he two stars. He slithered to body after body, dragging them one after the other to the center of the chamber, lifting them and forming of them a heap. One there was who was not dead. His eyes opened as the eunuch seized him, the blackened mouth opened.
	"Water!" he begged. "Give me drink. I burn!"
	I felt a thrill of pity; lifted my canteen and walked toward him.
	"You of the beard," the merciless chime rang out, "he shall have no water. But drink he shall have, and soon-- drink of fire!"
	The soldier's fevered eyes rolled toward her, saw and read aright the ruthlessness in the beautiful face.
	"Sorceress!" he groaned. "Cursed spawn of Ahriman!" He spat at her.
	The black talons of Yuruk stretched around his throat
	"Son of unclean dogs!" he whined. "You dare blaspheme the Goddess!"
	He snapped the soldier's neck as though it had been a rotten twig.
	At the callous cruelty I stood for an instant petrified; I heard Drake swear wildly, saw his pistol flash up.
	Norhala struck down his arm.
	"Your chance has passed," she said, "and not for THAT shall you slay him."
	And now Yuruk had cast that body upon the others; the pile was complete.
	"Mount!" commanded Norhala, and pointed. He cast himself at her feet, writhing, moaning, imploring. She looked at one of the great Shapes; something of command passed from her, something it understood plainly.
	The star slipped forward--there was an almost imperceptible  movement of its side points. The twitching form of the black seemed to leap up from the floor, to throw itself like a bag upon the mound of the dead.
	Norhala threw up her hands. Out of the violet ovals beneath the upper tips of the Things spurted streams of blue flame. They fell upon Yuruk and splashed over him upon the heap of the slain. In the mound was a dreadful movement, a contortion; the bodies stiffened, seemed to  try to rise, to push away--dead nerves and muscles responding to the blasting energy passing through them.
	Out from the stars rained bolt upon bolt. In the chamber was the sound of thunder, crackling like broken glass. The bodies flamed, crumbled. There was a little smoke-- nauseous, feebly protesting, beaten out by the consuming fires almost before it could rise.
	Where had been the heap of slain capped by the black eunuch there was but a little whirling cloud of sad gray dust. Caught by a passing draft, it eddied, slipped over the floor, vanished through the doorway. Motionless stood the blasting stars, contemplating us. Motionless stood Norhala, her wrath no whit abated by the ghastly sacrifice. And paralyzed by what we had beheld, motionless stood we.
	"Listen," she said. "You two who love the maid. What you have seen is nothing to that which you SHALL see--a wisp of mist to the storm cloud."
	"Norhala"--I found speech--"can you tell us when it was that the maid was captured?"
	Perhaps there was still time to overtake the abductors before Ruth was thrust into the worse peril waiting where she was being carried. Crossed this thought another-- puzzling, baffling. The cliffs Yuruk had pointed out to me as those through which the hidden way passed were, I had estimated then, at least twenty miles away. And how long  was the pass, the tunnel, through them? And then how far this place of the armored men? It had been past dawn when Drake had frightened the black eunuch with his pistol. It was not yet dawn now. How could Yuruk have made his way to the Persians so swiftly--how could they so swiftly have returned?
	Amazingly she answered the spoken question and the unspoken.
	"They came long before dusk," she said. "By the night before Yuruk had won to Ruszark, the city of Cherkis; and long before dawn they were on their way hither. This the black dog I slew told me."
	"But Yuruk was with us here at dawn yesterday," I gasped.
	"A night has passed since then," she said, "and another night is almost gone."
	Stunned, I considered this. If this were true--and not for an instant did I doubt her--then not for a few hours had we lain there at the foot of the living wall in the Hall of the Cones--but for the balance of that day and that night, and another day and part of still another night.
	"What does she say?" Drake stared anxiously into my whitened face. I told him.
	"Yes." Norhala spoke again. "The dusk before the last dusk that has passed I returned to my house. The maid was there and sorrowing. She told me you had gone into the valley, prayed me to help you and to bring you back. I comforted her, and something of--the peace--I gave her; but not all, for she fought against it. A little we played  together, and I left her sleeping. I sought you and found you also sleeping. I knew no harm would come to you, and I went my ways--and forgot you. Then I came here again --and found Yuruk and these the maid had slain."
	The great eyes flashed.
	"Now do I honor the maid for the battle that she did," she said, "though how she slew so many strong men I do not know. My heart goes out to her. And therefore when I bring her back she shall no more be plaything to Norhala, but sister. And with you it shall be as she wills. And woe to those who have taken her!"
	She paused, listening. From without came a rising storm of thin wailings, insistent and eager.
	"But I have an older vengeance than this to take," the golden voice tolled somberly. "Long have I forgotten-- and shame I feel that I had forgot. So long have I forgotten all hatreds, all lusts, all cruelty--among--these--" She thrust a hand forth toward the hidden valley. "Forgot --dwelling in the great harmonies. Save for you and what has befallen I would never have stirred from them, I think. But now awakened, I take that vengeance. After it is done"--she paused--"after it is over I shall go back again. For this awakening has in it nothing of the ordered joy I love--it is a fierce and slaying fire. I shall go back--"
	The shadow of her far dreaming flitted over, softened the angry brilliancy of her eyes.
	"Listen, you two!" The shadow of dream fled. "Those that I am about to slay are evil--evil are they all, men and women. Long have they been so--yea, for cycles of suns. And their children grow like them--or if they be gentle and with love for peace they are slain or die of heartbreak. All this my mother told me long ago. So no more children shall be born from them either to suffer or to grow evil."
	Again she paused, nor did we interrupt her musing.
	"My father ruled Ruszark," she said at last. "Rustum he was named, of the seed of Rustum the Hero even as was my mother. They were gentle and good, and it was their ancestors who built Ruszark when, fleeing from the might of Iskander, they were sealed in the hidden valley by the falling mountain.
	"Then there sprang from one of the families of the  nobles--Cherkis. Evil, evil was he, and as he grew he lusted for rule. On a night of terror he fell upon those who loved my father and slew; and barely had my father time to fly from the city with my mother, still but a bride, and a handful of those loyal to him.
	"They found by chance the way to this place, hiding in the cleft which is its portal. They came, and they were taken by--Those who are now my people. Then my mother, who was very beautiful, was lifted before him who rules here and she found favor in his sight and he had built for her this house, which now is mine.
	"And in time I was born--but not in this house. Nay-- in a secret place of light where, too, are born my people."
	She was silent. I shot a glance at Drake. The secret place of light--was it not that vast vault of mystery, of dancing orbs and flames transmuted into music into which we had peered and for which sacrilege, I had thought, had been thrust from the City? And did in this lie the explanation of her strangeness? Had she there sucked in  with her mother's milk the enigmatic life of the Metal Hordes, been transformed into half human changeling, become true kin to them? What else could explain--
	"My mother showed me Ruszark," her voice, taking up once more her tale, checked my thoughts. "Once when I was little she and my father bore me through the forest and through the hidden way. I looked upon Ruszark--a great city it is and populous, and a caldron of cruelty and of evil.
	"Not like me were my father and mother. They longed for their kind and sought ever for means to regain their place among them. There came a time when my father, driven by his longing, ventured forth to Ruszark, seeking friends to help him regain that place--for these who obey me obeyed not him as they obey me; nor would he have marched them--as I shall--upon Ruszark if they had obeyed him.
	"Cherkis caught him. And Cherkis waited, knowing well that my mother would follow. For Cherkis knew not where to seek her, nor where they had lain hid, for between his city and here the mountains are great, unscalable, and the way through them is cunningly hidden; by chance alone did my mother's mother and those who fled with her  discover it: And though they tortured him, my father would not tell. And after a while forthwith those who still remained of hers stole out with my mother to find him. They left me here with Yuruk. And Cherkis caught my mother."
	The proud breasts heaved, the eyes shot forth visible flames.
	"My father was flayed alive and crucified," she said. "His skin they nailed to the City's gates. And when Cherkis had had his will with my mother he threw her to his soldiers for their sport.
	"All of those who went with them he tortured and slew --and he and his laughed at their torment. But one there was who escaped and told me--me who was little more than a budding maid. He called on me to bring vengeance --and he died. A year passed--and I am not like my  mother and my father--and I forgot--dwelling here in the great tranquillities, barred from and having no thought for men and their way.
	"AIE, AIE!" she cried; "woe to me that I could forget! But now I shall take my vengeance--I, Norhala, will stamp them flat--Cherkis and his city of Ruszark and everything it holds! I, Norhala, and my servants shall stamp them into the rock of their valley so that none shall know that they have been! And would that I could meet their gods with all their powers that I might break them, too, and stamp them into the rock under the feet of my servants!"
	She threw out white arms.
	Why had Yuruk lied to me? I wondered as I watched her. The Disk had not slain her mother. Of course! He had lied to play upon our terrors; had lied to frighten us away.
	The wailings were rising in a sustained crescendo. One of the slaying stars slipped over the chamber floor, folded its points and glided out the door.
	"Come!" commanded Norhala, and led the way. The second star closed, followed us. We stepped over the threshold.
	For one astounded, breathless moment we paused. In front of us reared a monster--a colossal, headless Sphinx. Like forelegs and paws, a ridge of pointed cubes, and globes thrust against each side of the canyon walls. Between them for two hundred feet on high stretched the breast.
	And this was a shifting, weaving mass of the Metal Things; they formed into gigantic cuirasses, giant bucklers, corselets of living mail. From them as they moved--nay, from all the monster--came the wailings. Like a headless Sphinx it crouched--and as we stood it surged forward as though it sprang a step to greet us.
	"HAI!" shouted Norhala, battle buglings ringing through the golden voice. "HAI! my companies!"
	Out from the summit of the breast shot a tremendous trunk of cubes and spinning globes. And like a trunk it nuzzled us, caught us up, swept us to the crest. An instant I tottered dizzily; was held; stood beside Norhala upon a little, level twinkling eyed platform; upon her other side swayed Drake.
	Now through the monster I felt a throbbing, an eager and impatient pulse. I turned my head. Still like some huge and grotesque beast the back of the clustered Things ran for half a mile at least behind, tapering to a dragon tail that coiled and twisted another full mile toward the Pit. And from this back uprose and fell immense spiked and fan-shaped ruffs, thickets of spikes, whipping knouts of bristling tentacles, fanged crests. They thrust and waved, whipped and fell constantly; and constantly the great tail lashed and snapped, fantastic, long and living.
	"HAI!" shouted Norhala once more. From her lifted throat came again the golden chanting--but now a relentless, ruthless song of slaughter.
	Up reared the monstrous bulk. Into it ran the dragon tail. Into it poured the fanged and bristling back.
	Up, up we were thrust--three hundred feet, four hundred, five hundred. Over the blue globe of Norhala's house bent a gigantic leg. Spiderlike out from each side of the monster thrust half a score of others.
	Overhead the dawn began to break. Through it with ever increasing speed we moved, straight to the line of the cliffs behind which lay the city of the armored men-- and Ruth and Ventnor.


CHAPTER XXIV.
RUSZARK

	Smoothly moved the colossal shape; on it we rode as easily as though cradled. It did not glide--it strode.
	The columned legs raised themselves, bending from a thousand joints. The pedestals of the feet, huge and massive as foundations for sixteen-inch guns, fell with machinelike precision, stamping gigantically.
	Under their tread the trees of the forest snapped, were crushed like reeds beneath the pads of a mastodon. From far below came the sound of their crashing. The thick forest checked the progress of the Shape less than tall grass would that of a man.
	Behind us our trail was marked by deep, black pits in the forest's green, clean cut and great as the Mark upon the poppied valley. They were the footprints of the Thing that carried us.
	The wind streamed and whistled. A flock of the willow warblers arose, sworled about us with manifold beating of little frightened wings. Norhala's face softened, her eyes smiled.
	"Go--foolish little ones," she cried, and waved her arms. They flew away, scolding.
	A lammergeier swooped down on wide funereal wings; it peered at us; darted away toward the cliffs.
	"There will be no carrion there for you, black eater of the dead, when I am through," I heard Norhala whisper, eyes again somber.
	Steadily grew the dawn light; from Norhala's lips came again the chanting. And now that paean, the reckless pulse of the monster we rode, began to creep through my own veins. Into Drake's too, I knew, for his head was held high and his eyes were clear and bright as hers who sang.
	The jubilant pulse streamed through the hands that held us, throbbed through us. The pulse of the Thing--sang!
	Closer and closer grew the cliffs. Down and crashing down fell the trees, the noise of their fall accompanying the battle chant of the Valkyr beside me like wild harp chords of storm-lashed surf. Up to the precipices the forest rolled, unbroken. Now the cliffs loomed overhead. The dawn had passed. It was full day.
	Cutting up through the towering granite scarps was a rift. In it the black shadows clustered thickly. Straight toward that cleft we sped. As we drew near, the crest of the Shape began swiftly to lower. Down we sank and down --a hundred feet, two hundred; now we were two score yards above the tree tops.
	Out shot a neck, a tremendous serpent body. Crested it was with pyramids; crested with them, too, was its immense head. Thickly the head bristled with them, poised motionless upon spinning globes as huge as they. For hundreds of feet that incredible neck stretched ahead of us and for twice as far behind a monstrous, lizard-shaped body writhed.
	We rode now upon a serpent, a glittering blue metal dragon, spiked and knobbed and scaled. It was the weird steed of Norhala flattening, thrusting out to pierce the rift.
	And still as when it had reared on high beat through it the wild, triumphant, questing pulse. Still rang out Norhala's chanting.
	The trees parted and fell upon each side of us as though we were some monster of the sea and they the waves we cleft.
	The rift enclosed us. Lower we dropped; were not more than fifty feet above its floor. The Thing upon which we rode was a torrent roaring through it.
	A deeper blackness enclosed us--a tunneling.
	Through that we flowed. Out of it we darted into a widening filled with wan light drifting down through a pinnacle fanged mouth miles on high. Again the cleft shrunk. A thousand feet ahead was a crack, a narrowing of the cleft so small that hardly could a man pass through it.
	Abruptly the metal dragon halted.
	Norhala's chanting changed; became again the arrogant clarioning. And close below us the huge neck split. It came to me then that it was as though Norhala were the overspirit of this chimera--as though it caught and understood and obeyed each quick thought of hers.
	As though, indeed, she was a PART of it--as IT was in reality a part of that infinitely greater Thing, crouching there in its lair of the Pit--the Metal Monster that had lent this living part of itself to her for a steed, a champion. Little time had I to consider such matters.
	Up thrust the Shape before us. Into it raced and spun Things angled, Things curved and Things squared. It gathered itself into a Titanic pillar out of which, instantly, thrust scores of arms.
	Over them great globes raced; after these flew other scores of huge pyramids, none less than ten feet in height, the mass of them twenty and thirty. The manifold arms grew rigid. Quiet for a moment, a Titanic metal Briareous, it stood.
	Then at the tips of the arms the globes began to spin --faster, faster. Upon them I saw the hosts of the pyramids open--as one into a host of stars. The cleft leaped out in a flood of violet light.
	Now for another instant the stars which had been motionless,  poised upon the whirling spheres, joined in their mad spinning. Cyclopean pin wheels they turned; again as one they ceased. More brilliant now was their light, dazzling; as though in their whirling they had gathered greater force.
	Under me I felt the split Thing quiver with eagerness.
	From the stars came a hurricane of lightning! A cataract of electric flame poured into the crack, splashed and guttered down the granite walls. We were blinded by it; were deafened with thunders.
	The face of the precipice smoked and split; was whirled away in clouds of dust.
	The crack widened--widened as a gulley in a sand bank does when a swift stream rushes through it. Lightnings these were--and more than lightnings; lightnings keyed up to an invincible annihilating weapon that could rend and split and crumble to atoms the living granite.
	Steadily the cleft expanded. As its walls melted away the Blasting Thing advanced, spurting into it the flaming torrents. Behind it we crept. The dust of the shattered rocks swirled up toward us like angry ghosts--before they reached us they were blown away as though by strong winds streaming from beneath us.
	On we went, blinded, deafened. Interminably, it seemed, poured forth the hurricane of blue fire; interminably the thunder bellowed.
	There came a louder clamor--volcanic, chaotic, dulling the thunders. The sides of the cleft quivered, bent outward. They split; crashed down. Bright daylight poured in upon us, a flood of light toward which the billows of dust rushed as though seeking escape; out it poured like the smoke of ten thousand cannon.
	And the Blasting Thing shook--as though with laughter!
	The stars closed. Back into the Shape ran globe and pyramid. It slid toward us--joined the body from which it had broken away. Through all the mass ran a wave of jubilation, a pulse of mirth--a colossal, metallic--SILENT-- roar of laughter.
	We glided forward--out of the cleft. I felt a shifting movement.
	Up and up we were thrust. Dazed I looked behind me. In the face of a sky climbing wall of rock, smoked a wide chasm. Out of it the billowing clouds of dust still streamed, pursuing, threatening us. The whole granite barrier seemed to quiver with agony. Higher we rose and higher.
	"Look," whispered Drake, and whirled me around.
	Less than five miles away was Ruszark, the City of Cherkis. And it was like some ancient city come into life out of long dead centuries. A page restored from once conquering Persia's crumbled book. A city of the Chosroes transported by Jinns into our own time.
	Built around and upon a low mount, it stood within a valley but little larger than the Pit. The plain was level, as though once it had been the floor of some primeval lake; the hill of the City was its only elevation.
	Beyond, I caught the glinting of a narrow stream, meandering. The valley was ringed with precipitous cliffs falling sheer to its floor.
	Slowly we advanced.
	The city was almost square, guarded by double walls of hewn stone. The first raised itself a hundred feet on high, turreted and parapeted and pierced with gates. Perhaps a quarter of a mile behind it the second fortification thrust up.
	The city itself I estimated covered about ten square miles. It ran upward in broad terraces. It was very fair, decked with blossoming gardens and green groves. Among the clustering granite houses, red and yellow roofed, thrust skyward tall spires and towers. Upon the mount's top was a broad, flat plaza on which were great buildings, marble white and golden roofed; temples I thought, or palaces, or both.
	Running to the city out of the grain fields and steads that surrounded it, were scores of little figures, rat-like. Here and there among them I glimpsed horsemen, arms and armor glittering. All were racing to the gates and the shelter of the battlements.
	Nearer we drew. From the walls came now a faint sound of gongs, of drums, of shrill, flutelike pipings. Upon them I could see hosts gathering; hosts of swarming little figures whose bodies glistened, from above whom came gleamings--the light striking upon their helms, their spear and javelin tips.
	"Ruszark!" breathed Norhala, eyes wide, red lips cruelly smiling. "Lo--I am before your gates. Lo--I am here-- and was there ever joy like this!"
	The constellations in her eyes blazed. Beautiful, beautiful was Norhala--as Isis punishing Typhon for the murder of Osiris; as avenging Diana; shining from her something of the spirit of all wrathful Goddesses.
	The flaming hair whirled and snapped. From all her sweet body came white-hot furious force, a withering perfume of destruction. She pressed against me, and I trembled at the contact.
	Lawless, wild imaginings ran through me. Life, human life, dwindled. The City seemed but a thing of toys.
	On--let us crush it! On--on!
	Again the monster shook beneath us. Faster we moved. Louder grew the clangor of the drums, the gongs, the pipes. Nearer came the walls; and ever more crowded with the swarming human ants that manned them.
	We were close upon the heels of the last fleeing stragglers. The Thing slackened in its stride; waited patiently until they were close to the gates. Before they could reach them I heard the brazen clanging of their valves. Those shut out beat frenziedly upon them; dragged themselves close to the base of the battlements, cowered there or crept along them seeking some hole in which to hide.
	With a slow lowering of its height the Thing advanced. Now its form was that of a spindle a full mile in length on whose bulging center we three stood.
	A hundred feet from the outer wall we halted. We looked down upon it not more than fifty feet above its broad top. Hundreds of the soldiers were crouching behind the parapets, companies of archers with great bows poised, arrows at their cheeks, scores of leather jerkined  men with stands of javelins at their right hands, spearsmen and men with long, thonged slings.
	Set at intervals were squat, powerful engines of wood and metal beside which were heaps of huge, rounded boulders. Catapults I knew them to be and around each swarmed a knot of soldiers, fixing the great stones in place, drawing back the thick ropes that, loosened, would hurl forth the projectiles. From each side came other men,  dragging more of these balisters; assembling a battery against the prodigious, gleaming monster that menaced their city.
	Between outer wall and inner battlements galloped squadrons of mounted men. Upon this inner wall the soldiers clustered as thickly as on the outer, preparing as actively for its defense.
	The city seethed. Up from it arose a humming, a buzzing, as of some immense angry hive.
	Involuntarily I visualized the spectacle we must present to those who looked upon us--this huge incredible Shape of metal alive with quicksilver shifting. This--as it must have seemed to them--hellish mechanism of war captained by a sorceress and two familiars in form of men. There came to me dreadful visions of such a monster looking down upon the peace-reared battlements of New York-- the panic rush of thousands away from it.
	There was a blaring of trumpets. Up on the parapet leaped a man clad all in gleaming red armor. From head to feet the close linked scales covered him. Within a hood shaped somewhat like the tight-fitting head coverings of the Crusaders a pallid, cruel face looked out upon us; in the fierce black eyes was no trace of fear.
	Evil as Norhala had said these people of Ruszark were, wicked and cruel--they were no cowards, no!
	The red armored man threw up a hand.
	"Who are you?" he shouted. "Who are you three, you three who come driving down upon Ruszark through the rocks? We have no quarrel with you?"
	"I seek a man and a maid," cried Norhala. "A maid and a sick man your thieves took from me. Bring him forth!"
	"Seek elsewhere for them then," he answered. "They are not here. Turn now and seek elsewhere. Go quickly, lest I loose our might upon you and you go never."
	Mockingly rang her laughter--and under its lash the black eyes grew fiercer, the cruelty on the white face darkened.
	"Little man whose words are so big! Fly who thunders! What are you called, little man?"
	Her raillery bit deep--but its menace passed unheeded in the rage it called forth.
	"I am Kulun," shouted the man in scarlet armor. "Kulun, the son of Cherkis the Mighty, and captain of his hosts. Kulun--who will cast your skin under my mares in stall for them to trample and thrust your red flayed body upon a pole in the grain fields to frighten away the crows! Does that answer you?"
	Her laughter ceased; her eyes dwelt upon him--filled with an infernal joy.
	"The son of Cherkis!" I heard her murmur. "He has a son--"
	There was a sneer on the cruel face; clearly he thought her awed. Quick was his disillusionment.
	"Listen, Kulun," she cried. "I am Norhala--daughter of another Norhala and of Rustum, whom Cherkis tortured and slew. Now go, you lying spawn of unclean toads--go and tell your father that I, Norhala, am at his gates. And bring back with you the maid and the man. Go, I say!"


