al city, mountainous.

Featureless, smooth, the immense wall of it heaved heavenward. It should
have been blind, that vast oblong face--but it was not blind. From it
radiated alertness, vigilance. It seemed to gaze toward us as though
every foot were manned with sentinels; guardians invisible to the eyes
whose concentration of watchfulness was caught by some subtle hidden
sense higher than sight.

It was a metal city, mountainous and--AWARE.

About its base were huge openings. Through and around these portals
swirled hordes of the Metal People; in units and in combinations coming
and going, streaming in and out, forming as they came and went patterns
about the openings like the fretted spume of great breakers surging
into, retreating from, ocean-bitten gaps in some iron-bound coast.

From the immensity of the City the eyes dropped back to the Pit in which
it lay. Its floor was plaquelike, a great plane smooth as though turned
by potter's wheel, broken by no mound nor hillock, slope nor terrace;
level, horizontal, flawlessly flat. On it was no green living thing--no
tree nor bush, meadow nor covert.

It was alive with movement. A ferment that was as purposeful as it was
mechanical, a ferment symmetrical, geometrical, supremely ordered--

The surging of the Metal Hordes.

There they moved beneath us, these enigmatic beings, in a countless
host. They marched and countermarched in battalions, in regiments, in
armies. Far to the south I glimpsed a company of colossal shapes like
mobile, castellated and pyramidal mounts. They were circling, weaving
about each other with incredible rapidity--like scores of great pyramids
crowned with gigantic turrets and dancing. From these turrets came vivid
flashes, lightning bright--on their wake the rolling echoes of faraway
thunder.

Out of the north sped a squadron of obelisks from whose tops flamed
and flared the immense spinning wheels, appearing at this distance like
fiery whirling disks.

Up from their setting the Metal People lifted themselves in a thousand
incredible shapes, shapes squared and globed and spiked and shifting
swiftly into other thousands as incredible. I saw a mass of them draw
themselves up into the likeness of a tent skyscraper high; hang so for
an instant, then writhe into a monstrous chimera of a dozen towering
legs that strode away like a gigantic headless and bodiless tarantula in
steps two hundred feet long. I watched mile-long lines of them shape an