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The Metal Monster

by Abraham Merritt · English · Gutenberg #3479 · 495,008 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Metal Monster

Author: Abraham Merritt


        
Release date: October 1, 2002 [eBook #3479]
                Most recently updated: March 16, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3479

Credits: Produced by Judy Boss, and David Widger


*** START OF THE 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

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