CHAPTER XXV.
CHERKIS

	There was stark amazement on Kulun's face; and fear now enough. He dropped from the parapet among his men. There came one loud trumpet blast.
	Out from the battlements poured a storm of arrows, a cloud of javelins. The squat catapults leaped forward. From them came a hail of boulders. Before that onrushing tempest of death I flinched.
	I heard Norhala's golden laughter and before they could reach us arrow and javelin and boulder were checked as though myriads of hands reached out from the Thing under us and caught them. Down they dropped.
	Forth from the great spindle shot a gigantic arm, hammer tipped with cubes. It struck the wall close to where the scarlet armored Kulun had vanished.
	Under its blow the stones crumbled. With the fragments fell the soldiers; were buried beneath them.
	A hundred feet in width a breach gaped in the battlements. Out shot the arm again; hooked its hammer tip over the parapet, tore away a stretch of the breastwork as though it had been cardboard. Beside the breach an expanse of the broad flat top lay open like a wide platform.
	The arm withdrew, and out from the whole length of the spindle thrust other arms, hammer tipped, held high aloft, menacing.
	From all the length of the wall arose panic outcry. Abruptly the storm of arrows ended; the catapults were still. Again the trumpets sounded; the crying ceased. Down fell a silence, terrified, stifling.
	Kulun stepped forth again, both hands held high. Gone was his arrogance.
	"A parley," he shouted. "A parley, Norhala. If we give you the maid and man, will you go?"
	"Go get them," she answered. "And take with you this my command to Cherkis--that HE return with the two!"
	For an instant Kulun hesitated. Up thrust the dreadful arms, poised themselves to strike.
	"It shall be so," he shouted. "I carry your command."
	He leaped back, his red mail flashed toward a turret that held, I supposed, a stairway. He was lost to sight. In silence we waited.
	On the further side of the city I glimpsed movement. Little troops of mounted men, pony drawn wains, knots of running figures were fleeing from the city through the opposite gates.
	Norhala saw them too. With that incomprehensible, instant  obedience to her unspoken thought a mass of the Metal Things separated from us; whirled up into a dozen of those obelisked forms I had seen march from the cat eyes of the City of the Pit.
	In but a breath, it seemed, their columns were far off, herding back the fugitives.
	They did not touch them, did not offer to harm--only, grotesquely, like dogs heading off and corraling frightened sheep, they circled and darted. Rushing back came those they herded.
	From the watching terraces and walls arose shrill cries of terror, a wailing. Far away the obelisks met, pirouetted, melted into one thick column. Towering, motionless as we, it stood, guarding the further gates.
	There was a stir upon the wall, a flashing of spears, of drawn blades. Two litters closed with curtainings, surrounded by triple rows of swordsmen fully armored, carrying small shields and led by Kulun were being borne to the torn battlement.
	Their bearers stopped well within the platform and gently lowered their burdens. The leader of those around the second litter drew aside its covering, spoke.
	Out stepped Ruth and after her--Ventnor!
	"Martin!" I could not keep back the cry; heard mingled with it Drake's own cry to Ruth. Ventnor raised his hand in greeting; I thought he smiled.
	The cubes on which we stood shot forward; stopped within fifty feet of them. Instantly the guard of swordsmen raised their blades, held them over the pair as though waiting the signal to strike.
	And now I saw that Ruth was not clad as she had been when we had left her. She stood in scanty kirtle that came scarcely to her knees, her shoulders were bare, her curly brown hair unbound and tangled. Her face was set with wrath hardly less than that which beat from Norhala.  On Ventnor's forehead was a blood red scar, a line that ran from temple to temple like a brand.
	The curtains of the first litter quivered; behind them someone spoke. That in which Ruth and Ventnor had ridden was drawn swiftly away. The knot of swordsmen drew back.
	Into their places sprang and knelt a dozen archers. They ringed in the two, bows drawn taut, arrows in place and pointing straight to their hearts.
	Out of the litter rolled a giant of a man. Seven feet he must have been in height; over the huge shoulders, the barreled chest and the bloated abdomen hung a purple cloak glittering with gems; through the thick and grizzled hair passed a flashing circlet of jewels.
	The scarlet armored Kulun beside him, swordsmen guarding them, he walked to the verge of the torn gap in the wall. He peered down it, glancing imperturbably at the upraised, hammer-banded arms still threatening; examined again the breach. Then still with Kulun he strode over to the very edge of the broken battlement and stood, head thrust a little forward, studying us in silence.
	"Cherkis!" whispered Norhala--the whisper was a hymn to Nemesis. I felt her body quiver from head to foot.
	A wave of hatred, a hot desire to kill, passed through me as I scanned the face staring at us. It was a great gross mask of evil, of cold cruelty and callous lusts. Unwinking, icily malignant, black slits of eyes glared at us between pouches that held them half closed. Heavy jowls hung pendulous, dragging down the corners of the thick lipped, brutal mouth into a deep graven, unchanging sneer.
	As he gazed at Norhala a flicker of lust shot like a licking tongue through his eyes.
	Yet from him pulsed power; sinister, instinct with evil,  concentrate with cruelty--but power indomitable. Such was Cherkis, descendant perhaps of that Xerxes the Conqueror who three millenniums gone ruled most of the known world.
	It was Norhala who broke the silence.
	"Tcherak! Greeting--Cherkis!" There was merciless mirth in the buglings of her voice. "Lo, I did but knock so gently at your gates and you hastened to welcome me. Greetings--gross swine, spittle of the toads, fat slug beneath my sandals."
	He passed the insults by, unmoved--although I heard a murmuring go up from those near and Kulun's hard eyes blazed.
	"We will bargain, Norhala," he answered calmly; the voice was deep, filled with sinister strength.
	"Bargain?" she laughed. "What have you with which to bargain, Cherkis? Does the rat bargain with the tigress? And you, toad, have nothing."
	He shook his head.
	"I have these," he waved a hand toward Ruth and her brother. "Me you may slay--and mayhap many of mine. But before you can move my archers will feather their hearts."
	She considered him, no longer mocking.
	"Two of mine you slew long since, Cherkis," she said, slowly. "Therefore it is I am here."
	"I know," he nodded heavily. "Yet now that is neither here nor there, Norhala. It was long since, and I have learned much during the years. I would have killed you too, Norhala, could I have found you. But now I would not do as then--quite differently would I do, Norhala;  for I have learned much. I am sorry that those that you loved died as they did. I am in truth sorry!"
	There was a curious lurking sardonicism in the words, an undertone of mockery. Was what he really meant that in those years he had learned to inflict greater agonies, more exquisite tortures? If so, Norhala apparently did not sense that interpretation. Indeed, she seemed to be interested, her wrath abating.
	"No," the hoarse voice rumbled dispassionately. "None of that is important--now. YOU would have this man and girl. I hold them. They die if you stir a hand's breadth toward me. If they die, I prevail against you--for I have cheated you of what you desire. I win, Norhala, even though you slay me. That is all that is now important."
	There was doubt upon Norhala's face and I caught a quick gleam of contemptuous triumph glint through the depths of the evil eyes.
	"Empty will be your victory over me, Norhala," he said; then waited.
	"What is your bargain?" she spoke hesitatingly; with a sinking of my heart I heard the doubt tremble in her throat.
	"If you will go without further knocking upon my gates"--there was a satiric grimness in the phrase--"go when you have been given them, and pledge yourself never to return--you shall have them. If you will not, then they die."
	"But what security, what hostages, do you ask?" Her eyes were troubled. "I cannot swear by your gods, Cherkis, for they are not my gods--in truth I, Norhala, have no gods. Why should I not say yes and take the two, then fall upon you and destroy--as you would do in my place, old wolf?"
	"Norhala," he answered, "I ask nothing but your word. Do I not know those who bore you and the line from which they sprung? Was not always the word they gave kept till death--unbroken, inviolable? No need for vows to gods between you and me. Your word is holier than they --O glorious daughter of kings, princess royal!"
	The great voice was harshly caressing; not obsequious, but as though he gave her as an equal her rightful honor. Her face softened; she considered him from eyes far less hostile.
	A wholesome respect for this gross tyrant's mentality came to me; it did not temper, it heightened, the hatred I felt for him. But now I recognized the subtlety of his attack; realized that unerringly he had taken the only means by which he could have gained a hearing; have temporized. Could he win her with his guile?
	"Is it not true?" There was a leonine purring in the question.
	"It IS true!" she answered proudly. "Though why YOU should dwell upon this, Cherkis, whose word is steadfast as the running stream and whose promises are as lasting as its bubbles--why YOU should dwell on this I do not know."
	"I have changed greatly, Princess, in the years since my great wickedness; I have learned much. He who speaks to you now is not he you were taught--and taught justly then--to hate."
	"You may speak truth! Certainly you are not as I have pictured you." It was as though she were more than half convinced. "In this at least you do speak truth--that IF I promise I will go and molest you no more."
	"Why go at all, Princess?" Quietly he asked the amazing question--then drew himself to his full height, threw wide his arms.
	"Princess?" the great voice rumbled forth. "Nay-- Queen! Why leave us again--Norhala the Queen? Are we not of your people? Am I not of your kin? Join your power with ours. What that war engine you ride  may be, how built, I know not. But this I do know--that with our strengths joined we two can go forth from where I have dwelt so long, go forth into the forgotten world, eat its cities and rule.
	"You shall teach our people to make these engines, Norhala, and we will make many of them. Queen Norhala--you shall wed my son Kulun, he who stands beside me. And while I live you shall rule with me, rule equally. And when I die you and Kulun shall rule.
	"Thus shall our two royal lines be made one, the old feud wiped out, the long score be settled. Queen--wherever it is you dwell it comes to me that you have few men. Queen--you need men, many men and strong to follow you, men to gather the harvests of your power, men to  bring to you the fruit of your smallest wish--young men and vigorous to amuse you.
	"Let the past be forgotten--I too have wrongs to forget, O Queen. Come to us, Great One, with your power and your beauty. Teach us. Lead us. Return, and throned above your people rule the world!"
	He ceased. Over the battlements, over the city, dropped a vast expectant silence--as though the city knew its fate was hanging upon the balance.
	"No! No!" It was Ruth crying. "Do not trust him, Norhala! It's a trap! He shamed me--he tortured--"
	Cherkis half turned; before he swung about I saw a hell shadow darken his face. Ventnor's hand thrust out, covered Ruth's mouth, choking her crying.
	"Your son"--Norhala spoke swiftly; and back flashed the cruel face of Cherkis, devouring her with his eyes. "Your son--and Queenship here--and Empire of the World." Her voice was rapt, thrilled. "All this you offer? Me--Norhala?"
	"This and more!" The huge bulk of his body quivered with eagerness. "If it be your wish, O Queen, I, Cherkis, will step down from the throne for you and sit beneath your right hand, eager to do your bidding."
	A moment she studied him.
	"Norhala," I whispered, "do not do this thing. He thinks to gain your secrets."
	"Let my bridegroom stand forth that I may look upon him," called Norhala.
	Visibly Cherkis relaxed, as though a strain had been withdrawn. Between him and his crimson-clad son flashed a glance; it was as though a triumphant devil sped from them into each other's eyes.
	I saw Ruth shrink into Ventnor's arms. Up from the wall rose a jubilant shouting, was caught by the inner battlements, passed on to the crowded terraces.
	"Take Kulun," it was Drake, pistol drawn and whispering across to me. "I'll handle Cherkis. And shoot straight."


CHAPTER XXVI.
THE VENGEANCE OF NORHALA

	Norhala's hand that had gone from my wrist dropped down again; the other fell upon Drake's.
	Kulun loosed his hood, let it fall about his shoulders.
	He stepped forward, held out his arms to Norhala.
	"A strong man!" she cried approvingly. "Hail--my bridegroom! But stay--stand back a moment. Stand beside that man for whom I came to Ruszark. I would see you together!"
	Kulun's face darkened. But Cherkis smiled with evil understanding, shrugged his shoulders and whispered to him. Sullenly Kulun stepped back. The ring of the archers lowered their bows; they leaped to their feet and stood aside to let him pass.
	Quick as a serpent's tongue a pyramid tipped tentacle flicked out beneath us. It darted through the broken circle of the bowmen.
	It LICKED up Ruth and Ventnor and--Kulun!
	Swiftly as it had swept forth it returned, coiled and dropped those two I loved at Norhala's feet.
	It flashed back on high with the scarlet length of Cherkis's son sprawled along its angled end.
	The great body of Cherkis seemed to wither.
	Up from all the wall went a tempestuous sigh of horror.
	Out rang the merciless chimes of Norhala's laughter.
	"Tchai!" she cried. "Tchai! Fat fool there. Tchai--you Cherkis! Toad whose wits have sickened with your years!
	"Did you think to catch me, Norhala, in your filthy web? Princess! Queen! Empress of Earth! Ho--old fox I have outplayed and beaten, what now have you to trade with Norhala?"
	Mouth sagging open, eyes glaring, the tyrant slowly raised his arms--a suppliant.
	"You would have back the bridegroom you gave me?" she laughed. "Take him, then."
	Down swept the metal arm that held Kulun. The arm dropped Cherkis's son at Cherkis's feet; and as though Kulun had been a grape--it crushed him!
	Before those who had seen could stir from their stupor the tentacle hovered over Cherkis, glaring down at the horror that had been his son.
	It did not strike him--it drew him up to it as a magnet draws a pin.
	And as the pin swings from the magnet when held suspended by the head, so swung the great body of Cherkis from the under side of the pyramid that held him. Hanging so he was carried toward us, came to a stop not ten feet from us--
	Weird, weird beyond all telling was that scene--and would I had the power to make you who read see it as we did.
	The animate, living Shape of metal on which we stood, with its forest of hammer-handed arms raised menacingly along its mile of spindled length; the great walls glistening with the armored hosts; the terraces of that fair and ancient city, their gardens and green groves and clustering red and yellow-roofed houses and temples and palaces; the swinging gross body of Cherkis in the clutch of the  unseen grip of the tentacle, his grizzled hair touching the side of the pyramid that held him, his arms half outstretched, the gemmed cloak flapping like the wings of a jeweled bat, his white, malignant face in which the evil eyes were burning slits flaming hell's own blackest hatred; and beyond the city, from which pulsed almost visibly a vast and hopeless horror, the watching column--and over all this the palely radiant white sky under whose light the encircling cliffs were tremendous stony palettes splashed with a hundred pigments.
	Norhala's laughter had ceased. Somberly she looked upon Cherkis, into the devil fires of his eyes.
	"Cherkis!" she half whispered. "Now comes the end for you--and for all that is yours! But until the end's end you shall see."
	The hanging body was thrust forward; was thrust up; was brought down upon its feet on the upper plane of the prostrate pyramid tipping the metal arm that held him. For an instant he struggled to escape; I think he meant to hurl himself down upon Norhala, to kill her before he himself was slain.
	If so, after one frenzied effort he realized the futility, for with a certain dignity he drew himself upright, turned his eyes toward the city.
	Over that city a dreadful silence hung. It was as though it cowered, hid its face, was afraid to breathe.
	"The end!" murmured Norhala.
	There was a quick trembling through the Metal Thing. Down swung its forest of sledges. Beneath the blow down fell the smitten walls, shattered, crumbling, and with it glittering like shining flies in a dust storm fell the armored men.
	Through that mile-wide breach and up to the inner barrier I glimpsed confusion chaotic. And again I say it-- they were no cowards, those men of Cherkis. From the inner battlements flew clouds of arrows, of huge stones --as uselessly as before.
	Then out from the opened gates poured regiments of horsemen, brandishing javelins and great maces, and shouting fiercely as they drove down upon each end of the Metal Shape. Under cover of their attack I saw cloaked riders spurring their ponies across the plain to shelter of the cliff walls, to the chance of hiding places within them. Women and men of the rich, the powerful, flying for safety; after them ran and scattered through the fields of grain a multitude on foot.
	The ends of the spindle drew back before the horsemen's charge, broadening as they went--like the heads of monstrous cobras withdrawing into their hoods. Abruptly, with a lightning velocity, these broadenings expanded into immense lunettes, two tremendous curving and crablike claws. Their tips flung themselves past the racing troops; then like gigantic pincers began to contract.
	Of no avail now was it for the horsemen to halt dragging their mounts on their haunches, or to turn to fly. The ends of the lunettes had met, the pincer tips had closed. The mounted men were trapped within half-mile-wide circles. And in upon man and horse their living walls marched. Within those enclosures of the doomed began a frantic milling--I shut my eyes--
	There was a dreadful screaming of horses, a shrieking of men. Then silence.
	Shuddering, I looked. Where the mounted men had been was--nothing.
	Nothing? There were two great circular spaces whose floors were glistening, wetly red. Fragments of man or horse--there was none. They had been crushed into-- what was it Norhala had promised--had been stamped into the rock beneath the feet of her--servants.
	Sick, I looked away and stared at a Thing that writhed and undulated over the plain; a prodigious serpentine Shape of cubes and spheres linked and studded thick with the spikes of the pyramid. Through the fields, over the plain its coils flashed.
	Playfully it sped and twisted among the fugitives, crushing them, tossing them aside broken, gliding over them. Some there were who hurled themselves upon it in impotent despair, some who knelt before it, praying. On rolled the metal convolutions, inexorable.
	Within my vision's range there were no more fugitives. Around a corner of the broken battlements raced the serpent Shape. Where it had writhed was now no waving grain, no trees, no green thing. There was only smooth rock upon which here and there red smears glistened wetly.
	Afar there was a crying, in its wake a rumbling. It was the column, it came to me, at work upon the further battlements. As though the sound had been a signal the spindle trembled; up we were thrust another hundred feet or more. Back dropped the host of brandished arms, threaded themselves into the parent bulk.
	Right and left of us the spindle split into scores of fissures. Between these fissures the Metal Things that made up each now dissociate and shapeless mass geysered; block and sphere and tetrahedron spike spun and swirled. There was an instant of formlessness.
	Then right and left of us stood scores of giant, grotesque  warriors. Their crests were fully fifty feet below our living platform. They stood upon six immense, columnar stilts. These sextuple legs supported a hundred feet above their bases a huge and globular body formed of clusters of the spheres. Out from each of these bodies  that were at one and the same time trunks and heads, sprang half a score of colossal arms shaped like flails; like spike-studded girders, Titanic battle maces, Cyclopean sledges.
	From legs and trunks and arms the tiny eyes of the Metal Hordes flashed, exulting.
	There came from them, from the Thing we rode as well, a chorus of thin and eager wailings and pulsed through all that battle-line, a jubilant throbbing.
	Then with a rhythmic, JOCUND stride they leaped upon the city.
	Under the mallets of the smiting arms the inner battlements fell as under the hammers of a thousand metal Thors. Over their fragments and the armored men who fell with them strode the Things, grinding stone and man together as we passed.
	All of the terraced city except the side hidden by the mount lay open to my gaze. In that brief moment of pause I saw crazed crowds battling in narrow streets, trampling over mounds of the fallen, surging over barricades of bodies, clawing and tearing at each other in their flight.
	There was a wide, stepped street of gleaming white stone that climbed like an immense stairway straight up the slope to that broad plaza at the top where clustered the great temples and palaces--the Acropolis of the city. Into it the streets of the terraces flowed, each pouring out upon it a living torrent, tumultuous with tuliped, sparkling little waves, the gay coverings and the arms and armor of  Ruszark's desperate thousands seeking safety at the shrines of their gods.
	Here great carven arches arose; there slender, exquisite towers capped with red gold--there was a street of colossal statues, another over which dozens of graceful, fretted bridges threw their spans from feathery billows of flowering trees; there were gardens gay with blossoms in which fountains sparkled, green groves; thousands upon thousands of bright multicolored pennants, banners, fluttered.
	A fair, a lovely city was Cherkis's stronghold of Ruszark.
	Its beauty filled the eyes; out from it streamed the fragrance of its gardens--the voice of its agony was that of the souls in Dis.
	The row of destroying shapes lengthened, each huge warrior of metal drawing far apart from its mates. They flexed their manifold arms, shadow boxed--grotesquely, dreadfully.
	Down struck the flails, the sledges. Beneath the blows the buildings burst like eggshells, their fragments burying the throngs fighting for escape in the thoroughfares that threaded them. Over their ruins we moved.
	Down and ever down crashed the awful sledges. And ever under them the city crumbled.
	There was a spider Shape that crawled up the wide stairway hammering into the stone those who tried to flee before it.
	Stride by stride the Destroying Things ate up the city.
	I felt neither wrath nor pity. Through me beat a jubilant roaring pulse--as though I were a shouting corpuscle of the rushing hurricane, as though I were one of the hosts of smiting spirits of the bellowing typhoon.
	Through this stole another thought--vague, unfamiliar, yet seemingly of truth's own essence. Why, I wondered, had I never recognized this before? Why had I never known that these green forms called trees were but ugly, unsymmetrical excrescences? That these high projections of towers, these buildings were deformities?
	That these four-pronged, moving little shapes that screamed and ran were--hideous?
	They must be wiped out! All this misshapen, jumbled, inharmonious ugliness must be wiped out! It must be ground down to smooth unbroken planes, harmonious curvings, shapeliness--harmonies of arc and line and angle!
	Something deep within me fought to speak--fought to tell me that this thought was not human thought, not my thought--that it was the reflected thought of the Metal Things!
	It told me--and fiercely it struggled to make me realize what it was that it told. Its insistence was borne upon little despairing, rhythmic beatings--throbbings that were like the muffled sobbings of the drums of grief. Louder, closer came the throbbing; clearer with it my perception of the inhumanness of my thought.
	The drum beat tapped at my humanity, became a dolorous knocking at my heart.
	It was the sobbing of Cherkis!
	The gross face was shrunken, the cheeks sagging in folds of woe; cruelty and wickedness were wiped from it; the evil in the eyes had been washed out by tears. Eyes streaming, bull throat and barrel chest racked by his sobbing, he watched the passing of his people and his city.
	And relentlessly, coldly, Norhala watched him--as though loath to lose the faintest shadow of his agony.
	Now I saw we were close to the top of the mount. Packed between us and the immense white structures that crowned it were thousands of the people. They fell on their knees before us, prayed to us. They tore at each other, striving to hide themselves from us in the mass that was themselves. They beat against the barred doors of the sanctuaries; they climbed the pillars; they swarmed over the golden roofs.
	There was a moment of chaos--a chaos of which we were the heart. Then temple and palace cracked, burst; were shattered; fell. I caught glimpses of gleaming sculptures, glitterings of gold and of silver, flashing of gems, shimmering of gorgeous draperies--under them a weltering of men and women.
	We closed down upon them--over them!
	The dreadful sobbing ceased. I saw the head of Cherkis swing heavily upon a shoulder; the eyes closed.
	The Destroying Things touched. Their flailing arms coiled back, withdrew into their bodies. They joined, forming for an instant a tremendous hollow pillar far down in whose center we stood. They parted; shifted in shape? rolled down the mount over the ruins like a widening wave --crushing into the stone all over which they passed.
	Afar away I saw the gleaming serpent still at play-- still writhing among, still obliterating the few score scattered fugitives that some way, somehow, had slipped by the Destroying Things.
	We halted. For one long moment Norhala looked upon the drooping body of him upon whom she had let fall this mighty vengeance.
	Then the metal arm that held Cherkis whirled. Thrown from it, the cloaked form flew like a great blue bat. It fell upon the flattened mound that had once been the proud crown of his city. A blue blot upon desolation the broken body of Cherkis lay.
	A black speck appeared high in the sky; grew fast-- the lammergeier.
	"I have left carrion for you--after all!" cried Norhala.
	With an ebon swirling of wings the vulture dropped beside the blue heap--thrust in it its beak.


