Part 17 (1/2)
”You'll give ,” he interrupted fiercely; then, his passion breaking through all restraint--”Yes, you dae he had spoken English; she could not, of course, have understood the words, but their anger and hatred she did understand
Her serenity quivered, broke The strange stars within her eyes began to glitter forth as they had when she had su, Ventnor thrust out a hand, caught her roughly by one bare, lovely shoulder
”Give her back to me, I say!” he cried ”Give her back to reful Out of the distended pupils the strange stars blazed; upon her face was soed I felt the shadow of Death's wings
”No! No--Norhala! No, Martin!” the veils of inhuirl we knew looked out from them She threw herself between the two, arht his arht; ”that's not the way to save her!”
Ventnor stood between us, quivering, half sobbing Never until then had I realized how great, how absorbing was that love of his for Ruth And the woh dimly; envisioned it humanly For, under the shock of huht then as utterly unknown to her as her cold serenity was to us, the sleeping soul--I use the popular word for those emotional complexes that are peculiar to mankind--stirred, awakened
Wrath fled froirl, lost their dreadfulness; softened She turned them upon Ventnor, they brooded upon hi
A suring it, touching with tenderness the sweet and sleepingmaid
And on the face of Ruth, as upon atenderness reflected!
”Co curtains
As she passed, an arers upon her white shoulder, staining its purity,behind, watching their figures growshadows; then followed hastily Entering the , an acceleration of the pulse, an increase of that sense of well-being which, I grew suddenly aware, had since the beginning of our strange journey minimized the nervous attrition of constant contact with the abnor to classify, to reduce to order,them in a dozen paces A dozen paces s
CHAPTER XI THE METAL EMPEROR
We stood at the edge of a hose walls were of that sah which we had just coh here the corpuscles of which they oven were far closer spun Thousands of feet above us the hty cylinder uprose, and in the lessened circle that was its ht stars; and knew by this it opened into the free air
All of half aits height by wide as of a hollow piston They were, in color, replicas of that I had glilea cataracts the outlines of the incredible city had lowered And they were in lance I gave them, my eyes held by a most extraordinary--edifice--altar--machine--I could not find the word for it--then
Its base was a scant hundred yards from where we had paused and concentric with the sides of the pit It stood upon a thick circular pedestal of what appeared to be cloudy rock crystal supported by hundreds of thick rods of the sa of glistening cones and spinning golden disks; fantastic yet disquietingly syled headdress worn by a mountainous Javanese God--yet coldly, painfully ly interwoven of strands of ht
What was their color? It came to me--that of the mysterious element which stains the sun's corona, that diadem seen only when our day star is in eclipse; the unknown element which science has named coronium, which never yet has been found on earth and that may be electricity in its one material form; electricity that is ponderable; force whose vibrations are keyed down to mass; power transmuted into substance
Thousands upon thousands the cones bristled, pyra to the base of one tremendous spire that tapered up al the ht infinite calculations carried into infinity; an apotheosis of geo the rhythms of unknown spatial dimensions; concentration of the equations of the star hordes
The mathematics of the Cosmos
From the left of the crystalline base swept an enorht of a tall s I had seen, almost, indeed, an azure; different, too, in other subtle, indefinable ways
Behind it glided a pair of the pyraher by a yard orus Out frolobes, somewhat smaller than the first and of a deep purplish luster