re in the clamorous shell of the Pit echoed the
tremendous voices of that illimitable sea which laps the shores of the
countless suns.

I looked upon a mighty whirlpool miles and miles wide. It whirled with
surges whose racing crests were smiting incandescences; it was threaded
with a spindrift of lightnings; it was trodden by dervish mists of
molten flame thrust through with forests of lances of living light. It
cast a cadent spray high to the heavens.

Over it the heavens glittered as though they were a shield held by
fearful gods. Through the maelstrom staggered a mountainous bulk; a
gleaming leviathan of pale blue metal caught in the swirling tide of
some incredible volcano; a huge ark of metal breasting a deluge of
flame.

And the drumming we heard as of hollow beaten metal worlds, the shouting
tempests of cannonading stars, was the breaking of these incandescent
crests, the falling of the lightning spindrift, the rhythmic impact of
the lanced rays upon the glimmering mountain that reeled and trembled as
they struck it.

The reeling mountain, the struggling leviathan, was--the City!

It was the mass of the Metal Monster itself, guarded by, stormed by,
its own legions that though separate from it were still as much of it as
were the cells that formed the skin of its walls, its carapace.

It was the Metal Monster tearing, rending, fighting for, battling
against--itself.

Mile high as when I had first beheld it was the inexplicable body that
held the great heart of the cones into which had been drawn the magnetic
cataracts from our sun; that held too the smaller hearts of the lesser
cones, the workshops, the birth chamber and manifold other mysteries
unguessed and unseen. By a full fourth had its base been shrunken.

Ranged in double line along the side turned toward us were hundreds of
dread forms--Shapes that in their intensity bore down upon, oppressed
with a nightmare weight, the consciousness.

Rectangular, upon their outlines no spike of pyramid, no curve of globe
showing, uncompromisingly ponderous, they upthrust. Upon the tops of the
first rank were enormous masses, sledge shaped--like those metal fists
that had battered down the walls of Cherkis's city but to them as the
human hand is to the paw of the dinosaur.

Conceive this--conceive these Shapes as animate and flexible; beating
down with the prodigious mallets, smashing from side to side as though
the tremendous pillars that held them were tho