CHAPTER XXVII.
"THE DRUMS OF DESTINY"

	Slowly we descended that mount of desolation; lingeringly, as though the brooding eyes of Norhala were not yet sated with destruction. Of human life, of green life, of life of any kind there was none.
	Man and tree, woman and flower, babe and bud, palace, temple and home--Norhala had stamped flat. She had crushed them within the rock--even as she had promised.
	The tremendous tragedy had absorbed my every faculty; I had had no time to think of my companions; I had forgotten them. Now in the painful surges of awakening realization, of full human understanding of that inhuman annihilation, I turned to them for strength. Faintly  I wondered again at Ruth's scantiness of garb, her more than half nudity; dwelt curiously upon the red brand across Ventnor's forehead.
	In his eyes and in Drake's I saw reflected the horror I knew was in my own. But in the eyes of Ruth was none of this--sternly, coldly triumphant, indifferent to its piteousness as Norhala herself, she scanned the waste that less than an hour since had been a place of living beauty.
	I felt a shock of repulsion. After all, those who had been destroyed so ruthlessly could not ALL have been wholly evil. Yet mother and blossoming maid, youth and oldster, all the pageant of humanity within the great walls were now but lines within the stone. According to their different lights, it came to me, there had been in Ruszark no greater number of the wicked than one could find in any great city of our own civilization.
	From Norhala, of course, I looked for no perception of any of this. But from Ruth--  My reaction grew; the pity long withheld racing through me linked with a burning anger, a hatred for this woman who had been the directing soul of that catastrophe.
	My gaze fell again upon the red brand. I saw that it was a deep indentation as though a thong had been twisted around Ventnor's head biting the bone. There was dried blood on the edges, a double ring of swollen white flesh rimming the cincture. It was the mark of--torture!
	"Martin," I cried. "That ring? What did they do to you?"
	"They waked me with that," he answered quietly. "I suppose I ought to be grateful--although their intentions were not exactly--therapeutic--"
	"They tortured him," Ruth's voice was tense, bitter; she spoke in Persian--for Norhala's benefit I thought then, not guessing a deeper reason. "They tortured him. They gave him agony until he--returned. And they promised him other agonies that would make him pray long for death.
	"And me--me"--she raised little clenched hands--"me they stripped like a slave. They led me through the city and the people mocked me. They took me before that swine Norhala has punished--and stripped me before him --like a slave. Before my eyes they tortured my brother.  Norhala--they were evil, all evil! Norhala--you did well to slay them!"
	She caught the woman's hands, pressed close to her. Norhala gazed at her from great gray eyes in which the wrath was dying, into which the old tranquillity, the old serenity was flowing. And when she spoke the golden voice held more than returning echoes of the far-away, faint chimings.
	"It is done," she said. "And it was well done--sister. Now you and I shall dwell together in peace--sister. Or if there be those in the world from which you came that you would have slain, then you and I shall go forth with our companies and stamp them out--even as I did these."
	My heart stopped beating--for from the depths of Ruth's eyes shining shadows were rising, wraiths answering Norhala's calling; and, as they rose, steadily they drew life from the clear radiance summoning--drew closer to the semblance of that tranquil spirit which her vengeance had banished but that had now returned to its twin thrones of Norhala's eyes.
	And at last it was twin sister of Norhala who looked upon her from the face of Ruth!
	The white arms of the woman encircled her; the glorious head bent over her; flaming tresses mingled with tender brown curls.
	"Sister!" she whispered. "Little sister! These men you shall have as long as it pleases you--to do with as you will. Or if it is your wish they shall go back to their world and I will guard them to its gates.
	"But you and I, little sister, will dwell together--in the vastnesses--in the peace. Shall it not be so?"
	With no faltering, with no glance toward us three-- lover, brother, old friend--Ruth crept closer to her, rested her head upon the virginal, royal breasts.
	"It shall be so!" she murmured. "Sister--it shall be so. Norhala--I am tired. Norhala--I have seen enough of men."
	An ecstasy of tenderness, a flame of unearthly rapture, trembled over the woman's wondrous face. Hungrily, defiantly, she pressed the girl to her; the stars in the lucid heavens of her eyes were soft and gentle and caressing.
	"Ruth!" cried Drake--and sprang toward them. She paid no heed; and even as he leaped he was caught, whirled back against us.
	"Wait," said Ventnor, and caught him by the arm as wrathfully, blindedly, he strove against the force that held him. "Wait. No use--now."
	There was a curious understanding in his voice--a curious  sympathy, too, in the patient, untroubled gaze that dwelt upon his sister and this weirdly exquisite woman who held her.
	"Wait!" exclaimed Drake. "Wait--hell! The damned witch is stealing her away from us!"
	Again he threw himself forward; recoiled as though swept back by an invisible arm; fell against us and was clasped and held by Ventnor. And as he struggled the Thing we rode halted. Like metal waves back into it rushed the enigmatic billows that had washed over the fragments of the city.
	We were lifted; between us and the woman and girl a cleft appeared; it widened into a rift. It was as though Norhala had decreed it as a symbol of this her second victory--or had set it between us as a barrier.
	Wider grew the rift. Save for the bridge of our voices it separated us from Ruth as though she stood upon another world.
	Higher we rose; the three of us now upon the flat top of a tower upon whose counterpart fifty feet away and facing the homeward path, Ruth and Norhala stood with white arms interlaced.
	The serpent shape flashed toward us; it vanished beneath, merging into the waiting Thing.
	Then slowly the Thing began to move; quietly it glided to the chasm it had blasted in the cliff wall. The shadow of those walls fell upon us. As one we looked back; as one we searched out the patch of blue with the black blot at its breast.
	We found it; then the precipices hid it. Silently we streamed through the chasm, through the canyon and the tunnel--speaking no word, Drake's eyes fixed with bitter hatred upon Norhala, Ventnor brooding upon her always with that enigmatic sympathy. We passed between the walls of the further cleft; stood for an instant at the brink of the green forest.
	There came to us as though from immeasurable distances, a faint, sustained thrumming--like the beating of countless muffled drums. The Thing that carried us trembled--the sound died away. The Thing quieted; it began its steady, effortless striding through the crowding trees--but now with none of that speed with which it had come, spurred forward by Norhala's awakened hate.
	Ventnor stirred; broke the silence. And now I saw how wasted was his body, how sharpened his face; almost ethereal; purged not only by suffering but by, it came to me, some strange knowledge.
	"No use, Drake," he said dreamily. "All this is now on the knees of the gods. And whether those gods are humanity's or whether they are--Gods of Metal--I do not know.
	"But this I do know--only one way or another can the balance fall; and if it be one way, then you and we shall have Ruth back. And if it falls the other way--then there will be little need for us to care. For man will be done!"
	"Martin! What do you mean?"
	"It is the crisis," he answered. "We can do nothing,  Goodwin--nothing. Whatever is to be steps forth now from the womb of Destiny."
	Again there came that distant rolling--louder, now. Again the Thing trembled.
	"The drums," whispered Ventnor. "The drums of destiny. What is it they are heralding? A new birth of Earth and the passing of man? A new child to whom shall be given dominion--nay, to whom has been given dominion? Or is it--taps--for Them?"
	The drumming died as I listened--fearfully. About us was only the swishing, the sighing of the falling trees beneath the tread of the Thing. Motionless stood Norhala; and as motionless Ruth.
	"Martin," I cried once more, a dreadful doubt upon me. "Martin--what do you mean?"
	"Whence did--They--come?" His voice was clear and calm, the eyes beneath the red brand clear and quiet, too. "Whence did They come--these Things that carry us? That strode like destroying angels over Cherkis's city? Are they spawn of Earth--as we are? Or are they foster children--changelings from another star?
	"These creatures that when many still are one--that when one still are many. Whence did They come? What are They?"
	He looked down upon the cubes that held us; their hosts of tiny eyes shone up at him, enigmatically--as though they heard and understood.
	"I do not forget," he said. "At least not all do I forget of what I saw during that time when I seemed an atom outside space--as I told you, or think I told you, speaking with unthinkable effort through lips that seemed eternities away from me, the atom, who strove to open them.
	"There were three--visions, revelations--I know not what to call them. And though each seemed equally real, of two of them, only one, I think, can be true; and of the third--that may some time be true but surely is not yet."
	Through the air came a louder drum roll--in it something ominous, something sinister. It swelled to a crescendo; abruptly ceased. And now I saw Norhala raise her head; listen.
	"I saw a world, a vast world, Goodwin, marching stately through space. It was no globe--it was a world of many facets, of smooth and polished planes; a huge blue jewel world, dimly luminous; a crystal world cut out from Aether. A geometric thought of the Great Cause, of God, if you will, made material. It was airless, waterless, sunless.
	"I seemed to draw closer to it. And then I saw that over every facet patterns were traced; gigantic symmetrical designs; mathematical hieroglyphs. In them I read unthinkable calculations, formulas of interwoven universes, arithmetical progressions of armies of stars, pandects of the motions of the suns. In the patterns was an appalling  harmony--as though all the laws from those which guide the atom to those which direct the cosmos were there resolved into completeness--totalled.
	"The faceted world was like a cosmic abacist, tallying as it marched the errors of the infinite.
	"The patterned symbols constantly changed form. I drew nearer--the symbols were alive. They were, in untold numbers--These!"
	He pointed to the Thing that bore us.
	"I was swept back; looked again upon it from afar. And a fantastic notion came to me--fantasy it was, of course, yet built I know around a nucleus of strange truth. It was"--his tone was half whimsical, half apologetic --"it was that this jeweled world was ridden by some  mathematical god, driving it through space, noting occasionally with amused tolerance the very bad arithmetic of another Deity the reverse of mathematical--a more or less haphazard Deity, the god, in fact, of us and the things we call living.
	"It had no mission; it wasn't at all out to do any reforming; it wasn't in the least concerned in rectifying any of the inaccuracies of the Other. Only now and then it took note of the deplorable differences between the worlds it saw and its own impeccably ordered and tidy temple with its equally tidy servitors.
	"Just an itinerant demiurge of supergeometry riding along through space on its perfectly summed-up world; master of all celestial mechanics; its people independent of all that complex chemistry and labor for equilibrium by which we live; needing neither air nor water, heeding neither heat nor cold; fed with the magnetism of interstellar  space and stopping now and then to banquet off the energy of some great sun."
	A thrill of amazement passed through me; fantasy all this might be but--how, if so, had he gotten that last thought? He had not seen, as we had, the orgy in the Hall of the Cones, the prodigious feeding of the Metal Monster upon our sun.
	"That passed," he went on, unnoticing. "I saw vast caverns filled with the Things; working, growing, multiplying. In caverns of our Earth--the fruit of some unguessed womb? I do not know.
	"But in those caverns, under countless orbs of many colored lights"--again the thrill of amaze shook me-- "they grew. It came to me that they were reaching out toward sunlight and the open. They burst into it--into yellow, glowing sunlight. Ours? I do not know. And that picture passed."
	His voice deepened.
	"There came a third vision. I saw our Earth--I knew, Goodwin, indisputably, unmistakably that it was our earth. But its rolling hills were leveled, its mountains were ground and shaped into cold and polished symbols --geometric, fashioned.
	"The seas were fettered, gleaming like immense jewels in patterned settings of crystal shores. The very Polar ice was chiseled. On the ordered plains were traced the hieroglyphs of the faceted world. And on all Earth, Goodwin, there was no green life, no city, no trace of man. On this Earth that had been ours were only--These.
	"Visioning!" he said. "Don't think that I accept them in their entirety. Part truth, part illusion--the groping mind dazzled with light of unfamiliar truths and making pictures from half light and half shadow to help it understand.
	"But still--SOME truth in them. How much I do not know. But this I do know--that last vision was of a cataclysm whose beginnings we face now--this very instant."
	The picture flashed behind my own eyes--of the walled city, its thronging people, its groves and gardens, its science and its art; of the Destroying Shapes trampling it flat--and then the dreadful, desolate mount.
	And suddenly I saw that mount as Earth--the city as Earth's cities--its gardens and groves as Earth's fields and forests--and the vanished people of Cherkis seemed to expand into all humanity.
	"But Martin," I stammered, fighting against choking, intolerable terror, "there was something else. Something of the Keeper of the Cones and of our striking through the sun to destroy the Things--something of them being governed by the same laws that govern us and that if they broke them they must fall. A hope--a PROMISE, that they would NOT conquer."
	"I remember," he replied, "but not clearly. There WAS something--a shadow upon them, a menace. It was a shadow that seemed to be born of our own world--some threatening spirit of earth hovering over them.
	"I cannot remember; it eludes me. Yet it is because I remember but a little of it that I say those drums may not be--taps--for us."
	As though his words had been a cue, the sounds again burst forth--no longer muffled nor faint. They roared; they seemed to pelt through air and drop upon us; they beat about our ears with thunderous tattoo like covered caverns drummed upon by Titans with trunks of great trees.
	The drumming did not die; it grew louder, more vehement; defiant and deafening. Within the Thing under us a mighty pulse began to throb, accelerating rapidly to the rhythm of that clamorous roll.
	I saw Norhala draw herself up, sharply; stand listening and alert. Under me, the throbbing turned to an uneasy churning, a ferment.
	"Drums?" muttered Drake. "THEY'RE no drums. It's drum fire. It's like a dozen Marnes, a dozen Verduns. But where could batteries like those come from?"
	"Drums," whispered Ventnor. "They ARE drums. The drums of Destiny!"
	Louder the roaring grew. Now it was a tremendous rhythmic cannonading. The Thing halted. The tower that upheld Ruth and Norhala swayed, bent over the gap between us, touched the top on which we rode.
	Gently the two were plucked up; swiftly they were set beside us.
	Came a shrill, keen wailing--louder than ever I had heard before. There was an earthquake trembling; a maelstrom swirling in which we spun; a swift sinking.
	The Thing split in two. Up before us rose a stupendous, stepped pyramid; little smaller it was than that which Cheops built to throw its shadows across holy Nile. Into it streamed, over it clicked, score upon score of cubes, building it higher and higher. It lurched forward--away from us.
	From Norhala came a single cry--resonant, blaring like a wrathful, golden trumpet.
	The speeding shape halted, hesitated; it seemed about to return. Crashed down upon us an abrupt crescendo of the distant drumming; peremptory, commanding. The shape darted forward; raced away crushing to straw the trees beneath it in a full quarter-mile-wide swath.
	Great gray eyes wide, filled with incredulous wonder, stunned disbelief, Norhala for an instant faltered. Then out of her white throat, through her red lips pelted a tempest of staccato buglings.
	Under them what was left of the Thing leaped, tore on. Norhala's flaming hair crackled and streamed; about her body of milk and pearl--about Ruth's creamy skin--a radiant nimbus began to glow.
	In the distance I saw a sapphire spark; knew it for Norhala's home. Not far from it now was the rushing pyramid--and it came to me that within that shape was strangely neither globe nor pyramid. Nor except for the trembling cubes that made the platform on which we  stood, did the shrunken Thing carrying us hold any unit of the Metal Monster except its spheres and tetrahedrons --at least within its visible bulk.
	The sapphire spark had grown to a glimmering azure marble. Steadily we gained upon the pyramid. Never for an instant ceased that scourging hail of notes from Norhala --never for an instant lessened the drumming clamor that seemed to try to smother them.
	The sapphire marble became a sapphire ball, a great globe. I saw the Thing we sought to join lift itself into a prodigious pillar; the pillar's base thrust forth stilts; upon them the Thing stepped over the blue dome of Norhala's house.
	The blue bubble was close; now it curved below us. Gently we were lifted down; were set before its portal. I looked up at the bulk that had carried us.
	I had been right--built it was only of globe and pyramid; an inconceivably grotesque shape, it hung over us.
	Throughout the towering Shape was awful movement; its units writhed within it. Then it was lost to sight in the mists through which the Thing we had pursued had gone.
	In Norhala's face as she watched it go was a dismay, a poignant uncertainty, that held in it something indescribably pitiful.
	"I am afraid!" I heard her whisper.
	She tightened her grasp upon dreaming Ruth; motioned us to go within. We passed, silently; behind us she came, followed by three of the great globes, by a pair of her tetrahedrons.
	Beside a pile of the silken stuffs she halted. The girl's eyes dwelt upon hers trustingly.
	"I am afraid!" whispered Norhala again. "Afraid--for you!"
	Tenderly she looked down upon her, the galaxies of stars in her eyes soft and tremulous.
	"I am afraid, little sister," she whispered for the third time. "Not yet can you go as I do--among the fires." She hesitated. "Rest here until I return. I shall leave these to guard you and obey you."
	She motioned to the five shapes. They ranged themselves about Ruth. Norhala kissed her upon both brown eyes.
	"Sleep till I return," she murmured.
	She swept from the chamber--with never a glance for us three. I heard a little wailing chorus without, fast dying into silence.
	Spheres and pyramids twinkled at us, guarding the silken pile whereon Ruth lay asleep--like some enchanted princess.
	Beat down upon the blue globe like hollow metal worlds, beaten and shrieking.
	The drums of Destiny!
	The drums of Doom!
	Beating taps for the world of men?


CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE FRENZY OF RUTH

	For many minutes we stood silent, in the shadowy chamber,  listening, each absorbed in his own thoughts. The thunderous drumming was continuous; sometimes it faded into a background for clattering storms as of thousands of machine guns, thousands of riveters at work  at once upon a thousand metal frameworks; sometimes it was nearly submerged beneath splitting crashes as of meeting meteors of hollow steel.
	But always the drumming persisted, rhythmic, thunderous. Through it all Ruth slept, undisturbed, cheek pillowed in one rounded arm, the two great pyramids erect behind her, watchful; a globe at her feet, a globe at her head, the third sphere poised between her and us, and, like the pyramids--watchful.
	What was happening out there--over the edge of the canyon, beyond the portal of the cliffs, behind the veils, in the Pit of the Metal Monster? What was the message of the roaring drums? What the rede of their clamorous runes?
	Ventnor stepped by the sentinel globe, bent over the tranced girl. Sphere nor pointed pair stirred; only they watched him--like a palpable thing one felt their watchfulness. He listened to her heart, caught up a wrist, took note of her pulse of life. He drew a deep breath, stood upright, nodded reassuringly.
	Abruptly Drake turned, walked out through the open portal, his strain and a very deep anxiety written plainly in deep lines that ran from nostrils to firm young mouth.
	"Just went out to look for the pony," he muttered when he returned. "It's safe. I was afraid it had been stepped on. It's getting dusk. There's a big light down the canyon --over in the valley."
	Ventnor drew back past the globe; rejoined us.
	The blue bower trembled under a gust of sound. Ruth stirred; her brows knitted; her hands clenched. The sphere that stood before her spun on its axis, swept up to the globe at her head, glided from it to the globe at her feet--as though whispering. Ruth moaned--her body bent upright, swayed rigidly. Her eyes opened; they stared through us as though upon some dreadful vision; and strangely was it as though she were seeing with another's eyes, were reflecting another's sufferings.
	The globes at her feet and at her head swirled out, clustering against the third sphere--three weird shapes in silent consultation. On Ventnor's face I saw pity-- and a vast relief. With shocked amaze I realized that Ruth's agony--for in agony she clearly was--was calling forth in him elation. He spoke--and I knew why.
	"Norhala!" he whispered. "She is seeing with Norhala's  eyes--feeling what Norhala feels. It's not going well with --That--out there. If we dared leave Ruth--could only, see--"
	Ruth leaped to her feet; cried out--a golden bugling that might have been Norhala's own wrathful trumpet notes. Instantly the two pyramids flamed open, became two gleaming stars that bathed her in violet radiance. Beneath their upper tips I saw the blasting ovals glitter-- menacingly.
	The girl glared at us--more brilliant grew the glittering ovals as though their lightnings trembled on their lips.
	"Ruth!" called Ventnor softly.
	A shadow softened the intolerable, hard brilliancy of the brown eyes. In them something struggled to arise, fighting its way to the surface like some drowning human thing.
	It sank back--upon her face dropped a cloud of heartbreak,  appalling woe; the despair of a soul that, having withdrawn all faith in its own kind to rest all faith, as it thought, on angels--sees that faith betrayed.
	There stared upon us a stripped spirit, naked and hopeless and terrible.
	Despairing, raging, she screamed once more. The central globe swam to her; it raised her upon its back; glided to the doorway. Upon it she stood poised like some youthful, anguished Victory--a Victory who faced and knew she faced destroying defeat; poised upon that enigmatic  orb on bare slender feet, one sweet breast bare, hands upraised, virginally archaic, nothing about her of the Ruth we knew.
	"Ruth!" cried Drake; despair as great as that upon her face was in his voice. He sprang before the globe that held her; barred its way.
	For an instant the Thing paused--and in that instant the human soul of the girl rushed back.
	"No!" she cried. "No!"
	A weird call issued from the white lips--stumbling, uncertain, as though she who sent it forth herself wondered whence it sprang. Abruptly the angry stars closed. The three globes spun--doubting, puzzled! Again she called-- now a tremulous, halting cadence. She was lifted; dropped gently to her feet.
	For an instant the globes and pyramids whirled and danced before her--then sped away through the portal.
	Ruth swayed, sobbing. Then as though drawn, she ran to the doorway, fled through it. As one we sprang after her. Rods ahead her white body flashed, speeding toward the Pit. Like fleet-footed Atalanta she fled--and far, far behind us was the blue bower, the misty barrier of the veils close, when Drake with a last desperate burst reached her side, gripped her. Down the two fell, rolling upon the smooth roadway. Silently she fought, biting, tearing at Drake, struggling to escape.
	"Quick!" gasped Ventnor, stretching out to me an arm. "Cut off the sleeve. Quick!"
	Unquestioningly, I drew my knife, ripped the garment at the shoulder. He snatched the sleeve, knelt at Ruth's head; rapidly he crumpled an end, thrust it roughly into her mouth; tied it fast, gagging her.
	"Hold her!" he ordered Drake; and with a sob of relief sprang up. The girl's eyes blazed at him, filled with hate.
	"Cut that other sleeve," he said; and when I had done so, he knelt again, pinned Ruth down with a knee at her throat, turned her over and knotted her hands behind her. She ceased struggling; gently now he drew up the curly head; swung her upon her back.
	"Hold her feet." He nodded to Drake, who caught the slender bare ankles in his hands.
	She lay there, helpless, being unable to use her hands or feet.
	"Too little Ruth, and too much Norhala," said Ventnor, looking up at me. "If she'd only thought to cry out! She could have brought a regiment of those Things down to blast us. And would--if she HAD thought. You don't think THAT is Ruth, do you?"
	He pointed to the pallid face glaring at him, the eyes from which cold fires flamed.
	"No, you don't!" He caught Drake by the shoulder, sent him spinning a dozen feet away. "Damn it, Drake-- don't you understand!"
	For suddenly Ruth's eyes softened; she had turned them on Dick pitifully, appealingly--and he had loosed her ankles, had leaned forward as though to draw away the band that covered her lips.
	"Your gun," whispered Ventnor to me; before I had moved he had snatched the automatic from my holster; had covered Drake with it.
	"Drake," he said, "stand where you are. If you take another step toward this girl I'll shoot you--by God, I will!"
	Drake halted, shocked amazement in his face; I myself felt resentful, wondering at his outburst.
	"But it's hurting her," he muttered, Ruth's eyes, soft and pleading, still dwelt upon him.
	"Hurting her!" exclaimed Ventnor. "Man--she's my sister! I know what I'm doing. Can't you see? Can't you see how little of Ruth is in that body there--how little of the girl you love? How or why I don't know--but that it is so I DO know. Drake--have you forgotten how Norhala beguiled Cherkis? I want my sister back. I'm helping her to get back. Now let be. I know what I'm doing. Look at her!"
	We looked. In the face that glared up at Ventnor was nothing of Ruth--even as he had said. There was the same cold, awesome wrath that had rested upon Norhala's as she watched Cherkis weep over the eating up of his city. Swiftly came a change--like the sudden smoothing out of the rushing waves of a hill-locked, wind-lashed lake.
	The face was again Ruth's face--and Ruth's alone; the eyes were Ruth's eyes--supplicating, adjuring.
	"Ruth!" Ventnor cried. "While you can hear--am I not right?"
	She nodded vigorously, sternly; she was lost, hidden once more.
	"You see." He turned to us grimly.
	A shattering shaft of light flashed upon the veils; almost pierced them. An avalanche of sound passed high above us. Yet now I noted that where we stood the clamor was lessened, muffled. Of course, it came to me, it was the veils.
	I wondered why--for whatever the quality of the radiant mists, their purpose certainly had to do with concentration of the magnetic flux. The deadening of the noise must be accidental, could have nothing to do with their actual use; for sound is an air vibration solely. No --it must be a secondary effect. The Metal Monster was as heedless of clamor as it was of heat or cold--
	"We've got to see," Ventnor broke the chain of thought. "We've got to get through and see what's happening. Win or lose--we've got to KNOW."
	"Cut off your sleeve, as I did," he motioned to Drake. "Tie her ankles. We'll carry her."
	Quickly it was done. Ruth's light body swinging between brother and lover, we moved forward into the mists; we crept cautiously through their dead silences.
	Passed out and fell back into them from a searing chaos of light, chaotic tumult.
	From the slackened grip of Ventnor and Drake the body of Ruth dropped while we three stood blinded, deafened, fighting for recovery. Ruth twisted, rolled toward the brink; Ventnor threw himself upon her, held her fast.
	Dragging her, crawling on our knees, we crept forward; we stopped when the thinning of the mists permitted us to see through them yet still interposed a curtaining which, though tenuous, dimmed the intolerable brilliancy that filled the Pit, muffled its din to a degree we could bear.
	I peered through them--and nerve and muscle were locked in the grip of a paralyzing awe. I felt then as one would feel set close to warring regiments of stars, made witness to the death-throes of a universe, or swept through space and held above the whirling coils of Andromeda's nebula to watch its birth agonies of nascent suns.
	These are no figures of speech, no hyperboles--speck as our whole planet would be in Andromeda's vast loom, pinprick as was the Pit to the cyclone craters of our own sun, within the cliff-cupped walls of the valley was a tangible, struggling living force akin to that which dwells within the nebula and the star; a cosmic spirit transcending  all dimensions and thrusting its confines out into the infinite; a sentient emanation of the infinite itself.
	Nor was its voice less unearthly. It used the shell of the earth valley for its trumpetings, its clangors--but as one hears in the murmurings of the fluted conch the great voice of ocean, its whispering and its roarings, so here in the clamorous shell of the Pit echoed the tremendous voices of that illimitable sea which laps the shores of the countless suns.
	I looked upon a mighty whirlpool miles and miles wide. It whirled with surges whose racing crests were smiting incandescences; it was threaded with a spindrift of lightnings; it was trodden by dervish mists of molten flame thrust through with forests of lances of living light. It cast a cadent spray high to the heavens.
	Over it the heavens glittered as though they were a shield held by fearful gods. Through the maelstrom staggered a mountainous bulk; a gleaming leviathan of pale blue metal caught in the swirling tide of some incredible volcano; a huge ark of metal breasting a deluge of flame.
	And the drumming we heard as of hollow beaten metal worlds, the shouting tempests of cannonading stars, was the breaking of these incandescent crests, the falling of the lightning spindrift, the rhythmic impact of the lanced rays upon the glimmering mountain that reeled and trembled as they struck it.
	The reeling mountain, the struggling leviathan, was-- the City!
	It was the mass of the Metal Monster itself, guarded by, stormed by, its own legions that though separate from it were still as much of it as were the cells that formed the skin of its walls, its carapace.
	It was the Metal Monster tearing, rending, fighting for, battling against--itself.
	Mile high as when I had first beheld it was the inexplicable body that held the great heart of the cones into which had been drawn the magnetic cataracts from our sun; that held too the smaller hearts of the lesser cones, the workshops, the birth chamber and manifold other  mysteries unguessed and unseen. By a full fourth had its base been shrunken.
	Ranged in double line along the side turned toward us were hundreds of dread forms--Shapes that in their intensity bore down upon, oppressed with a nightmare weight, the consciousness.
	Rectangular, upon their outlines no spike of pyramid, no curve of globe showing, uncompromisingly ponderous, they upthrust. Upon the tops of the first rank were enormous masses, sledge shaped--like those metal fists that had battered down the walls of Cherkis's city but to them as the human hand is to the paw of the dinosaur.
	Conceive this--conceive these Shapes as animate and flexible; beating down with the prodigious mallets, smashing from side to side as though the tremendous pillars that held them were thousand jointed upright pistons; that as closely as I can present it in images of things we know is the picture of the Hammering Things.
	Behind them stood a second row, high as they and as angular. From them extended scores of girdered arms. These were thickly studded with the flaming cruciform shapes, the opened cubes gleaming with their angry flares of reds and smoky yellows. From the tentacles of many  swung immense shields like those which ringed the hall of the great cones.
	And as the sledges beat, ever over their bent heads poured from the crosses a flood of crimson lightnings. Out of the concave depths of the shields whipped lashes of blinding flame. With ropes of fire they knouted the Things the sledges struck, the sullen crimson levins blasted.
	Now I could see the Shapes that attacked. Grotesque; spined and tusked, spiked and antlered, wenned and breasted; as chimerically angled, cusped and cornute as though they were the superangled, supercornute gods of the cusped and angled gods of the Javanese, they strove against the sledge-headed and smiting, the multiarmed and blasting square towers.
	High as them, as huge as they, incomparably fantastic, in dozens of shifting forms they battled.
	More than a mile from the stumbling City stood ranged like sharpshooters a host of solid, bristling-legged towers. Upon their tops spun gigantic wheels. Out of the centers of these wheels shot the radiant lances, hosts of spears of intensest violet light. The radiance they volleyed was not continuous; it was broken, so that the javelin rays shot out in rhythmic flights, each flying fast upon the shafts of the others.
	It was their impact that sent forth the thunderous drumming. They struck and splintered against the walls, dropping from them in great gouts of molten flame. It was as though before they broke they pierced the wall, the Monster's side, bled fire.
	With the crashing of broadsides of massed batteries the sledges smashed down upon the bristling attackers. Under the awful impact globes and pyramids were shattered into hundreds of fragments, rocket bursts of blue and azure and violet flame, flames rainbowed and irised.
	The hammer ends split, flew apart, were scattered, were falling showers of sulphurous yellow and scarlet meteors. But ever other cubes swarmed out and repaired the broken smiting tips. And always where a tusked and cornute shape had been battered down, disintegrated,  another arose as huge and as formidable pouring forth upon the squared tower its lightnings, tearing at it with colossal spiked and hooked claws, beating it with incredible spiked and globular fists that were like the clenched hands of some metal Atlas.
	As the striving Shapes swayed and wrestled, gave way or thrust forward, staggered or fell, the bulk of the Monster stumbled and swayed, advanced and retreated--an unearthly motion wedded to an amorphous immensity that flooded the watching consciousness with a deathly nausea.
	Unceasingly the hail of radiant lances poured from the spinning wheels, falling upon Towered Shapes and City's wall alike. There arose a prodigious wailing, an unearthly thin screaming. About the bases of the defenders flashed blinding bursts of incandescence--like those which had heralded the flight of the Flying Thing dropping before Norhala's house.
	Unlike them they held no dazzling sapphire brilliancies; they were ochreous, suffused with raging vermilion. Nevertheless they were factors of that same inexplicable action --for from thousands of gushing lights leaped thousands of gigantic square pillars; unimaginable projectiles hurled from the flaming mouths of earth-hidden, titanic mortars.
	They soared high, swerved and swooped upon the lance-throwers.  Beneath their onslaught those chimerae tottered, I saw living  projectiles and living target fuse where they met--melt and weld in jets of lightnings.
	But not all. There were those that tore great gaps in the horned giants--wounds that instantly were healed with globes and pyramids seething out from the Cyclopean trunk. Ever the incredible projectiles flashed and flew as though from some inexhaustible store; ever uprose that prodigious barrage against the smiting rays.
	Now to check them soared from the ranks of the besiegers clouds of countless horned dragons, immense cylinders of clustered cubes studded with the clinging tetrahedrons. They struck the cubed projectiles head on; aimed themselves to meet them.
	Bristling dragon and hurtling pillar stuck and fused or burst with intolerable blazing. They fell--cube and sphere and pyramid--some half opened, some fully, in a rain of disks, of stars, huge flaming crosses; a storm of unimaginable pyrotechnics.
	Now I became conscious that within the City--within the body of the Metal Monster--there raged a strife colossal as this without. From it came a vast volcanic roaring. Up from its top shot tortured flames, cascades and fountains of frenzied Things that looped and struggled,  writhed over its edge, hurled themselves back; battling chimerae which against the glittering heavens traced luminous symbols of agony.
	Shrilled a stronger wailing. Up from behind the ray hurling Towers shot hosts of globes. Thousands of palely azure, metal moons they soared; warrior moons charging in meteor rush and streaming with fluttering battle pennons of violet flame. High they flew; they curved over the mile high back of the Monster; they dropped upon it.
	Arose to meet them immense columns of the cubes; battered against the spheres; swept them over and down into the depths. Hundreds fell, broken--but thousands held their place. I saw them twine about the pillars-- writhing columns of interlaced cubes and globes straining  like monstrous serpents while all along their coils the open disks and crosses smote with the scimitars of their lightnings.
	In the wall of the City appeared a shining crack; from top to bottom it ran; it widened into a rift from which a flood of radiance gushed. Out of this rift poured a thousand-foot-high torrent of horned globes.
	Only for an instant they flowed. The rift closed upon them, catching those still emerging in a colossal vise. It CRUNCHED them. Plain through the turmoil came a dreadful --bursting roar.
	Down from the closing jaws of the vise dripped a stream of fragments that flashed and flickered--and died. And now in the wall was no trace of the breach.
	A hurricane of radiant lances swept it. Under them a mile wide section of the living scarp split away; dropped like an avalanche. Its fall revealed great spaces, huge vaults and chambers filled with warring lightnings--out from them came roaring, bellowing thunders. Swiftly from each side of the gap a metal curtaining of the cubes joined. Again the wall was whole.
	I turned my stunned gaze from the City--swept over the valley. Everywhere, in towers, in writhing coils, in whipping flails, in waves that smote and crashed, in countless forms and combinations the Metal Hordes battled. Here were pillars against which metal billows rushed and were broken; there were metal comets that crashed high above the mad turmoil.
	From streaming silent veil to veil--north and south, east and west the Monster slew itself beneath its racing, flaming banners, the tempests of its lightnings.
	The tortured hulk of the City lurched; it swept toward us. Before it blotted out from our eyes the Pit I saw that the crystal spans upon the river of jade were gone; that the wondrous jeweled ribbons of its banks were broken.
	Closer came the reeling City.
	I fumbled for my lenses, focussed them upon it. Now I saw that where the radiant lances struck they--killed the blocks blackened under them, became lustreless; the sparkling of the tiny eyes--went out; the metal carapaces crumbled.
	Closer to the City--came the Monster; shuddering I lowered the glasses that it might not seem so near.
	Down dropped the bristling Shapes that wrestled with the squared Towers. They rose again in a single monstrous wave that rushed to overwhelm them. Before they could strike the City swept closer; had hidden them from me.
	Again I raised the glasses. They brought the metal scarp not fifty feet away--within it the hosts of tiny eyes glittered, no longer mocking nor malicious, but insane.
	Nearer drew the Monster--nearer.
	A thousand feet away it checked its movement, seemed to draw itself together. Then like the roar of a falling world that whole side facing us slid down to the valley's floor.


