Part 15 (1/2)

As s I realized with finality that whatever their activation, their life, they WEREnow the testimony of touch Metal they were, with a hint upon contact of highly polished platinurained as it

Also they had temperature, a curiously pleasant warrees Fahrenheit I looked deep down into the little sparkling points that were, I knew, organs of sight; they were like the points of contact of innuest paradoxical suggestion of being close to the surface and still infinite distances away

And they were like--as it they were like?--it caalaxies of little aureate and sapphire stars in the clear gray heavens of Norhala's eyes

I crept beside Drake, struck him with my head

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

”Drag 'e toas he had suggested I found to ht his belt, tried to lift htened for aface

”You'll have to keep praying till the power's turned off Nothing here you can slide your knees on”

I nodded, waddling close to his side; then sank back on -muscles

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

It was indeed, as though the clustered cubes sped within a bubble of the noanly glistening vapors; or rather as though in our passage--as a projectile does in air--we piled before us a thick wave of thein behind, obscured all that lay around

Yet I had, persistently, the feeling that beyond these shroudings was vast and ordered reater even than those Golden Hordes of Genghis which ages agone had washed about the outer bases of the very peaks that hid this place

Cae shapes, unnas that thrust the javelins of flame

And always, always, everywhere that constant --like er world , DRILLING there in some wide vestibule of space between the known and the unknown, alert andover it

Once again I seemed to stand upon the brink of an abyss of incredible revelation, striving helplessly, struggling for realization--and so struggling beca blast dying down, the veils before us thinning

They cleared away I saw Drake and Ventnor straighten up; raisedknees

We were at one end of a vortex, a funneling within the radiant vapors; a funnel whose further end a e circle, itsscarp of the--city It was as though before us lay, upon its side, a cone of crystalline clear air against whose curved sides sohter than water, pressed

The top arc of its prostrate base reached a thousand feet or more up the precipitous wall; above it all was hidden in sparkling nebulosities that were like still clouds of greenly gli sides of this cone, above it and below it, the pressing luminosities stretched into, it seeh thean to dart, to dance, weaving and interweaving, shooting hither and yon--like , like countless lances of the aurora thrusting through its own iridescent veils! And in the play of these bealy rhythmic

It was--how can I describe it?--PURPOSEFUL; purposeful as the geos of the ruins, of the su Shape and the Following Thing; and like all of these it was as laden with that baffling certainty of hidden nized as such yet knew it never could read

The rays see upward froht borne by led and flew as though they were clouds of javelins hurled by battling swarht while through theue shapes likeh thick forests of slender, high-reaching trees of cold flah jungles of bamboo with trunks of diaiant reeds of radiance rising fro ooze of a sea of star shi+ne