nd
twisted as though they had been jettings of lava cooled into rigidity
before they could sink back or break. These shapes clustered most
thickly around an immense calcified mound. They were what were left of
the battling Hordes, and the mound was what had been the Metal Monster.

Somewhere there were the ashes of Norhala, sealed by fire in the urn of
the Metal Emperor!

From side to side of the Pit, in broken beaches and waves and hummocks,
in blackened, distorted tusks and warped towerings, reaching with
hideous pathos in thousands of forms toward the charred mound, was only
slag.

From rifts and hollows still filled with water little wreaths of steam
drifted. In those futile wraiths of vapor was all that remained of the
might of the Metal Monster.

Catastrophe I had expected, tragedy I knew we would find--but I had
looked for nothing so filled with the abomination of desolation, so
frightful as was this.

"Burned out!" muttered Drake. "Short-circuited and burned out! Like a
dynamo--like an electric light!"

"Destiny!" said Ventnor. "Destiny! Not yet was the hour struck for man
to relinquish his sovereignty over the world. Destiny!"

We began to pick our way down the heaped debris and out upon the plain.
For all that day and part of another we searched for an opening out of
the Pit.

Everywhere was the incredible calcification. The surfaces that had
been the smooth metallic carapaces with the tiny eyes deep within them,
crumbled beneath the lightest blow. Not long would it be until under
wind and rain they dissolved into dust and mud.

And it grew increasingly obvious that Drake's theory of the destruction
was correct. The Monster had been one prodigious magnet--or, rather, a
prodigious dynamo. By magnetism, by electricity, it had lived and had
been activated.

Whatever the force of which the cones were built and that I have likened
to energy-made material, it was certainly akin to electromagnetic
energies.

When, in the cataclysm, that force was diffused there had been created
a magnetic field of incredible intensity; had been concentrated an
electric charge of inconceivable magnitude.

Discharging, it had blasted the Monster--short-circuited it, and burned
it out.

But what was it that had led up to the cataclysm? What was it that had
turned the Metal Monster upon itself? What disharmony had crept into
that supernal order to set in motion the machinery of disintegration?

We could only conject