CHAPTER XXIX.
THE PASSING OF NORHALA

	Hundreds of feet through must have been the fallen mass--within it who knows what chambers filled with mysteries? Yes, thousands of feet thick it must have been, for the debris of it splintered and lashed to the very edge of the ledge on which we crouched; heaped it with the dimming fragments of the bodies that had formed it.
	We looked into a thousand vaults, a thousand spaces. There came another avalanche roaring--before us opened the crater of the cones.
	Through the torn gap I saw them, clustering undisturbed about the base of that one slender, coroneted and star pointing spire, rising serene and unshaken from a hell of lightnings. But the shields that had rimmed the crater were gone.
	Ventnor snatched the glasses from my hand, leveled and held them long to his eyes.
	He thrust them back to me. "Look!"
	Through the lenses the great hall leaped into full view apparently only a few yards away. It was a cauldron of chameleon flame. It seethed with the Hordes battling over the remaining walls and floor. But around the crystal base of the cones was an open zone into which none broke.
	In that wide ring, girdling the shimmering fantasy like a circled sanctuary, were but three forms. One was the wondrous Disk of jeweled fires I have called the Metal Emperor; the second was the sullen fired cruciform of the Keeper.
	The third was Norhala!
	She stood at the side of that weird master of hers--or was it after all the servant? Between them and the Keeper's planes gleamed the gigantic T-shaped tablet of countless rods which controlled the activities of the cones; that had controlled the shifting of the vanished shields; that manipulated too, perhaps, the energies of whatever similar but smaller cornute ganglia were scattered throughout the City and one of which we had beheld when the Emperor's guards had blasted Ventnor.
	Close was Norhala in the lenses--so close that almost, it seemed, I could reach out and touch her. The flaming hair streamed and billowed above her glorious head like a banner of molten floss of coppery gold; her face was a mask of wrath and despair; her great eyes blazed upon the Keeper; her exquisite body was bare, stripped of every shred of silken covering.
	From streaming tresses to white feet an oval of pulsing, golden light nimbused her. Maiden Isis, virgin Astarte she stood there, held in the grip of the Disk--like a goddess betrayed and hopeless yet thirsting for vengeance.
	For all their stillness, their immobility, it came to me that Emperor and Keeper were at grapple, locked in death grip; the realization was as definite as though, like Ruth, I thought with Norhala's mind, saw with her eyes.
	Clearly too it came to me that in this contest between the two was epitomized all the vast conflict that raged around them; that in it was fast ripening that fruit of destiny of which Ventnor had spoken, and that here in the Hall of the Cones would be settled--and soon-- the fate not only of Disk and Cross, but it might be of humanity.
	But with what unknown powers was that duel being fought? They cast no lightnings, they battled with no visible weapons. Only the great planes of the inverted cruciform Shape smoked and smoldered with their sullen flares of ochres and of scarlets; while over all the face of  the Disk its cold and irised fires raced and shone, beating with a rhythm incredibly rapid; its core of incandescent ruby blazed, its sapphire ovals were cabochoned pools of living, lucent radiance.
	There was a splitting roar that arose above all the clamor, deafening us even in the shelter of the silent veils. On each side of the crater whole masses of the City dropped away. Fleetingly I was aware of scores of smaller pits in which uprose lesser replicas of the Coned Mount, lesser reservoirs of the Monster's force.
	Neither the Emperor nor the Keeper moved, both seemingly indifferent to the catastrophe fast developing around them.
	Now I strained forward to the very thinnest edge of the  curtainings. For between the Disk and Cross began to form fine black mist. It was transparent. It seemed spun of minute translucent ebon corpuscles. It hung like a black shroud suspended by unseen hands. It shook and wavered now toward the Disk, now toward the Cross.
	I sensed a keying up of force within the two; knew that each was striving to cast like a net that hanging mist upon the other.
	Abruptly the Emperor flashed forth, blindingly. As though caught upon a blast, the black shroud flew toward the Keeper--enveloped it. And as the mist covered and clung I saw the sulphurous and crimson flares dim. They were snuffed out.
	The Keeper fell!
	Upon Norhala's face flamed a wild triumph, banishing despair. The outstretched planes of the Cross swept up as though in torment. For an instant its fires flared and licked through the clinging blackness; it writhed half upright, threw itself forward, crashed down prostrate upon the enigmatic tablet which only its tentacles could manipulate.
	From Norhala's face the triumph fled. On its heels rushed stark, incredulous horror.
	The Mount of Cones shuddered. From it came a single mighty throb of force--like a prodigious heart-beat. Under that pulse of power the Emperor staggered, spun--and spinning, swept Norhala from her feet, swung her close to its flashing rose.
	A second throb pulsed from the cones, and mightier.
	A spasm shook the Disk--a paroxysm.
	Its fires faded; they flared out again, bathing the floating, unearthly figure of Norhala with their iridescences.
	I saw her body writhe--as though it shared the agony of the Shape that held her. Her head twisted; the great eyes, pools of uncomprehending, unbelieving horror, stared into mine.
	With a spasmodic, infinitely dreadful movement the Disk closed--
	And closed upon her!
	Norhala was gone--was shut within it. Crushed to the pent fires of its crystal heart.
	I heard a sobbing, agonized choking--knew it was I who sobbed. Against me I felt Ruth's body strike, bend in convulsive arc, drop inert.
	The slender steeple of the cones drooped sending its faceted coronet shattering to the floor. The Mount melted. Beneath the flooding radiance sprawled Keeper and the great inert Globe that was the Goddess woman's sepulcher.
	The crater filled with the pallid luminescence. Faster and ever faster it poured down into the Pit. And from all the lesser craters of the smaller cones swept silent cataracts of the same pale radiance.
	The City began to crumble--the Monster to fall.
	Like pent-up waters rushing through a broken dam the gleaming deluge swept over the valley; gushing in steady torrents from the breaking mass. Over the valley fell a vast silence. The lightnings ceased. The Metal Hordes stood rigid, the shining flood lapping at their bases, rising swiftly ever higher.
	Now from the sinking City swarmed multitudes of its weird luminaries.
	Out they trooped, swirling from every rent and gap-- orbs scarlet and sapphire, ruby orbs, orbs tuliped and irised --the jocund suns of the birth chamber and side by side with them hosts of the frozen, pale gilt, stiff rayed suns.
	Thousands upon thousands they marched forth and poised themselves solemnly over all the Pit that now was a fast rising lake of yellow froth of sun flame.
	They swept forth in squadrons, in companies, in regiments, those mysterious orbs. They floated over all the valley; they separated and swung motionless above it as though they were mysterious multiple souls of fire brooding over the dying shell that had held them.
	Beneath, thrusting up from the lambent lake like grotesque towers of some drowned fantastic metropolis, the great Shapes stood, black against its glowing.
	What had been the City--that which had been the bulk of the Monster--was now only a vast and shapeless hill from which streamed the silent torrents of that released, unknown force which, concentrate and bound, had been the cones.
	As though it was the Monster's shining life-blood it poured, raising ever higher in its swift flooding the level radiant lake.
	Lower and lower sank the immense bulk; squattered and spread, ever lowering--about its helpless, patient crouching something ineffably piteous, something indescribably, COSMICALLY tragic.
	Abruptly the watching orbs shook under a hail of sparkling atoms streaming down from the glittering sky; raining upon the lambent lake. So thick they fell that now the brooding luminaries were dim aureoles within them.
	From the Pit came a blinding, insupportable brilliancy. From every rigid tower gleamed out jeweled fires; their clinging units opened into blazing star and disk and cross. The City was a hill of living gems over which flowed torrents of pale molten gold.
	The Pit blazed.
	There followed an appalling tensity; a prodigious gathering of force; a panic stirring concentration of energy. Thicker fell the clouds of sparkling atoms--higher rose the yellow flood.
	Ventnor cried out. I could not hear him, but I read his  purpose--and so did Drake. Up on his broad shoulders he swung Ruth as though she had been a child. Back through the throbbing veils we ran; passed out of them.
	"Back!" shouted Ventnor. "Back as far as you can!"
	On we raced; we reached the gateway of the cliffs; we dashed on and on--up the shining roadway toward the blue globe now a scant mile before us; ran sobbing, panting --ran, we knew, for our lives.
	Out of the Pit came a sound--I cannot describe it!
	An unutterably desolate, dreadful wail of despair, it shuddered past us like the groaning of a broken-hearted star--anguished and awesome.
	It died. There rushed upon us a sea of that incredible loneliness, that longing for extinction that had assailed us in the haunted hollow where first we had seen Norhala. But its billows were resistless, invincible. Beneath them we fell; were torn by desire for swift death.
	Dimly, through fainting eyes, I saw a dazzling brilliancy fill the sky; heard with dying ears a chaotic, blasting roar. A wave of air thicker than water caught us up, hurled us hundreds of yards forward. It dropped us; in its wake rushed another wave, withering, scorching.
	It raced over us. Scorching though it was, within its heat was energizing, revivifying force; something that slew the deadly despair and fed the fading fires of life.
	I staggered to my feet; looked back. The veils were gone. The precipice walled gateway they had curtained was filled with a Plutonic glare as though it opened into the incandescent heart of a volcano.
	Ventnor clutched my shoulder, spun me around. He pointed to the sapphire house, started to run to it. Far ahead I saw Drake, the body of the girl clasped to his breast. The heat became blasting, insupportable; my lungs burned.
	Over the sky above the canyon streaked a serpentine chain of lightnings. A sudden cyclonic gust swept the cleft, whirling us like leaves toward the Pit.
	I threw myself upon my face, clutching at the smooth rock. A volley of thunder burst--but not the thunder of the Metal Monster or its Hordes; no, the bellowing of the levins of our own earth.
	And the wind was cold; it bathed the burning skin; laved the fevered lungs.
	Again the sky was split by the lightnings. And roaring down from it in solid sheets came the rain.
	From the Pit arose a hissing as though within it raged Babylonian Tiamat, Mother of Chaos, serpent dweller in the void; Midgard-snake of the ancient Norse holding in her coils the world.
	Buffeted by wind, beaten down by rain, clinging to each other like drowning men, Ventnor and I pushed on to the elfin globe. The light was dying fast. By it we saw Drake pass within the portal with his burden. The light became embers; it went out; blackness clasped us. Guided by the lightnings, we beat our way to the door; passed through it.
	In the electric glare we saw Drake bending over Ruth. In it I saw a slide draw over the open portal through which shrieked the wind, streamed the rain.
	As though its crystal panel was moved by unseen, gentle hands, the portal closed; the tempest shut out.
	We dropped beside Ruth upon a pile of silken stuffs-- awed, marveling, trembling with pity and--thanksgiving.
	For we knew--each of us knew with an absolute definiteness as we crouched there among the racing, dancing black and silver shadows with which the lightnings filled the blue globe--that the Metal Monster was dead.
	Slain by itself!


CHAPTER XXX.
BURNED OUT

	Ruth sighed and stirred. By the glare of the lightnings, now almost continuous, we saw that her rigidity, and in fact all the puzzling cataleptic symptoms, had disappeared. Her limbs relaxed, her skin faintly flushed, she lay in deepest but natural slumber undisturbed by the incessant cannonading of the thunder under which the walls of the blue globe shuddered. Ventnor passed through the curtains of the central hall; he returned with one of Norhala's cloaks; covered the girl with it.
	An overwhelming sleepiness took possession of me, a weariness ineffable. Nerve and brain and muscle suddenly relaxed, went slack and numb. Without a struggle I surrendered to an overpowering stupor and cradled deep in its heart ceased consciously to be.
	When my eyes unclosed the chamber of the moonstone walls was filled with a silvery, crepuscular light. I heard the murmuring and laughing of running water, the play, I lazily realized, of the fountained pool.
	I lay for whole minutes unthinking, luxuriating in the sense of tension gone and of security; lay steeped in the aftermath of complete rest. Memory flooded me.
	Quietly I sat up; Ruth still slept, breathing peacefully beneath the cloak, one white arm stretched over the shoulder of Drake--as though in her sleep she had drawn close to him.
	At her feet lay Ventnor, as deep in slumber as they. I arose and tip-toed over to the closed door.
	Searching, I found its key; a cupped indentation upon which I pressed.
	The crystalline panel slipped back; it was moved, I suppose, by some mechanism of counterbalances responding to the weight of the hand. It must have been some vibration of the thunder which had loosed that mechanism and had closed the panel upon the heels of our entrance  --so I thought--then seeing again in memory that uncanny, deliberate shutting was not at all convinced that it had been the thunder.
	I looked out. How many hours the sun had been up there was no means of knowing.
	The sky was low and slaty gray; a fine rain was falling. I stepped out.
	The garden of Norhala was a wreckage of uprooted and splintered trees and torn masses of what had been blossoming verdure.
	The gateway of the precipices beyond which lay the Pit was hidden in the webs of the rain. Long I gazed down the canyon--and longingly; striving to picture what the Pit now held; eager to read the riddles of the night.
	There came from the valley no sound, no movement, no light.
	I reentered the blue globe and paused on the threshold --staring into the wide and wondering eyes of Ruth bolt upright in her silken bed with Norhala's cloak clutched to her chin like a suddenly awakened and startled child. As she glimpsed me she stretched out her hand. Drake, wide awake on the instant, leaped to his feet, his hand jumping to his pistol.
	"Dick!" called Ruth, her voice tremulous, sweet.
	He swung about, looked deep into the clear and fearless brown eyes in which--with leaping heart I realized it --was throned only that spirit which was Ruth's and Ruth's alone; Ruth's clear unshadowed eyes glad and shy and soft with love.
	"Dick!" she whispered, and held soft arms out to him. The cloak fell from her. He swung her up. Their lips met.
	Upon them, embraced, the wakening eyes of Ventnor dwelt; they filled with relief and joy, nor was there lacking in them a certain amusement.
	She drew from Drake's arms, pushed him from her, stood for a moment shakily, with covered eyes.
	"Ruth," called Ventnor softly.
	"Oh!" she cried. "Oh, Martin--I forgot--" She ran to him, held him tight, face hidden in his breast. His hand rested on the clustering brown curls, tenderly.
	"Martin." She raised her face to him. "Martin, it's GONE! I'm--ME again! All ME! What happened? Where's Norhala?"
	I started. Did she not know? Of course, lying bound as she had in the vanished veils, she could have seen nothing of the stupendous tragedy enacted beyond them --but had not Ventnor said that possessed by the inexplicable obsession evoked by the weird woman Ruth had seen with her eyes, thought with her mind?
	And had there not been evidence that in her body had been echoed the torments of Norhala's? Had she forgotten? I started to speak--was checked by Ventnor's swift, warning glance.
	"She's--over in the Pit," he answered her quietly. "But do you remember nothing, little sister?"
	"There's something in my mind that's been rubbed out," she replied. "I remember the City of Cherkis--and your torture, Martin--and my torture--"
	Her face whitened; Ventnor's brow contracted anxiously. I knew for what he watched--but Ruth's shamed face was all human; on it was no shadow nor trace of that alien soul which so few hours since had threatened us.
	"Yes," she nodded, "I remember that. And I remember how Norhala repaid them. I remember that I was glad, fiercely glad, and then I was tired--so tired. And then--I come to the rubbed-out place," she ended perplexedly.
	Deliberately, almost banally had I not realized his purpose, he changed the subject. He held her from him at arm's length.
	"Ruth!" he exclaimed, half mockingly, half reprovingly. "Don't you think your morning negligee is just a little scanty even for this Godforsaken corner of the earth?"
	Lips parted in sheer astonishment, she looked at him. Then her eyes dropped to her bare feet, her dimpled knees. She clasped her arms across her breasts; rosy red turned all her fair skin.
	"Oh!" she gasped. "Oh!" And hid from Drake and me behind the tall figure of her brother.
	I walked over to the pile of silken stuffs, took the cloak and tossed it to her. Ventnor pointed to the saddlebags.
	"You've another outfit there, Ruth," he said. "We'll take a turn through the place. Call us when you're ready. We'll get something to eat and go see what's happening--out there."
	She nodded. We passed through the curtains and out of the hall into the chamber that had been Norhala's. There we halted, Drake eyeing Martin with a certain embarrassment. The older man thrust out his hand to him.
	"I knew it, Drake," he said. "Ruth told me all about it when Cherkis had us. And I'm very glad. It's time she was having a home of her own and not running around the lost places with me. I'll miss her--miss her damnably, of course. But I'm glad, boy--glad!"
	There was a little silence while each looked deep into each other's hearts. Then Ventnor dropped Dick's hand.
	"And that's all of THAT," he said. "The problem before us is--how are we going to get back home?"
	"The--THING--is dead." I spoke from an absolute conviction that surprised me, based as it was upon no really tangible, known evidence.
	"I think so," he said. "No--I KNOW so. Yet even if we can pass over its body, how can we climb out of its lair? That slide down which we rode with Norhala is unclimbable. The walls are unscalable. And there is that chasm--she-- spanned for us. How can we cross THAT? The  tunnel to the ruins was sealed. There remains of possible roads the way through the forest to what was the City of Cherkis. Frankly I am loathe to take it.
	"I am not at all sure that all the armored men were slain--that some few may not have escaped and be lurking there. It would be short shrift for us if we fell into their hands now."
	"And I'm not sure of THAT," objected Drake. "I think their pep and push must be pretty thoroughly knocked out --if any do remain. I think if they saw us coming they'd beat it so fast that they'd smoke with the friction."
	"There's something to that," Ventnor smiled. "Still I'm not keen on taking the chance. At any rate, the first thing to do is to see what happened down there in the Pit. Maybe we'll have some other idea after that."
	"I know what happened there," announced Drake, surprisingly. "It was a short circuit!"
	We gaped at him, mystified.
	"Burned out!" said Drake. "Every damned one of them --burned out. What were they, after all? A lot of living dynamos. Dynamotors--rather. And all of a sudden they had too much juice turned on. Bang went their insulations --whatever they were.
	"Bang went they. Burned out--short circuited. I don't pretend to know why or how. Nonsense! I do know. The cones were some kind of immensely concentrated force-- electric, magnetic; either or both or more. I myself believe that they were probably solid--in a way of speaking --coronium.
	"If about twenty of the greatest scientists the world has ever known are right, coronium is--well, call it curdled energy. The electric potentiality of Niagara in a pin point of dust of yellow fire. All right--they or IT lost control. Every pin point swelled out into a Niagara. And as it did so, it expanded from a controlled dust dot to an uncontrolled cataract--in other words, its energy was unleashed and undammed.
	"Very well--what followed? What HAD to follow? Every living battery of block and globe and spike was supercharged and went--blooey. The valley must have been some sweet little volcano while that short circuiting was going on. All right--let's go down and see what it did to your unclimbable slide and unscalable walls, Ventnor. I'm not sure we won't be able to get out that way."
	"Come on; everything's ready," Ruth was calling; her summoning blocked any objection we might have raised to Drake's argument.
	It was no dryad, no distressed pagan clad maid we saw as we passed back into the room of the pool. In knickerbockers and short skirt, prim and self-possessed, rebellious curls held severely in place by close-fitting cap and slender feet stoutly shod, Ruth hovered over the steaming kettle swung above the spirit lamp.
	And she was very silent as we hastily broke fast. Nor when we had finished did she go to Drake. She clung close to her brother and beside him as we set forth down the roadway, through the rain, toward the ledge between the cliffs where the veils had shimmered.
	Hotter and hotter it grew as we advanced; the air steamed like a Turkish bath. The mists clustered so thickly that at last we groped forward step by step, holding to each other.
	"No use," gasped Ventnor. "We couldn't see. We'll have to turn back."
	"Burned out!" said Dick. "Didn't I tell you? The whole valley was a volcano. And with that deluge falling in it--why wouldn't there be a fog? It's why there IS a fog. We'll have to wait until it clears."
	We trudged back to the blue globe.
	All that day the rain fell. Throughout the few remaining hours of daylight we wandered over the house of Norhala, examining its most interesting contents, or sat theorizing, discussing all phases of the phenomena we had witnessed.
	We told Ruth what had occurred after she had thrown in her lot with Norhala; and of the enigmatic struggle between the glorious Disk and the sullenly flaming Thing I have called the Keeper.
	We told her of the entombment of Norhala.
	When she heard that she wept.
	"She was sweet," she sobbed; "she was lovely. And she was beautiful. Dearly she loved me. I KNOW she loved me. Oh, I know that we and ours and that which was hers could not share the world together. But it comes to me that Earth would have been far less poisonous with those that were Norhala's than it is with us and ours!"
	Weeping, she passed through the curtainings, going we knew to Norhala's chamber.
	It was a strange thing indeed that she had said, I thought, watching her go. That the garden of the world would be far less poisonous blossoming with those Things of wedded crystal and metal and magnetic fires than fertile as now with us of flesh and blood and bone. To me came appreciations of their harmonies, and mingled with those perceptions were others of humanity--disharmonious, incoordinate, ever struggling, ever striving to destroy itself--
	There was a plaintive whinnying at the open door. A long and hairy face, a pair of patient, inquiring eyes looked in. It was a pony. For a moment it regarded us--and then trotted trustfully through; ambled up to us; poked its head against my side.
	It had been ridden by one of the Persians whom Ruth had killed, for under it, slipped from the girths, a saddle dangled. And its owner must have been kind to it--we knew that from its lack of fear for us. Driven by the tempest of the night before, it had been led back by instinct to the protection of man.
	"Some luck!" breathed Drake.
	He busied himself with the pony, stripping away the hanging saddle, grooming it.


CHAPTER XXXI.
SLAG!

	That night we slept well. Awakening, we found that the storm had grown violent again; the wind roaring and the rain falling in such volume that it was impossible to make our way to the Pit. Twice, as a matter of fact, we tried; but the smooth roadway was a torrent, and, drenched even through our oils to the skin, we at last abandoned the attempt. Ruth and Drake drifted away together among the other chambers of the globe; they were absorbed in themselves, and we did not thrust ourselves upon them. All the day the torrents fell.
	We sat down that night to what was well-nigh the last of Ventnor's stores. Seemingly Ruth had forgotten Norhala; at least, she spoke no more of her.
	"Martin," she said, "can't we start back tomorrow? I want to get away. I want to get back to our own world."
	"As soon as the storm ceases, Ruth," he answered, "we start. Little sister--I too want you to get back quickly."
	The next morning the storm had gone. We awakened soon after dawn into clear and brilliant light. We had a silent and hurried breakfast. The saddlebags were packed and strapped upon the pony. Within them were what we could carry of souvenirs from Norhala's home--a suit of  lacquered armor, a pair of cloaks and sandals, the jeweled combs. Ruth and Drake at the side of the pony, Ventnor and I leading, we set forth toward the Pit.
	"We'll probably have to come back, Walter," he said. "I don't believe the place is passable."
	I pointed--we were then just over the threshold of the elfin globe. Where the veils had stretched between the perpendicular pillars of the cliffs was now a wide and ragged-edged opening.
	The roadway which had run so smoothly through the scarps was blocked by a thousand foot barrier. Over it, beyond it, I could see through the crystalline clarity of the air the opposing walls.
	"We can climb it," Ventnor said. We passed on and reached the base of the barrier. An avalanche had dropped there; the barricade was the debris of the torn cliffs, their dust, their pebbles, their boulders. We toiled up; we reached the crest; we looked down upon the valley.
	When first we had seen it we had gazed upon a sea of radiance pierced with lanced forests, swept with gigantic gonfalons of flame; we had seen it emptied of its fiery mists--a vast slate covered with the chirography of a mathematical god; we had seen it filled with the symboling of the Metal Hordes and dominated by the colossal integrate hieroglyph of the living City; we had seen it as a radiant lake over which brooded weird suns; a lake of yellow flame froth upon which a sparkling hail fell, within which reared islanded towers and a drowning mount running with cataracts of sun fires; here we had  watched a goddess woman, a being half of earth, half of the unknown immured within a living tomb--a dying tomb--of flaming mysteries; had seen a cross-shaped metal Satan, a sullen flaming crystal Judas betray--itself.
	Where we had peered into the unfathomable, had glimpsed the infinite, had heard and had seen the inexplicable, now was--
	Slag!
	The amethystine ring from which had been streamed the circling veils was cracked and blackened; like a seam of coal it had stretched around the Pit--a crown of mourning. The veils were gone. The floor of the valley was fissured and blackened; its patterns, its writings  burned away. As far as we could see stretched a sea of slag--coal black, vitrified and dead.
	Here and there black hillocks sprawled; huge pillars arose, bent and twisted as though they had been jettings of lava cooled into rigidity before they could sink back or break. These shapes clustered most thickly around an immense calcified mound. They were what were left of the battling Hordes, and the mound was what had been the Metal Monster.
	Somewhere there were the ashes of Norhala, sealed by fire in the urn of the Metal Emperor!
	From side to side of the Pit, in broken beaches and waves and hummocks, in blackened, distorted tusks and warped towerings, reaching with hideous pathos in thousands of forms toward the charred mound, was only slag.
	From rifts and hollows still filled with water little wreaths of steam drifted. In those futile wraiths of vapor was all that remained of the might of the Metal Monster.
	Catastrophe I had expected, tragedy I knew we would find--but I had looked for nothing so filled with the abomination of desolation, so frightful as was this.
	"Burned out!" muttered Drake. "Short-circuited and burned out! Like a dynamo--like an electric light!"
	"Destiny!" said Ventnor. "Destiny! Not yet was the hour struck for man to relinquish his sovereignty over the world. Destiny!"
	We began to pick our way down the heaped debris and out upon the plain. For all that day and part of another we searched for an opening out of the Pit.
	Everywhere was the incredible calcification. The surfaces that had been the smooth metallic carapaces with the tiny eyes deep within them, crumbled beneath the lightest blow. Not long would it be until under wind and rain they dissolved into dust and mud.
	And it grew increasingly obvious that Drake's theory of the destruction was correct. The Monster had been one prodigious magnet--or, rather, a prodigious dynamo. By magnetism, by electricity, it had lived and had been activated.
	Whatever the force of which the cones were built and that I have likened to energy-made material, it was certainly akin to electromagnetic energies.
	When, in the cataclysm, that force was diffused there had been created a magnetic field of incredible intensity; had been concentrated an electric charge of inconceivable magnitude.
	Discharging, it had blasted the Monster--short-circuited it, and burned it out.
	But what was it that had led up to the cataclysm? What was it that had turned the Metal Monster upon itself? What disharmony had crept into that supernal order to set in motion the machinery of disintegration?
	We could only conjecture. The cruciform Shape I have named the Keeper was the agent of destruction--of that there could be no doubt. In the enigmatic organism which while many still was one and which, retaining its integrity as a whole could dissociate manifold parts yet  still as a whole maintain an unseen contact and direction over them through miles of space, the Keeper had its place, its work, its duties.
	So too had that wondrous Disk whose visible and concentrate power, whose manifest leadership, had made us name it emperor.
	And had not Norhala called the Disk--Ruler?
	What were the responsibilities of these twain to the mass of the organism of which they were such important units? What were the laws they administered, the laws they must obey?
	Something certainly of that mysterious law which Maeterlinck has called the spirit of the Hive--and something infinitely greater, like that which governs the swarming sun bees of Hercules' clustered orbs.
	Had there evolved within the Keeper of the Cones-- guardian and engineer as it seemed to have been--ambition?
	Had there risen within it a determination to wrest power from the Disk, to take its place as Ruler?
	How else explain that conflict I had sensed when the Emperor had plucked Drake and me from the Keeper's grip that night following the orgy of the feeding?
	How else explain that duel in the shattered Hall of the Cones whose end had been the signal for the final cataclysm?
	How else explain the alinement of the cubes behind the Keeper against the globes and pyramids remaining loyal to the will of the Disk?
	We discussed this, Ventnor and I.
	"This world," he mused, "is a place of struggle. Air and sea and land and all things that dwell within and on them must battle for life. Earth not Mars is the planet of war. I have a theory"--he hesitated--"that the magnetic currents which are the nerve force of this globe of ours were what fed the Metal Things.
	"Within those currents is the spirit of earth. And always they have been supercharged with strife, with hatreds, warfare. Were these drawn in by the Things as they fed? Did it happen that the Keeper became--TUNED --to them? That it absorbed and responded to them,  growing even more sensitive to these forces--until it reflected humanity?"
	"Who knows, Goodwin--who can tell?"
	Enigma, unless the explanations I have hazarded be accepted, must remain that monstrous suicide. Enigma, save for inconclusive theories, must remain the question of the Monster's origin.
	If answers there were, they were lost forever in the slag we trod.
	It was afternoon of the second day that we found a rift in the blasted wall of the valley. We decided to try it. We had not dared to take the road by which Norhala had led us into the City.
	The giant slide was broken and climbable. But even if we could have passed safely through the tunnel of the abyss there still was left the chasm over which we could have thrown no bridge. And if we could have bridged it still at that road's end was the cliff whose shaft Norhala had sealed with her lightnings.
	So we entered the rift.
	Of our wanderings thereafter I need not write. From the rift we emerged into a maze of the valleys, and after
	a month in that wilderness, living upon what game we could shoot, we found a road that led us into Gyantse.
	In another six weeks we were home in America.
	My story is finished.
	There in the Trans-Himalayan wilderness is the blue globe that was the weird home of the lightning witch--and looking back I feel now she could not have been all woman.
	There is the vast pit with its coronet of fantastic peaks; its symboled, calcined floor and the crumbling body of the inexplicable, the incredible Thing which, alive, was the shadow of extinction, annihilation, hovering to hurl itself upon humanity. That shadow is gone; that pall withdrawn.
	But to me--to each of us four who saw those phenomena-- their lesson remains, ineradicable; giving a new strength and purpose to us, teaching us a new humility.
	For in that vast crucible of life of which we are so small a part, what other Shapes may even now be rising to submerge us?
	In that vast reservoir of force that is the mystery-filled  infinite through which we roll, what other shadows may be speeding upon us?
	Who knows?
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çá £ž5¸}ê¡0`¢Jp›¬%û»]ÔIJî>.Ö¯¾u/g,Ô§DL«üï‡yizD^]ÉèXE©äÆßò½ô~€ÉNXT
nºôŠ	ê£Cöó�T‡dÕ`# PÙy2DÛX4¾}{÷{/{æÏïØi]’Ó¯c*rÓR� âåh­\ïoDq%aR`¤Al¦*RAy(Öœ¡bt^'ºc€ú�,T
Á€±P,¤	ÁA¨DëÎbd©œnªËÜ&MPTœEE®?;ôuåÃvÌ?éÃÝW¿«?˜?óòhU™·í]'ï�ÖœŽ2Üã�ïüßë·mð»e‰-kU›i¦PÓ�÷í.�svW]“äùu$�<¡¢t§Uæ©“The Moon Pool
A. MERRITT
AVON PUBLISHERS OF BARD, CAMELOT AND DISCUS BOOKS
Cover illustration by Rodney Matthews
Complete and Unabridged
Copyright (c) 1919 by A. Merritt
Published by arrangement with The Liveright Publishing Corp.
First Avon Printing, 1951
Third Printing

