, Drake eyeing Martin
with a certain embarrassment. The older man thrust out his hand to him.

“I knew it, Drake,” he said. “Ruth told me all about it when Cherkis had
us. And I'm very glad. It's time she was having a home of her own and
not running around the lost places with me. I'll miss her--miss her
damnably, of course. But I'm glad, boy--glad!”

There was a little silence while each looked deep into each other's
hearts. Then Ventnor dropped Dick's hand.

“And that's all of THAT,” he said. “The problem before us is--how are we
going to get back home?”

“The--THING--is dead.” I spoke from an absolute conviction that
surprised me, based as it was upon no really tangible, known evidence.

“I think so,” he said. “No--I KNOW so. Yet even if we can pass over its
body, how can we climb out of its lair? That slide down which we rode
with Norhala is unclimbable. The walls are unscalable. And there is that
chasm--she--spanned for us. How can we cross THAT? The tunnel to the
ruins was sealed. There remains of possible roads the way through the
forest to what was the City of Cherkis. Frankly I am loathe to take it.

“I am not at all sure that all the armored men were slain--that some few
may not have escaped and be lurking there. It would be short shrift for
us if we fell into their hands now.”

“And I'm not sure of THAT,” objected Drake. “I think their pep and push
must be pretty thoroughly knocked out--if any do remain. I think if
they saw us coming they'd beat it so fast that they'd smoke with the
friction.”

“There's something to that,” Ventnor smiled. “Still I'm not keen on
taking the chance. At any rate, the first thing to do is to see what
happened down there in the Pit. Maybe we'll have some other idea after
that.”

“I know what happened there,” announced Drake, surprisingly. “It was a
short circuit!”

We gaped at him, mystified.

“Burned out!” said Drake. “Every damned one of them--burned out. What
were they, after all? A lot of living dynamos. Dynamotors--rather.
And all of a sudden they had too much juice turned on. Bang went their
insulations--whatever they were.

“Bang went they. Burned out--short circuited. I don't pretend to know
why or how. Nonsense! I do know. The cones were some kind of immensely
concentrated force--electric, magnetic; either or both or more. I myself
believe that they were probably solid--in a way of speaking--coronium.

“If about twenty of the greatest scientists the world has ever known
are right, coronium is--well, call it curdled energy. The electric
potentiality of Niagara in a pin point of dust of yellow fire. All
right--they or IT lost control. Every pin point swelled out into a
Niagara. And as it did so, it expanded from a controlled dust dot to
an uncontrolled cataract--in other words, its energy was unleashed and
undammed.

“Very well--what followed? What HAD to follow? Every living battery of
block and globe and spike was supercharged and went--blooey. The valley
must have been some sweet little volcano while that short circuiting
was going on. All right--let's go down and see what it did to your
unclimbable slide and unscalable walls, Ventnor. I'm not sure we won't
be able to get out that way.”

“Come on; everything's ready,” Ruth was calling; her summoning blocked
any objection we might have raised to Drake's argument.

It was no dryad, no distressed pagan clad maid we saw as we passed back
into the room of the pool. In knickerbockers and short skirt, prim and
self-possessed, rebellious curls held severely in place by close-fitting
cap and slender feet stoutly shod, Ruth hovered over the steaming kettle
swung above the spirit lamp.

And she was very silent as we hastily broke fast. Nor when we had
finished did she go to Drake. She clung close to her brother and beside
him as we set forth down the roadway, through the rain, toward the ledge
between the cliffs where the veils had shimmered.

Hotter and hotter it grew as we advanced; the air steamed like a Turkish
bath. The mists clustered so thickly that at last we groped forward step
by step, holding to each other.

“No use,” gasped Ventnor. “We couldn't see. We'll have to turn back.”

“Burned out!” said Dick. “Didn't I tell you? The whole valley was a
volcano. And with that deluge falling in it--why wouldn't there be a
fog? It's why there IS a fog. We'll have to wait until it clears.”

We trudged back to the blue globe.

All that day the rain fell. Throughout the few remaining hours of
daylight we wandered over the house of Norhala, examining its most
interesting contents, or sat theorizing, discussing all phases of the
phenomena we had witnessed.

We told Ruth what had occurred after she had thrown in her lot with
Norhala; and of the enigmatic struggle between the glorious Disk and the
sullenly flaming Thing I have called the Keeper.

We told her of the entombment of Norhala.

When she heard that she wept.

“She was sweet,” she sobbed; “she was lovely. And she was beautiful.
Dearly she loved me. I KNOW she loved me. Oh, I know that we and ours
and that which was hers could not share the world together. But it comes
to me that Earth would have been far less poisonous with those that were
Norhala's than it is with us and ours!”

Weeping, she passed through the curtainings, going we knew to Norhala's
chamber.

