s and fountains of frenzied Things that looped and struggled,
writhed over its edge, hurled themselves back; battling chimerae which
against the glittering heavens traced luminous symbols of agony.

Shrilled a stronger wailing. Up from behind the ray hurling Towers shot
hosts of globes. Thousands of palely azure, metal moons they soared;
warrior moons charging in meteor rush and streaming with fluttering
battle pennons of violet flame. High they flew; they curved over the
mile high back of the Monster; they dropped upon it.

Arose to meet them immense columns of the cubes; battered against
the spheres; swept them over and down into the depths. Hundreds fell,
broken--but thousands held their place. I saw them twine about the
pillars--writhing columns of interlaced cubes and globes straining
like monstrous serpents while all along their coils the open disks and
crosses smote with the scimitars of their lightnings.

In the wall of the City appeared a shining crack; from top to bottom it
ran; it widened into a rift from which a flood of radiance gushed. Out
of this rift poured a thousand-foot-high torrent of horned globes.

Only for an instant they flowed. The rift closed upon them, catching
those still emerging in a colossal vise. It CRUNCHED them. Plain through
the turmoil came a dreadful--bursting roar.

Down from the closing jaws of the vise dripped a stream of fragments
that flashed and flickered--and died. And now in the wall was no trace
of the breach.

A hurricane of radiant lances swept it. Under them a mile wide section
of the living scarp split away; dropped like an avalanche. Its fall
revealed great spaces, huge vaults and chambers filled with warring
lightnings--out from them came roaring, bellowing thunders. Swiftly from
each side of the gap a metal curtaining of the cubes joined. Again the
wall was whole.

I turned my stunned gaze from the City--swept over the valley.
Everywhere, in towers, in writhing coils, in whipping flails, in waves
that smote and crashed, in countless forms and combinations the Metal
Hordes battled. Here were pillars against which metal billows rushed
and were broken; there were metal comets that crashed high above the mad
turmoil.

From streaming silent veil to veil--north and south, east and west the
Monster slew itself beneath its racing, flaming banners, the tempests of
its lightnings.

The tortured hulk of the City lurched; it swept toward us. Before it
blotted out from