Foreword

	The publication of the following narrative of Dr. Walter T. Goodwin has been authorized by the Executive Council of the International Association of Science.
	First:
	To end officially what is beginning to be called the Throckmartin Mystery and to kill the innuendo and scandalous suspicions which have threatened to stain the reputations of Dr. David Throckmartin, his youthful wife, and equally youthful associate Dr. Charles Stanton ever since a tardy despatch from Melbourne, Australia, reported the disappearance of the first from a ship sailing to that port, and the subsequent reports of the disappearance of his wife and associate from the camp of their expedition in the Caroline Islands.
	Second:
	Because the Executive Council have concluded that Dr. Goodwin's experiences in his wholly heroic effort to save the three, and the lessons and warnings within those experiences, are too important to humanity as a whole to be hidden away in scientific papers understandable only to the technically educated; or to be presented through the newspaper press in the abridged and fragmentary form which the space limitations of that vehicle make necessary.
	For these reasons the Executive Council commissioned Mr. A. Merritt to transcribe into form to be readily understood by the layman the stenographic notes of Dr. Goodwin's own report to the Council, supplemented by further oral reminiscences and comments by Dr. Goodwin; this transcription, edited and censored by the Executive Council of the Association, forms the contents of this book.
	Himself a member of the Council, Dr. Walter T. Good  win, Ph.D., F.R.G.S. etc., is without cavil the foremost of American botanists, an observer of international reputation and the author of several epochal treaties upon his chosen branch of science. His story, amazing in the best sense of that word as it may be, is fully supported by proofs brought forward by him and accepted by the organization of which I have the honor to be president. What matter has been elided from this popular presentation - because of the excessively menacing potentialities it contains, which unrestricted dissemination might develop - will be dealt with in purely scientific pamphlets of carefully guarded circulation.

THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF SCIENCE
Per J. B. K., President

CHAPTER I
The Thing on the Moon Path

	FOR two months I had been on the d'Entrecasteaux Islands gathering data for the concluding chapters of my book upon the flora of the volcanic islands of the South Pacific. The day before I had reached Port Moresby and had seen my specimens safely stored on board the Southern Queen. As I sat on the upper deck I thought, with homesick mind, of the long leagues between me and Melbourne, and the longer ones between Melbourne and New York.
	It was one of Papua's yellow mornings when she shows herself in her sombrest, most baleful mood. The sky was smouldering ochre. Over the island brooded a spirit sullen, alien, implacable, filled with the threat of latent, malefic forces waiting to be unleashed. It seemed an emanation out of the untamed, sinister heart of Papua herself - sinister even when she smiles. And now and then, on the wind, came a breath from virgin jungles, laden with unfamiliar odours, mysterious and menacing.
	It is on such mornings that Papua whispers to you of her immemorial ancientness and of her power. And, as every white man must, I fought against her spell. While I struggled I saw a tall figure striding down the pier; a KapaKapa boy followed swinging a new valise. There was something familiar about the tall man. As he reached the gangplank he looked up straight into my eyes, stared for a moment, then waved his hand.
	And now I knew him. It was Dr. David Throckmartin - "Throck" he was to me always, one of my oldest friends and, as well, a mind of the first water whose power and achievements were for me a constant inspiration as they were, I know, for scores other.
	Coincidentally with my recognition came a shock of surprise, definitely - unpleasant. It was Throckmartin - but about him was something disturbingly unlike the man I had known long so well and to whom and to whose little party I had bidden farewell less than a month before I myself had sailed for these seas. He had married only a few weeks before, Edith, the daughter of Professor William Frazier, younger by at least a decade than he but at one with him in his ideals and as much in love, if it were possible, as Throckmartin. By virtue of her father's training a wonderful assistant, by virtue of her own sweet, sound heart a - I use the word in its olden sense - lover. With his equally youthful associate Dr. Charles Stanton and a Swedish woman, Thora Halversen, who had been Edith Throckmartin's nurse from babyhood, they had set forth for the NanMatal, that extraordinary group of island ruins clustered along the eastern shore of Ponape in the Carolines.
	I knew that he had planned to spend at least a year among these ruins, not only of Ponape but of Lele - twin centres of a colossal riddle of humanity, a weird flower of civilization that blossomed ages before the seeds of Egypt were sown; of whose arts we know little enough and of whose science nothing. He had carried with him unusually complete equipment for the work he had expected to do and which, he hoped, would be his monument.
	What then had brought Throckmartin to Port Moresby, and what was that change I had sensed in him?
	Hurrying down to the lower deck I found him with the purser. As I spoke he turned, thrust out to me an eager hand - and then I saw what was that difference that had so moved me. He knew, of course by my silence and involuntary shrinking the shock my closer look had given me. His eyes filled; he turned brusquely from the purser, hesitated - then hurried off to his stateroom.
	"'E looks rather queer - eh?" said the purser. "Know 'im well, sir? Seems to 'ave given you quite a start."
	I made some reply and went slowly up to my chair. There I sat, composed my mind and tried to define what it was that had shaken me so. Now it came to me. The old Throckmartin was on the eve of his venture just turned forty, lithe, erect, muscular; his controlling expression one of enthusiasm, of intellectual keenness, of - what shall I say  - expectant search. His always questioning brain had stamped its vigor upon his face.
	But the Throckmartin I had seen below was one who had borne some scaring shock of mingled rapture and horror; some soul cataclysm that in its climax had remoulded, deep from within, his face, setting on it seal of wedded ecstasy and despair; as though indeed these two had come to him hand in hand, taken possession of him and departing left behind, ineradicably, their linked shadows!
	Yes - it was that which appalled. For how could rapture and horror, Heaven and Hell mix, clasp hands - kiss?
	Yet these were what in closest embrace lay on Throckmartin's face!
	Deep in thought, subconsciously with relief, I watched the shore line sink behind; welcomed the touch of the wind of the free seas. I had hoped, and within the hope was an inexplicable shrinking that I would meet Throckmartin at lunch. He did not come down, and I was sensible of deliverance within my disappointment. All that afternoon I lounged about uneasily but still he kept to his cabin - and within me was no strength to summon him. Nor did he appear at dinner.
	Dusk and night fell swiftly. I was warm and went back to my deckchair. The Southern Queen was rolling to a disquieting swell and I had the place to myself.
	Over the heavens was a canopy of cloud, glowing faintly and testifying to the moon riding behind it. There was much phosphorescence. Fitfully before the ship and at her sides arose those stranger little swirls of mist that swirl up from the Southern Ocean like breath of sea monsters, whirl for an instant and disappear.
	 Suddenly the deck door opened and through it came Throckmartin. He paused uncertainly, looked up at the sky with a curiously eager, intent gaze, hesitated, then closed the door behind him.
	 "Throck," I called. "Come! It's Goodwin."
	 He made his way to me.
	 "Throck," I said, wasting no time in preliminaries. "What's wrong? Can I help you?"
	 I felt his body grow tense.
	 "I'm going to Melbourne, Goodwin," he answered. "I need a few things - need them urgently. And more men - white men - "
	He stopped abruptly; rose from his chair, gazed intently toward the north. I followed his gaze. Far, far away the moon had broken through the clouds. Almost on the horizon, you could see the faint luminescence of it upon the smooth sea. The distant patch of light quivered and shook. The clouds thickened again and it was gone. The ship raced on southward, swiftly.
	Throckmartin dropped into his chair. He lighted a cigarette with a hand that trembled; then turned to me with abrupt resolution.
	"Goodwin," he said. "I do need help. If ever man needed it, I do. Goodwin - can you imagine yourself in another world, alien, unfamiliar, a world of terror, whose unknown joy is its greatest terror of all; you all alone there, a stranger! As such a man would need help, so I need - "
	He paused abruptly and arose; the cigarette dropped from his fingers. The moon had again broken through the clouds, and this time much nearer. Not a mile away was the patch of light that it threw upon the waves. Back of it, to the rim of the sea was a lane of moonlight; a gigantic gleaming serpent racing over the edge of the world straight and surely toward the ship.
	Throckmartin stiffened to it as a pointer does to a hidden covey. To me from him pulsed a thrill of horror - but horror tinged with an unfamiliar, an infernal joy. It came to me and passed away - leaving me trembling with its shock of bitter sweet.
	He bent forward, all his soul in his eyes. The moon path swept closer, closer still. It was now less than half a mile away. From it the ship fled - almost as though pursued. Down upon it, swift and straight, a radiant torrent cleaving the waves, raced the moon stream.
	"Good God!" breathed Throckmartin, and if ever the words were a prayer and an invocation they were.
	And then, for the first time - I saw - it!
	The moon path stretched to the horizon and was bordered by darkness. It was as though the clouds above had been parted to form a lanedrawn aside like curtains or as the waters of the Red Sea were held back to let the hosts of Israel through. On each side of the stream was the black  shadow cast by the folds of the high canopies And straight as a road between the opaque walls gleamed, shimmered, and danced the shining, racing, rapids of the moonlight
	Far, it seemed immeasurably far, along this stream of silver fire I sensed, rather than saw, something coming. It drew first into sight as a deeper glow within the light. On and on it swept toward us - an opalescent mistiness that sped with the suggestion of some winged creature in arrowed flight. Dimly there crept into my mind memory of the Dyak legend of the winged messenger of Buddha - the Akla bird whose feathers are woven of the moon rays, whose heart is a living opal, whose wings in flight echo the crystal clear music of the white stars - but whose beak is of frozen flame and shreds the souls of unbelievers.
	Closer it drew and now there came to me sweet, insistent tinklings - like pizzicati on violins of glass; crystal clear; diamonds melting into sounds!
	Now the Thing was close to the end of the white path; close up to the barrier of darkness still between the ship and the sparkling head of the moon stream. Now it beat up against that barrier as a bird against the bars of its cage. It whirled with shimmering plumes, with swirls of lacy light, with spirals of living vapour. It held within it odd, unfamiliar gleams as of shifting motherofpearl. Coruscations and glittering atoms drifted through it as though it drew them from the rays that bathed it.
	Nearer and nearer it came, borne on the sparkling waves, and ever thinner shrank the protecting wall of shadow between it and us. Within the mistiness was a core, a nucleus of intenser light - veined, opaline, effulgent, intensely alive. And above it, tangled in the plumes and spirals that throbbed and whirled were seven glowing lights.
	Through all the incessant but strangely ordered movement of the - thing - these lights held firm and steady. They were seven - like seven little moons. One was of a pearly pink, one of a delicate nacreous blue, one of lambent saffron, one of the emerald you see in the shallow waters of tropic isles; a deathly white; a ghostly amethyst; and one of the silver that is seen only when the flying fish leap beneath the moon.
	The tinkling music was louder still. It pierced the ears with a shower of tiny lances; it made the heart beat jubi  lantly - and checked it dolorously. It closed the throat with a throb of rapture and gripped it tight with the hand of infinite sorrow!
	Came to me now a murmuring cry, stilling the crystal notes. It was articulate - but as though from something utterly foreign to this world. The ear took the cry and translated with conscious labour into the sounds of earth. And even as it compassed, the brain shrank from it irresistibly, and simultaneously it seemed reached toward it with irresistible eagerness.
	Throckmartin strode toward the front of the deck, straight toward the vision, now but a few yards away from the stern. His face had lost all human semblance. Utter agony and utter ecstasy - there they were side by side, not resisting each other; unholy inhuman companions blending into a look that none of God's creatures should wear - and deep, deep as his soul! A devil and a God dwelling harmoniously side by side! So must Satan, newly fallen, still divine, seeing heaven and contemplating hell, have appeared.
	And then - swiftly the moon path faded! The clouds swept over the sky as though a hand had drawn them together. Up from the south came a roaring squall. As the moon vanished what I had seen vanished with it - blotted out as an image on a magic lantern; the tinkling ceased abruptly - leaving a silence like that which follows an abrupt thunder clap. There was nothing about us but silence and blackness!
	Through me passed a trembling as one who has stood on the very verge of the gulf wherein the men of the Louisades says lurks the fisher of the souls of men, and has been plucked back by sheerest chance.
	Throckmartin passed an arm around me.
	"It is as I thought," he said. In his voice was a new note; the calm certainty that has swept aside a waiting terror of the unknown. "Now I know! Come with me to my cabin, old friend. For now that you too have seen I can tell you" - he hesitated - "what it was you saw," he ended.
	As we passed through the door we met the ship's first officer. Throckmartin composed his face into at least a semblance of normality.
	 "Going to have much of a storm?" he asked.
	  "Yes," said the mate. "Probably all the way to Melbourne."
	Throckmartin straightened as though with a new thought. He gripped the officer's sleeve eagerly.
	"You mean at least cloudy weather - for" - he hesitated - "for the next three nights, say?"
	 "And for three more," replied the mate.
	"Thank God!" cried Throckmartin, and I think I never heard such relief and hope as was in his voice.
	 The sailor stood amazed. "Thank God?" he repeated. "Thank - what d'ye mean?"
	But Throckmartin was moving onward to his cabin. I started to follow. The first officer stopped me.
	 "Your friend," he said, "is he ill?"
	"The sea!" I answered hurriedly. "He's not used to it. I am going to look after him."
	Doubt and disbelief were plain in the seaman's eyes but I hurried on. For I knew now that Throckmartin was ill indeed - but with a sickness the ship's doctor nor any other could heal.


CHAPTER II
"Dead! All Dead!"

	HE WAS SITTING, face in hands, on the side of his berth as I entered. He had taken off his coat.
	"Throck," I cried. "What was it? What are you flying from, man? Where is your wife - and Stanton?"
	"Dead!" he replied monotonously. "Dead! All dead!" Then as I recoiled from him - "All dead. Edith, Stanton, Thora - dead - or worse. And Edith in the Moon Pool - with them - drawn by what you saw on the moon path - that has put its brand upon me - and follows me!"
	He ripped open his shirt.
	"Look at this," he said. Around his chest, above his heart, the skin was white as pearl. This whiteness was sharply defined against the healthy tint of the body. It circled him with an even cincture about two inches wide.
	"Burn it!" he said, and offered me his cigarette. I drew back. He gestured - peremptorily. I pressed the glowing end of the cigarette into the ribbon of white flesh. He did not flinch nor was there odour of burning nor, as I drew the little cylinder away, any mark upon the whiteness.
	"Feel it!" he commanded again. I placed my fingers upon the band. It was cold - like frozen marble.
	He drew his shirt around him.
	"Two things you have seen," he said. "It - and its mark. Seeing, you must believe my story. Goodwin, I tell you again that my wife is dead - or worse - I do not know; the prey of - what you saw; so, too, is Stanton; so Thora. How - "
	Tears rolled down the seared face.
	"Why did God let it conquer us? Why did He let it take my Edith?" he cried in utter bitterness. "Are there things stronger than God, do you think, Walter?"
	 I hesitated. 
	 "Are there? Are there?" His wild eyes searched me.
	"I do not know just how you define God," I managed at last through my astonishment to make answer. "If you mean the will to know, working through science - "
	He waved me aside impatiently.
	"Science," he said. "What is our science against - that? Or against the science of whatever devils that made it - or made the way for it to enter this world of ours?"
	With an effort he regained control.
	"Goodwin," he said, "do you know at all of the ruins on the Carolines; the cyclopean, megalithic cities and harbours of Ponape and Lele, of Kusaie, of Ruk and Hogolu, and a score of other islets there? Particularly, do you know of the NanMatal and the Metalanim?"
	"Of the Metalanim I have heard and seen photographs," I said. "They call it, don't they, the Lost Venice of the Pacific?"
	"Look at this map," said Throckmartin. "That," he went on, "is Christian's chart of Metalanim harbour and the NanMatal. Do you see the rectangles marked NanTauach?"
	"Yes," I said.
	"There," he said, "under those walls is the Moon Pool and the seven gleaming lights that raise the Dweller in the Pool, and the altar and shrine of the Dweller. And there in the Moon Pool with it lie Edith and Stanton and Thora."
	 "The Dweller in the Moon Pool?" I repeated halfincredulously.
	 "The Thing you saw," said Throckmartin solemnly.
	A solid sheet of rain swept the ports, and the Southern Queen began to roll on the rising swells. Throckmartin drew another deep breath of relief, and drawing aside a curtain peered out into the night. Its blackness seemed to reassure him. At any rate, when he sat again he was entirely calm.
	"There are no more wonderful ruins in the world," he began almost casually. "They take in some fifty islets and cover with their intersecting canals and lagoons about twelve square miles. Who built them? None knows. When were they built? Ages before the memory of present man, that is sure. Ten thousand, twenty thousand, a hundred thousand years ago - the last more likely.
	"All these islets, Walter, are squared, and their shores are   frowning seawalls of gigantic basalt blocks hewn and put in place by the hands of ancient man. Each inner waterfront is faced with a terrace of those basalt blocks which stand out six feet above the shallow canals that meander between them. On the islets behind these walls are timeshattered fortresses, palaces, terraces, pyramids; immense courtyards strewn with ruins - and all so old that they seem to wither the eyes of those who look on them.
	"There has been a great subsidence. You can stand out of Metalanim harbour for three miles and look down upon the tops of similar monolithic structures and walls twenty feet below you in the water.
	"And all about, strung on their canals, are the bulwarked islets with their enigmatic walls peering through the dense growths of mangroves - dead, deserted for incalculable ages; shunned by those who live near.
	"You as a botanist are familiar with the evidence that a vast shadowy continent existed in the Pacific - a continent that was not rent asunder by volcanic forces as was that legendary one of Atlantis in the Eastern Ocean. 1 My work in Java, in Papua, and in the Ladrones had set my mind upon this Pacific lost land. Just as the Azores are believed to be the last high peaks of Atlantis, so hints came to me steadily that Ponape and Lele and their basalt bulwarked islets were the last points of the slowly sunken western land clinging still to the sunlight, and had been the last refuge and sacred places of the rulers of that race which had lost their immemorial home under the rising waters of the Pacific.
	"I believed that under these ruins I might find the evidence that I sought.
	"My - my wife and I had talked before we were married of making this our great work. After the honeymoon we prepared for the expedition. Stanton was as enthusiastic as ourselves. We sailed, as you know, last May for fulfilment of my dreams.
	 "At Ponape we selected, not without difficulty, workmen   to help us - diggers. I had to make extraordinary inducements before I could get together my force. Their beliefs are gloomy, these Ponapeans. They people their swamps, their forests, their mountains, and shores, with malignant spirits - ani they call them. And they are afraid - bitterly afraid of the isles of ruins and what they think the ruins hide. I do not wonder - now!
	"When they were told where they were to go, and how long we expected to stay, they murmured. Those who, at last, were tempted made what I thought then merely a superstitious proviso that they were to be allowed to go away on the three nights of the full moon. Would to God we had heeded them and gone too!"
	"We passed into Metalanim harbour. Off to our left - a mile away arose a massive quadrangle. Its walls were all of forty feet high and hundreds of feet on each side. As we drew by, our natives grew very silent; watched it furtively, fearfully. I knew it for the ruins that are called NanTauach, the 'place of frowning walls.' And at the silence of my men I recalled what Christian had written of this place; of how he had come upon its 'ancient platforms and tetragonal enclosures of stonework; its wonder of tortuous alleyways and labyrinth of shallow canals; grim masses of stonework peering out from behind verdant screens; cyclopean barricades,' and of how, when he had turned 'into its ghostly shadows, straightway the merriment of guides was hushed and conversation died down to whispers.'
	He was silent for a little time.
	"Of course I wanted to pitch our camp there," he went on again quietly, "but I soon gave up that idea. The natives were panicstricken - threatened to turn back. 'No,' they said, 'too great ani there. We go to any other place - but not there.'
	"We finally picked for our base the islet called UschenTau. It was close to the isle of desire, but far enough away from it to satisfy our men. There was an excellent campingplace and a spring of fresh water. We pitched our tents, and in a couple of days the work was in full swing."  [1] For more detailed observations on these points refer to G. Volkens, Uber die Karolinen Insel Yap, in Verhandlungen Gesellschaft Erdkunde Berlin, xxvii (1901); J. S. Kubary, Ethnographische Beitrage zur Kentniss des Karolinen Archipel (Leiden, 18891892); De Abrade Historia del Conflicto de las Carolinas, etc. (Madrid, 1886). - W. T. G.