It was a strange thing indeed that she had said, I thought, watching her
go. That the garden of the world would be far less poisonous blossoming
with those Things of wedded crystal and metal and magnetic fires
than fertile as now with us of flesh and blood and bone. To me came
appreciations of their harmonies, and mingled with those perceptions
were others of humanity--disharmonious, incoordinate, ever struggling,
ever striving to destroy itself--

There was a plaintive whinnying at the open door. A long and hairy face,
a pair of patient, inquiring eyes looked in. It was a pony. For a moment
it regarded us--and then trotted trustfully through; ambled up to us;
poked its head against my side.

It had been ridden by one of the Persians whom Ruth had killed, for
under it, slipped from the girths, a saddle dangled. And its owner must
have been kind to it--we knew that from its lack of fear for us. Driven
by the tempest of the night before, it had been led back by instinct to
the protection of man.

“Some luck!” breathed Drake.

He busied himself with the pony, stripping away the hanging saddle,
grooming it.




CHAPTER XXXI. SLAG!

That night we slept well. Awakening, we found that the storm had grown
violent again; the wind roaring and the rain falling in such volume
that it was impossible to make our way to the Pit. Twice, as a matter of
fact, we tried; but the smooth roadway was a torrent, and, drenched even
through our oils to the skin, we at last abandoned the attempt. Ruth and
Drake drifted away together among the other chambers of the globe; they
were absorbed in themselves, and we did not thrust ourselves upon them.
All the day the torrents fell.

We sat down that night to what was well-nigh the last of Ventnor's
stores. Seemingly Ruth had forgotten Norhala; at least, she spoke no
more of her.

“Martin,” she said, “can't we start back tomorrow? I want to get away. I
want to get back to our own world.”

“As soon as the storm ceases, Ruth,” he answered, “we start. Little
sister--I too want you to get back quickly.”

The next morning the storm had gone. We awakened soon after dawn into
clear and brilliant light. We had a silent and hurried breakfast. The
saddlebags were packed and strapped upon the pony. Within them were what
we could carry of souvenirs from Norhala's home--a suit of lacquered
armor, a pair of cloaks and sandals, the jeweled combs. Ruth and Drake
at the side of the pony, Ventnor and I leading, we set forth toward the
Pit.

“We'll probably have to come back, Walter,” he said. “I don't believe
the place is passable.”

I pointed--we were then just over the threshold of the elfin globe.
Where the veils had stretched between the perpendicular pillars of the
cliffs was now a wide and ragged-edged opening.

The roadway which had run so smoothly through the scarps was blocked
by a thousand foot barrier. Over it, beyond it, I could see through the
crystalline clarity of the air the opposing walls.

“We can climb it,” Ventnor said. We passed on and reached the base
of the barrier. An avalanche had dropped there; the barricade was the
debris of the torn cliffs, their dust, their pebbles, their boulders. We
toiled up; we reached the crest; we looked down upon the valley.

When first we had seen it we had gazed upon a sea of radiance pierced
with lanced forests, swept with gigantic gonfalons of flame; we had seen
it emptied of its fiery mists--a vast slate covered with the chirography
of a mathematical god; we had seen it filled with the symboling of the
Metal Hordes and dominated by the colossal integrate hieroglyph of the
living City; we had seen it as a radiant lake over which brooded weird
suns; a lake of yellow flame froth upon which a sparkling hail fell,
within which reared islanded towers and a drowning mount running with
cataracts of sun fires; here we had watched a goddess woman, a being
half of earth, half of the unknown immured within a living tomb--a
dying tomb--of flaming mysteries; had seen a cross-shaped metal Satan, a
sullen flaming crystal Judas betray--itself.

Where we had peered into the unfathomable, had glimpsed the infinite,
had heard and had seen the inexplicable, now was--

Slag!

The amethystine ring from which had been streamed the circling veils was
cracked and blackened; like a seam of coal it had stretched around the
Pit--a crown of mourning. The veils were gone. The floor of the valley
was fissured and blackened; its patterns, its writings burned away. As
far as we could see stretched a sea of slag--coal black, vitrified and
dead.

Here and there black hillocks sprawled; huge pillars arose, bent and
twisted as though they had been jettings of lava cooled into rigidity
before they could sink back or break. These shapes clustered most
thickly around an immense calcified mound. They were what were left of
the battling Hordes, and the mound was what had been the Metal Monster.

Somewhere there were the ashes of Norhala, sealed by fire in the urn of
the Metal Emperor!

From side to side of the Pit, in broken beaches and waves and hummocks,
in blackened, distorted tusks and warped towerings, reaching with
hideous pathos in thousands of forms toward the charred mound, was only
slag.

From rifts and hollows still filled with water little wreaths of steam
drifted. In those futile wraiths of vapor was all that remained of the
might of the Metal Monster.

Catastrophe I had expected, tragedy I knew we would find--but I had
looked for nothing so filled with the abomination of desolation, so
frightful as was this.

