high.
Again the cleft shrunk. A thousand feet ahead was a crack, a narrowing
of the cleft so small that hardly could a man pass through it.

Abruptly the metal dragon halted.

Norhala's chanting changed; became again the arrogant clarioning. And
close below us the huge neck split. It came to me then that it was as
though Norhala were the overspirit of this chimera--as though it caught
and understood and obeyed each quick thought of hers.

As though, indeed, she was a PART of it--as IT was in reality a part
of that infinitely greater Thing, crouching there in its lair of the
Pit--the Metal Monster that had lent this living part of itself to her
for a steed, a champion. Little time had I to consider such matters.

Up thrust the Shape before us. Into it raced and spun Things angled,
Things curved and Things squared. It gathered itself into a Titanic
pillar out of which, instantly, thrust scores of arms.

Over them great globes raced; after these flew other scores of huge
pyramids, none less than ten feet in height, the mass of them twenty
and thirty. The manifold arms grew rigid. Quiet for a moment, a Titanic
metal Briareous, it stood.

Then at the tips of the arms the globes began to spin--faster, faster.
Upon them I saw the hosts of the pyramids open--as one into a host of
stars. The cleft leaped out in a flood of violet light.

Now for another instant the stars which had been motionless, poised upon
the whirling spheres, joined in their mad spinning. Cyclopean pin wheels
they turned; again as one they ceased. More brilliant now was their
light, dazzling; as though in their whirling they had gathered greater
force.

Under me I felt the split Thing quiver with eagerness.

From the stars came a hurricane of lightning! A cataract of electric
flame poured into the crack, splashed and guttered down the granite
walls. We were blinded by it; were deafened with thunders.

The face of the precipice smoked and split; was whirled away in clouds
of dust.

The crack widened--widened as a gulley in a sand bank does when a
swift stream rushes through it. Lightnings these were--and more than
lightnings; lightnings keyed up to an invincible annihilating weapon
that could rend and split and crumble to atoms the living granite.

Steadily the cleft expanded. As its walls melted away the Blasting Thing
advanced, spurting into it the flaming torrents. Behind it we crept.
The dust of the shattered rocks swirled up toward us li