CHAPTER III
The Moon Rock

	"I DO not intend to tell you now," Throckmartin continued, "the results of the next two weeks, nor of what we found. Later - if I am allowed, I will lay all that before you. It is sufficient to say that at the end of those two weeks I had found confirmation for many of my theories.
	"The place, for all its decay and desolation, had not infected us with any touch of morbidity - that is not Edith, Stanton, or myself. But Thora was very unhappy. She was a Swede, as you know, and in her blood ran the beliefs and superstitions of the Northland - some of them so strangely akin to those of this far southern land; beliefs of spirits of mountain and forest and water werewolves and beings malign. From the first she showed a curious sensitivity to what, I suppose, may be called the 'influences' of the place. She said it 'smelled' of ghosts and warlocks.
	 "I laughed at her then -
	"Two weeks slipped by, and at their end the spokesman for our natives came to us. The next night was the full of the moon, he said. He reminded me of my promise. They would go back to their village in the morning; they would return after the third night, when the moon had begun to wane. They left us sundry charms for our 'protection,' and solemnly cautioned us to keep as far away as possible from NanTauach during their absence. Halfexasperated, halfamused I watched them go.
	"No work could be done without them, of course, so we decided to spend the days of their absence junketing about the southern islets of the group. We marked down several spots for subsequent exploration, and on the morning of the third day set forth along the east face of the breakwater for our camp on UschenTau, planning to have everything in readiness for the return of our men the next day. 
	 "We landed just before dusk, tired and ready for our cots. It was only a little after ten o'clock that Edith awakened me.
	 "'Listen!' she said. 'Lean over with your ear close to the ground!'
	"I did so, and seemed to hear, far, far below, as though coming up from great distances, a faint chanting. It gathered strength, died down, ended; began, gathered volume, faded away into silence.
	"'It's the waves rolling on rocks somewhere,' I said. 'We're probably over some ledge of rock that carries the sound.'
	 "'It's the first time I've heard it,' replied my wife doubtfully. We listened again. Then through the dim rhythms, deep beneath us, another sound came. It drifted across the lagoon that lay between us and NanTauach in little tinkling waves. It was music - of a sort; I won't describe the strange effect it had upon me. You've felt it - "
	 "You mean on the deck?" I asked. Throckmartin nodded.
	"I went to the flap of the tent," he continued, "and peered out. As I did so Stanton lifted his flap and walked out into the moonlight, looking over to the other islet and listening. I called to him.
	"'That's the queerest sound!' he said. He listened again. 'Crystalline! Like little notes of translucent glass. Like the bells of crystal on the sistrums of Isis at Dendarah Temple,' he added halfdreamily. We gazed intently at the island. Suddenly, on the seawall, moving slowly, rhythmically, we saw a little group of lights. Stanton laughed.
	"'The beggars!' he exclaimed. 'That's why they wanted to get away, is it? Don't you see, Dave, it's some sort of a festival - rites of some kind that they hold during the full moon! That's why they were so eager to have us keep away, too.'
	 "The explanation seemed good. I felt a curious sense of relief, although I had not been sensible of any oppression.
	"'Let's slip over,' suggested Stanton - but I would not.
	"'They're a difficult lot as it is,' I said. 'If we break into one of their religious ceremonies they'll probably never forgive us. Let's keep out of any family party where we haven't been invited.'
	 "'That's so,' agreed Stanton.
	 "The strange tinkling rose and fell, rose and fell -
	"'There's something - something very unsettling about it,' said Edith at last soberly. 'I wonder what they make those   sounds with. They frighten me half to death, and, at the same time. they make me feel as though some enormous rapture were just around the corner.'
	 "'It's devilish uncanny!' broke in Stanton.
	"And as he spoke the flap of Thora's tent was raised and out into the moonlight strode the old Swede. She was the great Norse type - tall, deepbreasted, moulded on the old Viking lines. Her sixty years had slipped from her. She looked like some ancient priestess of Odin.
	"She stood there, her eyes wide, brilliant, staring. She thrust her head forward toward NanTauach, regarding the moving lights; she listened. Suddenly she raised her arms and made a curious gesture to the moon. It was - an archaic - movement; she seemed to drag it from remote antiquity - yet in it was a strange suggestion of power, Twice she repeated this gesture and - the tinklings died away! She turned to us.
	"'Go!' she said, and her voice seemed to come from far distances. 'Go from here - and quickly! Go while you may. It has called - ' She pointed to the islet. 'It knows you are here. It waits!' she wailed. 'It beckons - the - the - "
	"She fell at Edith's feet, and over the lagoon came again the tinklings, now with a quicker note of jubilance - almost of triumph.
	"We watched beside her throughout the night. The sounds from NanTauach continued until about an hour before moonset. In the morning Thora awoke, none the worse, apparently. She had had bad dreams, she said. She could not remember what they were - except that they had warned her of danger. She was oddly sullen, and throughout the morning her gaze returned again and again halffascinatedly, halfwonderingly to the neighbouring isle.
	"That afternoon the natives returned. And that night on NanTauach the silence was unbroken nor were there lights nor sign of life.
	"You will understand, Goodwin, how the occurrences I have related would excite the scientific curiosity. We rejected immediately, of course, any explanation admitting the supernatural.
	"Our - symptoms let me call them - could all very easily be accounted for. It is unquestionable that the vibrations created by certain musical instruments have definite and   sometimes extraordinary effect upon the nervous system. We accepted this as the explanation of the reactions we had experienced, hearing the unfamiliar sounds. Thora's nervousness, her superstitious apprehensions, had wrought her up to a condition of semisomnambulistic hysteria. Science could readily explain her part in the night's scene.
	"We came to the conclusion that there must be a passageway between Ponape and NanTauach known to the natives - and used by them during their rites. We decided that on the next departure of our labourers we would set forth immediately to NanTauach. We would investigate during the day, and at evening my wife and Thora would go back to camp, leaving Stanton and me to spend the night on the island, observing from some safe hidingplace what might occur.
	"The moon waned; appeared crescent in the west; waxed slowly toward the full. Before the men left us they literally prayed us to accompany them. Their importunities only made us more eager to see what it was that, we were now convinced, they wanted to conceal from us. At least that was true of Stanton and myself. It was not true of Edith. She was thoughtful, abstracted - reluctant.
	"When the men were out of sight around the turn of the harbour, we took our boat and made straight for NanTauach. Soon its mighty seawall towered above us. We passed through the watergate with its gigantic hewn prisms of basalt and landed beside a halfsubmerged pier. In front of us stretched a series of giant steps leading into a vast court strewn with fragments of fallen pillars. In the centre of the court, beyond the shattered pillars, rose another terrace of basalt blocks, concealing, I knew, still another enclosure.
	"And now, Walter, for the better understanding of what follows - and - and - " he hesitated. "Should you decide later to return with me or, if I am taken, to - to - follow us - listen carefully to my description of this place: NanTauach is literally three rectangles. The first rectangle is the seawall, built up of monoliths - hewn and squared, twenty feet wide at the top. To get to the gateway in the seawall you pass along the canal marked on the map between NanTauach and the islet named Tau. The entrance to the canal is bidden by dense thickets of mangroves; once through these the way   is clear. The steps lead up from the landing of the seagate through the entrance to the courtyard.
	"This courtyard is surrounded by another basalt wall, rectangular, following with mathematical exactness the march of the outer barricades. The seawall is from thirty to forty feet high - originally it must have been much higher, but there has been subsidence in parts. The wall of the first enclosure is fifteen feet across the top and its height varies from twenty to fifty feet - here, too, the gradual sinking of the land has caused portions of it to fall.
	"Within this courtyard is the second enclosure. Its terrace, of the same basalt as the outer walls, is about twenty feet high. Entrance is gained to it by many breaches which time has made in its stonework. This is the inner court, the heart of NanTauach! There lies the great central vault with which is associated the one name of living being that has come to us out of the mists of the past. The natives say it was the treasurehouse of Chauteleur, a mighty king who reigned long 'before their fathers.' As Chan is the ancient Ponapean word both for sun and king, the name means, without doubt, 'place of the sun king.' It is a memory of a dynastic name of the race that ruled the Pacific continent, now vanished - just as the rulers of ancient Crete took the name of Minos and the rulers of Egypt the name of Pharaoh.
	"And opposite this place of the sun king is the moon rock that hides the Moon Pool.
	"It was Stanton who discovered the moon rock. We had been inspecting the inner courtyard; Edith and Thora were getting together our lunch. I came out of the vault of Chauteleur to find Stanton before a part of the terrace studying it wonderingly.
	"'What do you make of this?' he asked me as I came up. He pointed to the wall. I followed his finger and saw a slab of stone about fifteen feet high and ten wide. At first all I noticed was the exquisite nicety with which its edges joined the blocks about it. Then I realized that its colour was subtly different - tinged with grey and of a smooth, peculiar - deadness.
	"'Looks more like calcite than basalt,' I said. I touched it and withdrew my hand quickly for at the contact every nerve in my arm tingled as though a shock of frozen electricity had passed through it. It was not cold as we know cold. It was a   chill force - the phrase I have used - frozen electricity - describes it better than anything else. Stanton looked at me oddly.
	"'So you felt it too,' he said. 'I was wondering whether I was developing hallucinations like Thora. Notice, by the way, that the blocks beside it are quite warm beneath the sun.'
	"We examined the slab eagerly. Its edges were cut as though by an engraver of jewels. They fitted against the neighbouring blocks in almost a hairline. Its base was slightly curved, and fitted as closely as top and sides upon the huge stones on which it rested. And then we noted that these stones had been hollowed to follow the line of the grey stone's foot. There was a semicircular depression running from one side of the slab to the other. It was as though the grey rock stood in the centre of a shallow cup - revealing half, covering half. Something about this hollow attracted me. I reached down and felt it. Goodwin, although the balance of the stones that formed it, like all the stones of the courtyard, were rough and ageworn - this was as smooth, as even surfaced as though it had just left the hands of the polisher.
	"'It's a door!' exclaimed Stanton. 'It swings around in that little cup. That's what makes the hollow so smooth.'
	"'Maybe you're right,' I replied. 'But how the devil can we open it?'
	"We went over the slab again - pressing upon its edges, thrusting against its sides. During one of those efforts I happened to look up - and cried out. A foot above and on each side of the corner of the grey rock's lintel was a slight convexity, visible only from the angle at which my gaze struck it.
	"We carried with us a small scalingladder and up this I went. The bosses were apparently nothing more than chiseled curvatures in the stone. I laid my hand on the one I was examining, and drew it back sharply. In my palm, at the base of my thumb, I had felt the same shock that I had in touching the slab below. I put my hand back. The impression came from a spot not more than an inch wide. I went carefully over the entire convexity, and six times more the chill ran through my arm. There were seven circles an inch wide in the curved place, each of which communicated the precise sensation I have described. The convexity on the opposite side of the slab gave exactly the same results. But no amount of touching or of pressing these spots singly or in any com   bination gave the slightest promise of motion to the slab itself.
	 "'And yet - they're what open it,' said Stanton positively.
	 "'Why do you say that?' I asked.
	"'I - don't know,' he answered hesitatingly. 'But something tells me so. Throck,' he went on half earnestly, half laughingly, 'the purely scientific part of me is fighting the purely human part of me. The scientific part is urging me to find some way to get that slab either down or open. The human part is just as strongly urging me to do nothing of the sort and get away while I can!'
	 "He laughed again - shamefacedly.
	"'Which shall it be?' he asked - and I thought that in his tone the human side of him was ascendant.
	"'It will probably stay as it is - unless we blow it to bits,' I said.
	"'I thought of that,' he answered, 'and I wouldn't dare,' he added soberly enough. And even as I had spoken there came to me the same feeling that he had expressed. It was as though something passed out of the grey rock that struck my heart as a hand strikes an impious lip. We turned away - uneasily, and faced Thora coming through a breach on the terrace.
	'Miss Edith wants you quick,' she began - and stopped. Her eyes went past me to the grey rock. Her body grew rigid; she took a few stiff steps forward and then ran straight to it. She cast herself upon its breast, hands and face pressed against it; we heard her scream as though her very soul were being drawn from her - and watched her fall at its foot. As we picked her up I saw steal from her face the look I had observed when first we heard the crystal music of NanTauach - that unhuman mingling of opposites!"


CHAPTER IV
The First Vanishings

	"WE CARRIED Thora back, down to where Edith was waiting. We told her what had happened and what we had found. She listened gravely, and as we finished Thora sighed and opened her eyes.
	"'I would like to see the stone,' she said. 'Charles, you stay here with Thora.' We passed through the outer court silently - and stood before the rock. She touched it, drew back her hand as I had; thrust it forward again resolutely and held it there. She seemed to be listening. Then she turned to me.
	"'David,' said my wife, and the wistfulness in her voice hurt me - 'David, would you be very, very disappointed if we went from here - without trying to find out any more about it - would you?'
	"Walter, I never wanted anything so much in my life as I wanted to learn what that rock concealed. Nevertheless, I tried to master my desire, and I answered - 'Edith, not a bit if you want us to do it.'
	"She read my struggle in my eyes. She turned back toward the grey rock. I saw a shiver pass through her. I felt a tinge of remorse and pity!
	 "'Edith,' I exclaimed, 'we'll go!'
	"She looked at me again. 'Science is a jealous mistress,' she quoted. 'No, after all it may be just fancy. At any rate, you can't run away. No! But, Dave, I'm going to stay too!'
	"And there was no changing her decision. As we neared the others she laid a hand on my arm.
	"'Dave,' she said, 'if there should be something - well - inexplicable tonight - something that seems - too dangerous - will you promise to go back to our own islet tomorrow, if we can - and wait until the natives return?'
	"I promised eagerly - the desire to stay and see what came with the night was like a fire within me. 
	"We picked a place about five hundred feet away from the steps leading into the outer court.
	"The spot we had selected was well hidden. We could not be seen, and yet we had a clear view of the stairs and the gateway. We settled down just before dusk to wait for whatever might come. I was nearest the giant steps; next me Edith; then Thora, and last Stanton.
	"Night fell. After a time the eastern sky began to lighten, and we knew that the moon was rising; grew lighter still, and the orb peeped over the sea; swam into full sight. I glanced at Edith and then at Thora. My wife was intently listening. Thora sat, as she had since we had placed ourselves, elbows on knees, her hands covering her face.
	"And then from the moonlight flooding us there dripped down on me a great drowsiness. Sleep seemed to seep from the rays and fall upon my eyes, closing them - closing them inexorably. Edith's hand in mine relaxed. Stanton's head fell upon his breast and his body swayed drunkenly. I tried to rise - to fight against the profound desire for slumber that pressed on me.
	"And as I fought, Thora raised her head as though listening; and turned toward the gateway. There was infinite despair in her face - and expectancy. I tried again to rise - and a surge of sleep rushed over me. Dimly, as I sank within it, I heard a crystalline chiming; raised my lids once more with a supreme effort.
	"Thora, bathed in light, was standing at the top of the stairs.
	"Sleep took me for its very own - swept me into the heart of oblivion!
	"Dawn was breaking when I wakened. Recollection rushed back; I thrust a panicstricken hand out toward Edith; touched her and my heart gave a great leap of thankfulness. She stirred, sat up, rubbing dazed eyes. Stanton lay on his side, back toward us, head in arms.
	"Edith looked at me laughingly. 'Heavens! What sleep!' she said. Memory came to her.
	"'What happened?' she whispered. 'What made us sleep like that?'
	 "Stanton awoke.
	"'What's the matter!' he exclaimed. 'You look as though you've been seeing ghosts.' 
	 "Edith caught my hands.
	"'Where's Thora?' she cried. Before I could answer she had run out into the open, calling.
	"'Thora was taken,' was all I could say to Stanton, 'together we went to my wife, now standing beside the great stone steps, looking up fearfully at the gateway into the terraces. There I told them what I had seen before sleep had drowned me. And together then we ran up the stairs, through the court and to the grey rock.
	"The slab was closed as it had been the day before, nor was there trace of its having opened. No trace? Even as I thought this Edith dropped to her knees before it and reached toward something lying at its foot. It was a little piece of gay silk. I knew it for part of the kerchief Thora wore about her hair. She lifted the fragment. It had been cut from the kerchief as though by a razoredge; a few threads ran from it - down toward the base of the slab; ran on to the base of the grey rock and - under it!
	"The grey rock was a door! And it had opened and Thora had passed through it!
	"I think that for the next few minutes we all were a little insane. We beat upon that portal with our hands, with stones and sticks. At last reason came back to us.
	"Goodwin, during the next two hours we tried every way in our power to force entrance through the slab. The rock resisted our drills. We tried explosions at the base with charges covered by rock. They made not the slightest impression on the surface, expending their force, of course, upon the slighter resistance of their coverings.
	"Afternoon found us hopeless. Night was coming on and we would have to decide our course of action. I wanted to go to Ponape for help. But Edith objected that this would take hours and after we had reached there it would be impossible to persuade our men to return with us that night, if at all. What then was left? Clearly only one of two choices: to go back to our camp, wait for our men, and on their return try to persuade them to go with us to NanTauach. But this would mean the abandonment of Thora for at least two days. We could not do it; it would have been too cowardly.
	"The other choice was to wait where we were for night to come; to wait for the rock to open as it had the night before,   and to make a sortie through it for Thora before it could close again.
	"Our path lay clear before us. We had to spend that night on NanTauach!
	"We had, of course, discussed the sleep phenomena very fully. If our theory that lights, sounds, and Thora's disappearance were linked with secret religious rites of the natives, the logical inference was that the slumber had been produced by them, perhaps by vapours - you know as well as I, what extraordinary knowledge these Pacific peoples have of such things. Or the sleep might have been simply a coincidence and produced by emanations either gaseous or from plants, natural causes which had happened to coincide in their effects with the other manifestations. We made some rough and ready but effective respirators.
	"As dusk fell we looked over our weapons. Edith was an excellent shot with both rifle and pistol. We had decided that my wife was to remain in the hidingplace. Stanton would take up a station on the far side of the stairway and I would place myself opposite him on the side near Edith. The place I picked out was less than two hundred feet from her, and I could reassure myself now and then as to her safety as it looked down upon the hollow wherein she crouched. From our respective stations Stanton and I could command the gateway entrance. His position gave him also a glimpse of the outer courtyard.
	"A faint glow in the sky heralded the moon. Stanton and I took our places. The moon dawn increased rapidly; the disk swam up, and in a moment it was shining in full radiance upon ruins and sea.
	"As it rose there came a curious little sighing sound from the inner terrace. Stanton straightened up and stared intently through the gateway, rifle ready.
	"'Stanton, what do you see?' I called cautiously. He waved a silencing hand. I turned my head to look at Edith. A shock ran through me. She lay upon her side. Her face, grotesque with its nose and mouth covered by the respirator, was turned full toward the moon. She was again in deepest sleep!
	"As I turned again to call to Stanton, my eyes swept the head of the steps and stopped, fascinated. For the moonlight had thickened. It seemed to be - curdled - there; and through it ran little gleams and veins of shimmering white   fire. A languor passed through me. It was not the ineffable drowsiness of the preceding night. It was a sapping of all will to move. I tried to cry out to Stanton. I had not even the will to move my lips. Goodwin - I could not even move my eyes!
	"Stanton was in the range of my fixed vision. I watched him leap up the steps and move toward the gateway. The curdled radiance seemed to await him. He stepped into it - and was lost to my sight.
	"For a dozen heart beats there was silence. Then a rain of tinklings that set the pulses racing with joy and at once checked them with tiny fingers of ice - and ringing through them Stanton's voice from the courtyard - a great cry - a scream - filled with ecstasy insupportable and horror unimaginable! And once more there was silence. I strove to burst the bonds that held me. I could not. Even my eyelids were fixed. Within them my eyes, dry and aching, burned.
	"Then Goodwin - I first saw the - inexplicable! The crystalline music swelled. Where I sat I could take in the gateway and its basalt portals, rough and broken, rising to the top of the wall forty feet above, shattered, ruined portals - unclimbable. From this gateway an intenser light began to flow. It grew, it gushed, and out of it walked Stanton.
	 "Stanton! But - God! What a vision!"
	 A deep tremor shook him. I waited - waited.


