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then — whence and how came the orders to which the ANTS responded; that bade them open THIS corridor in their nest, close THAT, form this chamber, fill that one? Was one more mysterious than the other?
Breaking into my current of thoughts came consciousness that I was moving with increased speed; that my body was fast growing lighter.
Simultaneously with this recognition I felt myself lifted from the floor of the corridor and levitated with considerable rapidity forward; looking down I saw that floor several feet below me. Drake’s arm wound itself around my shoulder.
“Closing up behind us,” he muttered. “They’re putting us — out.”
It was, indeed, as though the passageway had wearied of our deliberate progress. Had decided to — give us a lift. Rearward it was shutting. I noted with interest how accurately this motion kept pace with our own speed, and how fluidly the walls seemed to run together.
Our movement became accelerated. It was as though we floated buoyantly, weightless, upon some swift stream. The sensation was curiously pleasant, languorous — what was that word Ruth had used? — ELEMENTAL— and free. The supporting force seemed to flow equally from walls and floor; to reach down to us from the roof. It was slumberously even, and effortless. I saw that in advance of us the living corridor was opening even as behind us it was closing.
All around us the little eye points twinkled and — laughed.
There was no danger here — there could be none. Deeper and deeper dropped my mind into the depths of that alien tranquillity. Faster and faster we floated — onward.
Abruptly, ahead of us shone a blaze of daylight. We passed into it. The force holding us withdrew its grip; I felt solidity beneath my feet; stood and leaned back against a smooth wall.
The corridor had ended and — had shut us out from itself.
“Bounced!” exclaimed Drake.
And incongruous, flippant, colloquial as was that word, I know none that would better describe my own feelings.
We were BOUNCED out upon a turret jutting from the barrier. And before us lay spread the most amazing, the most extraordinary fantastic scene upon which, I think, the vision of man has rested since the advent of time.
CHAPTER XX
VAMPIRES OF THE SUN
It was a crater; a half mile on high and all of two thousand feet across ran the circular lip of its vast rim. Above it was a circle of white and glaring sky in whose center flamed the sun.
And instantly, before my vision could grasp a tithe of that panorama, I knew that this place was the very heart of the City; its vital ganglion; its soul.
Around the crater lip were poised thousands of concave disks, vernal green, enormous. They were like a border of gigantic, upthrust shields; and within each, emblazoned like a shield’s device, was a blinding flower of flame — the reflected, dilated face of the sun. Below this diadem hung, pendent, clusters of other disks, swarmed like the globular hiving of the constellation Hercules’ captured stars. And each of these prisoned the image of our sun.
A hundred feet below us was the crater floor.
Up from it thrust a mountainous forest of the pallidly radiant cones; bristling; prodigious. Tier upon tier, thicket upon thicket, phalanx upon phalanx they climbed. Up and up, pyramidically, they flung their spiked hosts.
They drew together two thousand feet above us, clustering close about the foot of a single huge spire which thrust itself skyward above them. The crest of this spire was truncated. From its shorn tip radiated scores of long and slender spokes holding in place a thousand feet wide wheel of wan green disks whose concave surfaces, unlike those smooth ones girding the crater, were curiously faceted.
This amazing structure rested upon a myriad-footed base of crystal, even as had that other cornute fantasy beside which we had met the great Disk. But it was in size to that as — as Leviathan to a minnow. From it streamed the same baffling suggestion of invincible force transmuted into matter; energy coalesced into the tangible; power made concentrate in the vestments of substance.
Half-way between crater lip and floor began the hordes of the Metal People.
In colossal animate cheveau-de-frise of hundred-foot girders they thrust themselves out from the curving walls — walls, I knew, as alive as they!
From these Brobdignagian beams they swung in ropes and clusters — spheres and cubes studded as thickly with the pyramids as ever Titan’s mace with spikes. Group after bizarre group they dropped; pendulous. Coppices of slender columns of thistled globes sprang up to meet the festooned joists.
Between the girders they draped themselves in long, stellated garlands; grouped themselves in innumerable, kaleidoscopic patterns.
They clicked into place around the golden turret in which we crouched.
In fantastic arrases they swayed in front of us — now hiding by, now revealing through their quicksilver interweavings the mounts of the Cones.
And steadily those flowing in below added to their multitudes; gliding up cable and pillar; building out still further the living girders, stringing themselves upon living festoon and living garland, weaving in among them, changing their shapes, rewriting their symbols.
They swung and threaded swiftly, in shifting arabesque, in Gothic traceries, in lace-like fantasies; utterly bizarre, unutterably beautiful — crystalline, geometric always.
Abruptly their movement ceased — so abruptly that the stoppage of all the ordered turmoil had the quality of appalling silence.
An unimaginable tapestry bedight with incredible broidery, the Metal People draped the vast cup.
Pillared it as though it were a temple.
Garnished it with their bodies as though it were a shrine.
Across the floor toward the Cones glided a palely lustrous sphere. In shape only a globe like all its kind, yet it was invested with power; it radiated power as a star does light; was clothed in unseen garments of supernal force. In its wake drifted two great pyramids; after them ten spheres but little smaller than the Shape which led.
“The Metal Emperor!” breathed Drake.
On they swept until they reached the base of the Cones. They paused at the edge of the crystal tabling. They turned.
There was a flashing as of a meteor bursting. The globe had opened into that splendor of jewel fires before which had floated Norhala and Ruth.
I saw again the luminous ovals of sapphire, studding its golden zone, the mystic rose of pulsing, petal flame, the still core of incandescent ruby that was the heart of that rose.
Strangely I felt my own heart veer toward this — Thing; bowing before its beauty and its strength; almost worshiping!
A shock of revulsion went through me. I shot a quick, half frightened glance at Drake. He was crouching dangerously close to the lip of the ledge, hands clasped and knuckles white with the intensity of his grip, eyes rapt, staring — upon the verge of worship even as I had been.
“Drake!” I thrust my elbow into his side brutally. “None of that! Remember you’re human! Guard yourself, man — guard yourself!”
“What?” he muttered; then, abruptly: “How did you know?”
“I felt it myself,” I answered: “For God’s sake, Dick — hold fast to yourself! Remember Ruth!”
He shook his head violently — as though to be rid of some clinging, cloying thing.
“I’ll not forget again,” he said.
He huddled down once more close