nt tingling, 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 abnormal.

Striving to classify, to reduce to order, my sensations I drew close to
the others, overtaking them in a dozen paces. A dozen paces more and we
stepped out of the curtainings.

CHAPTER XI. THE METAL EMPEROR

We stood at the edge of a well whose walls were of that same green
vaporous iridescence through which we had just come, but finer grained,
compact; as though here the corpuscles of which they were woven were far
closer spun. Thousands of feet above us the mighty cylinder uprose, and
in the lessened circle that was its mouth I glimpsed the bright stars;
and knew by this it opened into the free air.

All of half a mile in diameter was this shaft, and ringed regularly
along its height by wide amethystine bands--like rings of a hollow
piston. They were, in color, replicas of that I had glimpsed before
our descent into this place and against whose gleaming cataracts the
outlines of the incredible city had lowered. And they were in motion,
spinning smoothly, and swiftly.

Only one swift glance 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 same material.

Up from it lifted the structure, a thing of glistening cones and
spinning golden disks; fantastic yet disquietingly symmetrical; bizarre
as an angled headdress worn by a mountainous Javanese god--yet coldly,
painfully mathematical. In every direction the cones pointed, seemingly
interwoven of strands of metal and of light.

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, pyramiding to the base
of one tremendous spire that tapered