CHAPTER V
Into the Moon Pool

	"GOODWIN," Throckmartin went on at last, "I can describe him only as a thing of living light. He radiated light; was filled with light; overflowed with it. A shining cloud whirled through and around him in radiant swirls, shimmering tentacles, luminescent, coruscating spirals.
	"His face shone with a rapture too great to be borne by living man, and was shadowed with insuperable misery. It was as though it had been remoulded by the hand of God and the hand of Satan, working together and in harmony. You have seen that seal upon my own. But you have never seen it in the degree that Stanton bore it. The eyes were wide open and fixed, as though upon some inward vision of hell and heaven!
	"The light that filled and surrounded him had a nucleus, a core - something shiftingly human shaped - that dissolved and changed, gathered itself, whirled through and beyond him and back again. And as its shining nucleus passed through him Stanton's whole body pulsed radiance. As the luminescence moved, there moved above it, still and serene always, seven tiny globes of seven colors, like seven little moons.
	"Then swiftly Stanton was lifted - levitated - up the unscalable wall and to its top. The glow faded from the moonlight, the tinkling music grew fainter. I tried again to move. The tears were running down now from my rigid lids and they brought relief to my tortured eyes.
	"I have said my gaze was fixed. It was. But from the side, peripherally, it took in a part of the far wall of the outer enclosure. Ages seemed to pass and a radiance stole along it. Soon drifted into sight the figure that was Stanton. Far away he was - on the gigantic wall. But still I could see the shining spirals whirling jubilantly around and through him; felt   rather than saw his tranced face beneath the seven moons. A swirl of crystal notes, and he had passed. And all the time, as though from some opened well of light, the courtyard gleamed and sent out silver fires that dimmed the moonrays, yet seemed strangely to be a part of them.
	"At last the moon neared the horizon. There came a louder burst of sound; the second, and last, cry of Stanton, like an echo of his first! Again the soft sighing from the inner terrace. Then - utter silence!
	"The light faded; the moon was setting and with a rush life and power to move returned to me. I made a leap for the steps, rushed up them, through the gateway and straight to the grey rock. It was closed - as I knew it would be. But did I dream it or did I bear, echoing through it as though from vast distances a triumphant shouting?
	"I ran back to Edith. At my touch she wakened; looked at me wanderingly; raised herself on a hand.
	"'Dave!' she said, 'I slept - after all.' She saw the despair on my face and leaped to her feet. 'Dave!' she cried. 'What is it? Where's Charles?'
	"I lighted a fire before I spoke. Then I told her. And for the balance of that night we sat before the flames, arms around each other - like two frightened children."
	Abruptly Throckmartin held his hands out to me appealingly.
	Walter, old friend!" he cried. "Don't look at me as though I were mad. It's truth, absolute truth. Wait - " I comforted him as well as I could. After a little time he took up his story.
	"Never," he said, "did man welcome the sun as we did that morning. A soon as it had risen we went back to the courtyard. The walls whereon I had seen Stanton were black and silent. The terraces were as they had been. The grey slab was in its place. In the shallow hollow at its base was - nothing. Nothing - nothing was there anywhere on the islet of Stanton - not a trace.
	"What were we to do? Precisely the same arguments that had kept us there the night before held good now - and doubly good. We could not abandon these two; could not go as long as there was the faintest hope of finding them - and yet for love of each other how could we remain? I loved my wife, - how much I never knew until that day; and she loved me as deeply. 
	'It takes only one each night,' she pleaded. 'Beloved, let it take me.'
	 "I wept, Walter. We both wept.
	"'We will meet it together,' she said. And it was thus at last that we arranged it."
	"That took great courage indeed, Throckmartin," I interrupted. He looked at me eagerly.
	 "You do believe then?" he exclaimed.
	"I believe," I said. He pressed my hand with a grip that nearly crushed it.
	"Now," he told me. "I do not fear. If I - fail, you will follow with help?"
	I promised.
	"We talked it over carefully," he went on, "bringing to bear all our power of analysis and habit of calm, scientific thought. We considered minutely the time element in the phenomena. Although the deep chanting began at the very moment of moonrise, fully five minutes had passed between its full lifting and the strange sighing sound from the inner terrace. I went back in memory over the happenings of the night before. At least ten minutes had intervened between the first heralding sigh and the intensification of the moonlight in the courtyard. And this glow grew for at least ten minutes more before the first burst of the crystal notes. Indeed, more than half an hour must have elapsed, I calculated, between the moment the moon showed above the horizon and the first delicate onslaught of the tinklings.
	"'Edith!' I cried. 'I think I have it! The grey rock opens five minutes after upon the moonrise. But whoever or whatever it is that comes through it must wait until the moon has risen higher, or else it must come from a distance. The thing to do is not to wait for it, but to surprise it before it passes out the door. We will go into the inner court early. You will take your rifle and pistol and hide yourself where you can command the opening - if the slab does open. The instant it opens I will enter. It's our best chance, Edith. I think it's our only one.'
	"My wife demurred strongly. She wanted to go with me. But I convinced her that it was better for her to stand guard without, prepared to help me if I were forced again into the open by what lay behind the rock.
	"At the halfhour before moonrise we went into the inner   court. I took my place at the side of the grey rock. Edith crouched behind a broken pillar twenty feet away; slipped her riflebarrel over it so that it would cover the opening.
	"The minutes crept by. The darkness lessened and through the breaches of the terrace I watched the far sky softly lighten. With the first pale flush the silence of the place intensified. It deepened; became unbearably - expectant. The moon rose, showed the quarter, the half, then swam up into full sight like a great bubble.
	"Its rays fell upon the wall before me and suddenly upon the convexities I have described seven little circles of light sprang out. They gleamed, glimmered, grew brighter - shone. The gigantic slab before me glowed with them, silver wavelets of phosphorescence pulsed over its surface and then - it turned as though on a pivot, sighing softly as it moved!
	"With a word to Edith I flung myself through the opening. A tunnel stretched before me. It glowed with the same faint silvery radiance. Down it I raced. The passage turned abruptly, passed parallel to the walls of the outer courtyard and then once more led downward.
	"The passage ended. Before me was a high vaulted arch. It seemed to open into space; a space filled with lambent, coruscating, manycoloured mist whose brightness grew even as I watched. I passed through the arch and stopped in sheer awe!
	"In front of me was a pool. It was circular, perhaps twenty feet wide. Around it ran a low, softly curved lip of glimmering silvery stone. Its water was palest blue. The pool with its silvery rim was like a great blue eye staring upward.
	"Upon it streamed seven shafts of radiance. They poured down upon the blue eye like cylindrical torrents; they were like shining pillars of light rising from a sapphire floor.
	"One was the tender pink of the pearl; one of the aurora's green; a third a deathly white; the fourth the blue in motherofpearl; a shimmering column of pale amber; a beam of amethyst; a shaft of molten silver. Such are the colours of the seven lights that stream upon the Moon Pool. I drew closer, awestricken. The shafts did not illumine the depths. They played upon the surface and seemed there to diffuse, to melt into it. The Pool drank them?
	"Through the water tiny gleams of phosphorescence began to dart, sparkles and coruscations of pale incandescence.   And far, far below I sensed a movement, a shifting glow as of a radiant body slowly rising.
	"I looked upward, following the radiant pillars to their source. Far above were seven shining globes, and it was from these that the rays poured. Even as I watched their brightness grew. They were like seven moons set high in some caverned heaven. Slowly their splendour increased, and with it the splendour of the seven beams streaming from them.
	"I tore my gaze away and stared at the Pool. It had grown milky, opalescent. The rays gushing into it seemed to be filling it; it was alive with sparklings, scintillations, glimmerings. And the luminescence I had seen rising from its depths was larger, nearer!
	"A swirl of mist floated up from its surface. It drifted within the embrace of the rosy beam and hung there for a moment. The beam seemed to embrace it, sending through it little shining corpuscles, tiny rosy spiralings. The mist absorbed the rays, was strengthened by them, gained substance. Another swirl sprang into the amber shaft, clung and fed there, moved swiftly toward the first and mingled with it. And now other swirls arose, here and there, too fast to be counted; hung poised in the embrace of the light streams; flashed and pulsed into each other.
	"Thicker and thicker still they arose until over the surface of the Pool was a pulsating pillar of opalescent mist steadily growing stronger; drawing within it life from the seven beams falling upon it; drawing to it from below the darting, incandescent atoms of the Pool. Into its centre was passing the luminescence rising from the far depths. And the pillar glowed, throbbed - began to send out questing swirls and tendrils -
	"There forming before me was That which had walked with Stanton, which had taken Thora - the thing I had come to find!
	"My brain sprang into action. My hand threw up the pistol and I fired shot after shot into the shining core.
	"As I fired, it swayed and shook; gathered again. I slipped a second clip into the automatic and another idea coming to me took careful aim at one of the globes in the roof. From thence I knew came the force that shaped this Dweller in the Pool - from the pouring rays came its strength. If I could destroy them I could check its forming. I fired again and   again. If I hit the globes I did no damage. The little motes in their beams danced with the motes in the mist, troubled. That was all.
	"But up from the Pool like little bells, like tiny bursting bubbles of glass, swarmed the tinkling sounds - their pitch higher, all their sweetness lost, angry.
	"And out from the Inexplicable swept a shining spiral.
	"It caught me above the heart; wrapped itself around me. There rushed through me a mingled ecstasy and horror. Every atom of me quivered with delight and shrank with despair. There was nothing loathsome in it. But it was as though the icy soul of evil and the fiery soul of good had stepped together within me. The pistol dropped from my hand.
	"So I stood while the Pool gleamed and sparkled; the streams of light grew more intense and the radiant Thing that held me gleamed and strengthened. Its shining core had shape - but a shape that my eyes and brain could not define. It was as though a being of another sphere should assume what it might of human semblance, but was not able to conceal that what human eyes saw was but a part of it. It was neither man nor woman; it was unearthly and androgynous. Even as I found its human semblance it changed. And still the mingled rapture and terror held me. Only in a little corner of my brain dwelt something untouched; something that held itself apart and watched. Was it the soul? I have never believed - and yet -
	"Over the head of the misty body there sprang suddenly out seven little lights. Each was the colour of the beam beneath which it rested. I knew now that the Dweller was - complete!
	"I heard a scream. It was Edith's voice. It came to me that she had heard the shots and followed me. I felt every faculty concentrate into a mighty effort. I wrenched myself free from the gripping tentacle and it swept back. I turned to catch Edith, and as I did so slipped - fell.
	"The radiant shape above the Pool leaped swiftly - and straight into it raced Edith, arms outstretched to shield me from it! God!
	"She threw herself squarely within its splendour," he whispered. "It wrapped its shining self around her. The crystal tinklings burst forth jubilantly. The light filled her, ran   through and around her as it had with Stanton; and dropped down upon her face - the look!
	"But her rush had taken her to the very verge of the Moon Pool. She tottered; she fell - with the radiance still holding her, still swirling and winding around and through her - into the Moon Pool! She sank, and with her went - the Dweller!
	"I dragged myself to the brink. Far down was a shining, manycoloured nebulous cloud descending; out of it peered Edith's face, disappearing; her eyes stared up at me - and she vanished!
	 "'Edith!' I cried again. 'Edith, come back to me!'
	"And then a darkness fell upon me. I remember running back through the shimmering corridors and out into the courtyard. Reason had left me. When it returned I was far out at sea in our boat wholly estranged from civilization. A day later I was picked up by the schooner in which I came to Port Moresby.
	"I have formed a plan; you must bear it, Goodwin - " He fell upon his berth. I bent over him. Exhaustion and the relief of telling his story had been too much for him. He slept like the dead.
	All that night I watched over him. When dawn broke I went to my room to get a little sleep myself. But my slumber was haunted.
	The next day the storm was unabated. Throckmartin came to me at lunch. He had regained much of his old alertness.
	"Come to my cabin," he said. There, he stripped his shirt from him. "Something is happening," he said. "The mark is smaller." It was as he said.
	"I'm escaping," he whispered jubilantly, "Just let me get to Melbourne safely, and then we'll see who'll win! For, Walter, I'm not at all sure that Edith is dead - as we know death - nor that the others are. There is something outside experience there - some great mystery."
	And all that day he talked to me of his plans.
	"There's a natural explanation, of course," he said. "My theory is that the moon rock is of some composition sensitive to the action of moon rays; somewhat as the metal selenium is to sun rays. The little circles over the top are, without doubt, its operating agency. When the light strikes them they release the mechanism that opens the slab, just as you   can open doors with sun or electric light by an ingenious arrangement of seleniumcells. Apparently it takes the strength of the full moon both to do this and to summon the Dweller in the Pool. We will first try a concentration of the rays of the waning moon upon these circles to see whether that will open the rock. If it does we will be able to investigate the Pool without interruption from - from - what emanates.
	"Look, here on the chart are their locations. I have made this in duplicate for you in the event - of something happening - to me. And if I lose - you'll come after us, Goodwin, with help - won't you?"
	 And again I promised.
	 A little later he complained of increasing sleepiness.
	"But it's just weariness," he said. "Not at all like that other drowsiness. It's an hour till moonrise still," he yawned at last. "Wake me up a good fifteen minutes before."
	He lay upon the berth. I sat thinking. I came to myself with a guilty start. I had completely lost myself in my deep preoccupation. What time was it? I looked at my watch and jumped to the porthole. It was full moonlight; the orb had been up for fully half an hour. I strode over to Throckmartin and shook him by the shoulder.
	"Up, quick, man!" I cried. He rose sleepily. His shirt fell open at the neck and I looked, in amazement, at the white band around his chest. Even under the electric light it shone softly, as though little flecks of light were in it.
	Throckmartin seemed only halfawake. He looked down at his breast, saw the glowing cincture, and smiled.
	"Yes," he said drowsily, "it's coming - to take me back to Edith! Well, I'm glad."
	 "Throckmartin!" I cried. "Wake up! Fight!"
	 "Fight!" he said. "No use; come after us!"
	He went to the port and sleepily drew aside the curtain. The moon traced a broad path of light straight to the ship. Under its rays the band around his chest gleamed brighter and brighter; shot forth little rays; seemed to writhe.
	The lights went out in the cabin; evidently also throughout the ship, for I heard shoutings above.
	Throckmartin still stood at the open port. Over his shoulder I saw a gleaming pillar racing along the moon path toward us. Through the window cascaded a blinding radiance. It gathered Throckmartin to it, clothed him in a robe of   living opalescence. Light pulsed through and from him. The cabin filled with murmurings -
	A wave of weakness swept over me, buried me in blackness. When consciousness came back, the lights were again burning brightly.
	 But of Throckmartin there was no trace!


CHAPTER VI
"The Shining Devil Took Them!"

	MY COLLEAGUES of the Association, and you others who may read this my narrative, for what I did and did not when full realization returned I must offer here, briefly as I can, an explanation; a defense - if you will.
	My first act was to spring to the open port. The coma had lasted hours, for the moon was now low in the west! I ran to the door to sound the alarm. It resisted under my frantic hands; would not open. Something fell tinkling to the floor. It was the key and I remembered then that Throckmartin had turned it before we began our vigil. With memory a hope died that I had not known was in me, the hope that he had escaped from the cabin, found refuge elsewhere on the ship.
	And as I stooped, fumbling with shaking fingers for the key, a thought came to me that drove again the blood from my heart, held me rigid. I could sound no alarm on the Southern Queen for Throckmartin!
	Conviction of my appalling helplessness was complete. The ensemble of the vessel from captain to cabin boy was, to put it conservatively, average. None, I knew, save Throckmartin and myself had seen the first apparition of the Dweller. Had they witnessed the second? I did not know, nor could I risk speaking, not knowing. And not seeing, how could they believe? They would have thought me insane - or worse; even, it might be, his murderer.
	I snapped off the electrics; waited and listened; opened the door with infinite caution and slipped, unseen, into my own stateroom. The hours until the dawn were eternities of waking nightmare. Reason, resuming sway at last, steadied me. Even had I spoken and been believed where in these wastes after all the hours could we search for Throckmartin? Certainly the captain would not turn back to Port Moresby. And   even if he did, of what use for me to set forth for the NanMatal without the equipment which Throckmartin himself had decided was necessary if one hoped to cope with the mystery that lurked there?
	There was but one thing to do - follow his instructions; get the paraphernalia in Melbourne or Sydney if it were possible; if not sail to America as swiftly as might be, secure it there and as swiftly return to Ponape. And this I determined to do.
	Calmness came back to me after I had made this decision. And when I went up on deck I knew that I had been right. They had not seen the Dweller. They were still discussing the darkening of the ship, talking of dynamos burned out, wires short circuited, a half dozen explanations of the extinguishment. Not until noon was Throckmartin's absence discovered. I told the captain that I had left him early in the evening; that, indeed, I knew him but slightly, after all. It occurred to none to doubt me, or to question me minutely. Why should it have? His strangeness had been noted, commented upon; all who had met him had thought him half mad. I did little to discourage the impression. And so it came naturally that on the log it was entered that he had fallen or leaped from the vessel some time during the night.
	A report to this effect was made when we entered Melbourne. I slipped quietly ashore and in the press of the war news Throckmartin's supposed fate won only a few lines in the newspapers; my own presence on the ship and in the city passed unnoticed.
	I was fortunate in securing at Melbourne everything I needed except a set of Becquerel ray condensers - but these were the very keystone of my equipment. Pursuing my search to Sydney I was doubly fortunate in finding a firm who were expecting these very articles in a consignment due them from the States within a fortnight. I settled down in strictest seclusion to await their arrival.
	And now it will occur to you to ask why I did not cable, during this period of waiting, to the Association; demand aid from it. Or why I did not call upon members of the University staffs of either Melbourne or Sydney for assistance. At the least, why I did not gather, as Throckmartin had hoped to do, a little force of strong men to go with me to the NanMatal. 
	To the first two questions I answer frankly - I did not dare. And this reluctance, this inhibition, every man jealous of his scientific reputation will understand. The story of Throckmartin, the happenings I had myself witnessed, were incredible, abnormal, outside the facts of all known science. I shrank from the inevitable disbelief, perhaps ridicule - nay, perhaps even the graver suspicion that had caused me to seal my lips while on the ship. Why I myself could only half believe! How then could I hope to convince others?
	And as for the third question - I could not take men into the range of such a peril without first warning them of what they might encounter; and if I did warn them -
	It was checkmate! If it also was cowardice - well, I have atoned for it. But I do not hold it so; my conscience is clear.
	That fortnight and the greater part of another passed before the ship I awaited steamed into port. By that time, between my straining anxiety to be after Throckmartin, the despairing thought that every moment of delay might be vital to him and his, and my intensely eager desire to know whether that shining, glorious horror on the moon path did exist or had been hallucination, I was worn almost to the edge of madness.
	At last the condensers were in my hands. It was more than a week later, however, before I could secure passage back to Port Moresby and it was another week still before I started north on the Suwarna, a swift little sloop with a fiftyhorsepower auxiliary, heading straight for Ponape and the NanMatal.
	 We sighted the Brunhilda some five hundred miles south of the Carolines. The wind had fallen soon after Papua had dropped astern. The Suwarna's ability to make her twelve knots an hour without it had made me very fully forgive her for not being as fragrant as the Javan flower for which she was named. Da Costa, her captain, was a garrulous Portuguese; his mate was a Canton man with all the marks of long and able service on some pirate junk; his engineer was a halfbreed ChinaMalay who had picked up his knowledge of power plants, Heaven alone knew where, and, I had reason to believe, had transferred all his religious impulses to the American built deity of mechanism he so faithfully served. The crew was made up of six huge, chattering Tonga boys. 
	The Suwarna had cut through Finschafen Huon Gulf to the protection of the Bismarcks. She had threaded the maze of the archipelago tranquilly, and we were then rolling over the thousandmile stretch of open ocean with New Hanover far behind us and our boat's bow pointed straight toward Nukuor of the Monte Verdes. After we had rounded Nukuor we should, barring accident, reach Ponape in not more than sixty hours.
	It was late afternoon, and on the demure little breeze that marched behind us came farflung sighs of spicetrees and nutmeg flowers. The slow prodigious swells of the Pacific lifted us in gentle, giant hands and sent us as gently down the long, blue wave slopes to the next broad, upward slope. There was a spell of peace over the ocean, stilling even the Portuguese captain who stood dreamily at the wheel, slowly swaying to the rhythmic lift and fall of the sloop.
	There came a whining hail from the Tonga boy lookout draped lazily over the bow.
	"Sail he b'long port side!"
	Da Costa straightened and gazed while I raised my glass. The vessel was a scant mile away, and must have been visible long before the sleepy watcher had seen her. She was a sloop about the size of the Suwarna, without power. All sails set, even to a spinnaker she carried, she was making the best of the little breeze. I tried to read her name, but the vessel jibed sharply as though the hands of the man at the wheel had suddenly dropped the helm - and then with equal abruptness swung back to her course. The stern came in sight, and on it I read Brunhilda.
	I shifted my glasses to the man at wheel. He was crouching down over the spokes in a helpless, huddled sort of way, and even as I looked the vessel veered again, abruptly as before. I saw the helmsman straighten up and bring the wheel about with a vicious jerk.
	He stood so f