d
reshape into circles, into interlaced lozenges and pentagons--then lift
in great columns and shoot through the air in unimaginable barrage.

Through all this incessant movement I sensed plainly purpose, knew
that it was definite activity toward a definite end, caught the clear
suggestion of drill, of maneuver.

And when the shiftings of the Metal Hordes permitted we saw that all
the flat floor of the valley was stripped and checkered, stippled and
tessellated with every color, patterned with enormous lozenges and
squares, rhomboids and parallelograms, pentagons and hexagons and
diamonds, lunettes, circles and spirals; harlequined yet harmonious;
instinct with a grotesque suggestion of a super-Futurism.

But always this patterning was ordered, always COHERENT. As though
it were a page on which was spelled some untranslatable other world
message.

Fourth Dimensional revelations by some Euclidean deity! Commandments
traced by some mathematical God!

Looping across the vale, emerging from the sparkling folds of the
southernmost curtainings and vanishing into the gleaming veils of the
easternmost, ran a broad ribbon of pale-green jade; not straightly but
with manifold convolutions and flourishes. It was like a sentence in
Arabic.

It was margined with sapphire blue. All along its twisting course two
broad bands of jet margined the cerulean shore. It was spanned by scores
of flashing crystal arches. Nor were these bridges--even from that
distance I knew they were no bridges. From them came the crystalline
murmurings.

Jade? This stream jade? If so then it must be in truth molten, for I
caught its swift and polished rushing! It was no jade. It was in truth a
river; a river running like a writing across a patterned plane.

I looked upward--up to the circling peaks. They were a stupendous
coronet thrusting miles deep into the dazzling sky. I raised my glasses,
swept them. In color they were an immense and variegated flower with
countless multiform petals of stone; in outline they were a ring of
fortresses built by fantastic unknown Gods.

Up they thrust--domed and arched, spired and horned, pyramided, fanged
and needled. Here were palisades of burning orange with barbicans of
incandescent bronze; there aiguilles of azure rising from bastions of
cinnabar red; turrets of royal purple, obelisks of indigo; titanic forts
whose walls were splashed with vermilion, with citron yellows and with
rust of rubies; watch towers