“Burned out!” muttered Drake. “Short-circuited and burned out! Like a
dynamo--like an electric light!”

“Destiny!” said Ventnor. “Destiny! Not yet was the hour struck for man
to relinquish his sovereignty over the world. Destiny!”

We began to pick our way down the heaped debris and out upon the plain.
For all that day and part of another we searched for an opening out of
the Pit.

Everywhere was the incredible calcification. The surfaces that had
been the smooth metallic carapaces with the tiny eyes deep within them,
crumbled beneath the lightest blow. Not long would it be until under
wind and rain they dissolved into dust and mud.

And it grew increasingly obvious that Drake's theory of the destruction
was correct. The Monster had been one prodigious magnet--or, rather, a
prodigious dynamo. By magnetism, by electricity, it had lived and had
been activated.

Whatever the force of which the cones were built and that I have likened
to energy-made material, it was certainly akin to electromagnetic
energies.

When, in the cataclysm, that force was diffused there had been created
a magnetic field of incredible intensity; had been concentrated an
electric charge of inconceivable magnitude.

Discharging, it had blasted the Monster--short-circuited it, and burned
it out.

But what was it that had led up to the cataclysm? What was it that had
turned the Metal Monster upon itself? What disharmony had crept into
that supernal order to set in motion the machinery of disintegration?


We could only conjecture. The cruciform Shape I have named the Keeper
was the agent of destruction--of that there could be no doubt. In the
enigmatic organism which while many still was one and which, retaining
its integrity as a whole could dissociate manifold parts yet still as a
whole maintain an unseen contact and direction over them through miles
of space, the Keeper had its place, its work, its duties.

So too had that wondrous Disk whose visible and concentrate power, whose
manifest leadership, had made us name it emperor.

And had not Norhala called the Disk--Ruler?

What were the responsibilities of these twain to the mass of the
organism of which they were such important units? What were the laws
they administered, the laws they must obey?

Something certainly of that mysterious law which Maeterlinck has called
the spirit of the Hive--and something infinitely greater, like that
which governs the swarming sun bees of Hercules' clustered orbs.

Had there evolved within the Keeper of the Cones--guardian and engineer
as it seemed to have been--ambition?

Had there risen within it a determination to wrest power from the Disk,
to take its place as Ruler?

How else explain that conflict I had sensed when the Emperor had plucked
Drake and me from the Keeper's grip that night following the orgy of the
feeding?

How else explain that duel in the shattered Hall of the Cones whose end
had been the signal for the final cataclysm?

How else explain the alinement of the cubes behind the Keeper against
the globes and pyramids remaining loyal to the will of the Disk?

We discussed this, Ventnor and I.

“This world,” he mused, “is a place of struggle. Air and sea and land
and all things that dwell within and on them must battle for life. Earth
not Mars is the planet of war. I have a theory”--he hesitated--“that the
magnetic currents which are the nerve force of this globe of ours were
what fed the Metal Things.

“Within those currents is the spirit of earth. And always they have been
supercharged with strife, with hatreds, warfare. Were these drawn in by
the Things as they fed? Did it happen that the Keeper became--TUNED--to
them? That it absorbed and responded to them, growing even more
sensitive to these forces--until it reflected humanity?”

“Who knows, Goodwin--who can tell?”

Enigma, unless the explanations I have hazarded be accepted, must remain
that monstrous suicide. Enigma, save for inconclusive theories, must
remain the question of the Monster's origin.

If answers there were, they were lost forever in the slag we trod.


It was afternoon of the second day that we found a rift in the blasted
wall of the valley. We decided to try it. We had not dared to take the
road by which Norhala had led us into the City.

The giant slide was broken and climbable. But even if we could have
passed safely through the tunnel of the abyss there still was left the
chasm over which we could have thrown no bridge. And if we could have
bridged it still at that road's end was the cliff whose shaft Norhala
had sealed with her lightnings.

So we entered the rift.

Of our wanderings thereafter I need not write. From the rift we emerged
into a maze of the valleys, and after a month in that wilderness, living
upon what game we could shoot, we found a road that led us into Gyantse.

In another six weeks we were home in America.

My story is finished.

There in the Trans-Himalayan wilderness is the blue globe that was the
weird home of the lightning witch--and looking back I feel now she could
not have been all woman.

There is the vast pit with its coronet of fantastic peaks; its
symboled, calcined floor and the crumbling body of the inexplicable,
the incredible Thing which, alive, was the shadow of extinction,
annihilation, hovering to hurl itself upon humanity. That shadow is
gone; that pall withdrawn.

But to me--to each of us four who saw those phenomena--their lesson
remains, ineradicable; giving a new strength and purpose to us, teaching
us a new humility.

For in that vast crucible of life of which we are so small a part, what
other Shapes may even now be rising to submerge us?

In that vast reservoir of force that is the mystery-filled infinite
through which we roll, what other shadows may be speeding upon us?

Who knows?






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