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.