Part 28 (1/2)

Scattered alaciers and the immense pallid baroques of the snow fields

Like a diade of flashi+ng amethyst with its aural mists Between them lay the vast and patterned flat covered with still symbol and inexplicable movement

Under their su City

Within circling walls, over plain and from the City hovered a cosmic spirit not to be understood by eem hard, crystalline and metallic, lapidescent and--

Conscious!

Down froe where we stood fell a steep ramp, similar to that by which, in the darkness, we had descended It dropped at an angle of at least forty-five degrees; its surface was sh theblock It paused, seemed to perk itself; spun so that in turn each of its six faces took us in

I felt myself lifted upon it byup beside h the force that held us A block swept away froh ere floating in air, the Pit lay stretched

There was a rapid readjust of our two selves upon another surface I looked down upon a tre below, five hundred feet to the valley's floor a column of which the block that held us was the top

Gone was the whirling wheel that had crowned it, but I knew this for the Grinding Thing fro block had been its scout As though curious to know h the ht us, delivered us to it

The pillar leaned over--bent like that shi+ning pillar that had bridged for us, at Norhala's commands, the abyss The floor of the valley arose to ain there was a rapid shi+fting of us to another surface of the crowning cube Fast noept up toward us the valley floor A dizziness cloudedthat had held us--

We stood upon the floor of the Pit

And breaking from the immense and prostrate shaft on whose top we had ridden doard carating it; circled about us, curiously, interestedly, twinkling at us froazed at those who circled around us Then suddenly I felt myself lifted once more, was tossed to the surface of the nearest block

Upon it I spun while the tiny eyes searched ht a glih the air

The play becanized that But it was perilous play for us I felt lass in the hands of careless children

I was tossed to a waiting cube On the ground, not ten feet fro dizzily Suddenly the cube that held htened it so that it drew me irresistibly flat down upon its surface Before I dropped, Drake's body leaped toward h drawn by a lasso He fell at s and like so off the spoils, the block that held us raced away, straight for an open portal A blaze of incandescent blue flaain as the dazzlement faded I saw Drake beside me--a skeleton form Swiftly flesh melted back upon him, clothed him

The cube stopped, abruptly; the hosts of little unseen hands raised us, slid us gently over its edge, set us upright beside it And it sped away

All about us stretched another of those vast halls in which on high burned the pale-gilt suns Between its colossal coluer hurriedly, but quietly, deliberately, sedately

We ithin the City--even as Ventnor had commanded

CHAPTER XIX THE CITY THAT WAS ALIVE

Close beside us was one of the cyclopean columns We crept to it; crouched at its base opposite the drift of the Metal People; strove, huddled there, to regain our shaken poise Like bagatelles we felt in that trearlands of frozen suns, the enig past

They ranged in size froiants of thirty feet or rossed in whateverthem And after a tiroups, to stragglers; then ceased The hall was empty of them

As far as the eye could reach the columned spaces stretched I was conscious once h every vein and nerve