CHAPTER VIII. THE DRUMS OF THUNDER
Upon that threshold the mists foamed like breaking billows, then ceasedabruptly to be. Keeping exactly the distance I had noted when our gazehad risen above the fog, glided the block that bore Ruth and Norhala.In the strange light of the place into which we had emerged--andwhether that place was canyon, corridor, or tunnel I could not thendetermine--it stood out sharply.
One arm of Norhala held Ruth--and in her attitude I sensed a shieldingintent, guardianship--the first really human impulse this shape ofmystery and beauty had revealed.
In front of them swept score upon score of her familiars--no longerdully lustrous, but shining as though cut from blue and polished steel.They--marched--in ordered rows, globes and cubes and pyramids; movingsedately now as units.
I looked behind me; out of the spume boiling at the portal, were pouringforth other scores of the Metal Things, darting through like diversthrough a wave. And as they drew into our wake and swam into the light,their dim lustre vanished like a film; their surfaces grew almostradiant.
Whence came the light that set them gleaming? Our pace had slackened--Ilooked about me. The walls of the cleft or tunnel were perpendicular,smooth and shining with a cold, metallic, greenish glow.
Between the walls, like rhythmic flashing of fire-flies, pulsed soft andfugitive glimmerings that carried a sense of the infinitely minute--ofelectrons, it came to me, rather than atoms. Their irradiance wasgreenish, like the walls; but I was certain that these corpuscles didnot come from them.
They blinked and faded like motes within a shifting sunbeam; or, to usea more scientific comparison, like colloids within the illuminated fieldof the ultramicroscope; and like these latter it was as though the eyestook in not the minute particles themselves but their movement only.
Save for these gleamings the light of the place, although crepuscular,was crystalline clear. High above us--five hundred, a thousand feet--thewalls merged into a haze of clouded beryl.
Rock certainly the cliffs were--but rock cut and planed, smoothed andpolished and PLATED!
Yes, that was it--plated. Plated with some metallic substance that wasitself a reservoir of luminosity and from which, it came to me, pulsedthe force that lighted the winking ions. But who could have done such athing? For what purpose? How?
And the meticulousness, the perfection of these smoothed cliffs struckover my nerves as no rasp could, stirring a vague resentment, anirritated desire for human inharmonies, human disorder.
Absorbed in my examination I had forgotten those who must share with memy doubts and dangers. I felt a grip on my arm.
"If we get close enough and I can get my feet loose from this damnedthing I'll jump," Drake said.
"What?" I gasped, blankly, startled out of my preoccupation. "Jumpwhere?"
I followed his pointing finger. We were rapidly closing upon the othercube; it was now a scant twenty paces ahead; it seemed to be stopping.Ventnor was leaning forward, quivering with eagerness.
"Ruth!" he called. "Ruth--are you all right?"
Slowly she turned to us--my heart gave a great leap, then seemedto stop. For her sweet face was touched with that same unearthlytranquillity which was Norhala's; in her brown eyes was a shadow of thatpassionless spirit brooding in Norhala's own; her voice as she answeredheld within it more than echo of Norhala's faint, far-off goldenchiming.
"Yes," she sighed; "yes, Martin--have no fear for me--"
And turned from us, gazing forward once more with the woman and assilent as she.
I glanced covertly at Ventnor, at Drake--had I imagined, or had theytoo seen? Then I knew they had seen, for Ventnor's face was white to thelips, and Drake's jaw was set, his teeth clenched, his eyes blazing withanger.
"What's she doing to Ruth--you saw her face," he gritted, halfinarticulately.
"Ruth!" There was anguish in Ventnor's cry.
She did not turn again. It was as though she had not heard him.
The cubes were now not five yards apart. Drake gathered himself;strained to loosen his feet from the shining surface, making ready toleap when they should draw close enough. His great chest swelled withhis effort, the muscles of his neck knotted, sweat steamed down hisface.
"No use," he gasped, "no use, Goodwin. It's like trying to lift yourselfby your boot-straps--like a fly stuck in molasses."
"Ruth," cried Ventnor once more.
As though it had been a signal the block darted forward, resuming thedistance it had formerly maintained between us.
The vanguard of the Metal Things began to race. With an incredible speedthey fled into, were lost in an instant within, the luminous distances.
The cube that bore the woman and girl accelerated; flew faster andfaster onward. And as swiftly our own followed it. The lustrous wallsflowed by, dizzily.
We had swept over toward the right wall of the cleft and were glidingover a broad ledge. This ledge was, I judged, all of a hundred feet inwidth. From it the floor of the place was dropping rapidly.
The opposite precipices were slowly drawing closer. After us flowed theflanking host.
Steadily our ledge arose and the floor of the canyon dropped. Now wewere twenty feet above it, now thirty. And the character of the cliffswas changing. Veins of quartz shone under the metallic plating likecut crystal, like cloudy opals; here was a splash of vermilion, there apatch of amber; bands of pallid ochre stained it.
My gaze was caught by a line of inky blackness in the exact center ofthe falling floor. So black was it that at first glance I took it for avein of jetty lignite.
It widened. It was a crack, a fissure. Now it was a yard in width, nowthree, and blackness seemed to well up from within it, blackness thatwas the very essence of the depths. Steadily the ebon rift expanded;spread suddenly wide open in two sharp-edged, flying wedges--
Earth had dropped away. At our side a gulf had opened, an abyss,striking down depth upon depth; profound; immeasurable.
We were human atoms, riding upon a steed of sorcery and racing along asplit rampart of infinite space.
I looked behind--scores of the cubes were darting from the metal hosttrailing us; in a long column of twos they flashed by, raced ahead. Farin front of us a gloom began to grow; deepened until we were rushinginto blackest night.
Through the murk stabbed a long lance of pale blue phosphorescence.It unrolled like a ribbon of wan flame, flicked like a serpent'stongue--held steady. I felt the Thing beneath us leap forward; itsvelocity grew prodigious; the wind beat upon us with hurricane force.
I shielded my eyes with my hands and peered through the chinks of myfingers. Ranged directly in our path was a barricade of the cubes andupon them we were racing like a flying battering-ram. Involuntarily Iclosed my eyes against the annihilating impact that seemed inevitable.
The Thing on which we rode lifted.
We were soaring at a long angle straight to the top of the barrier; wereupon it, and still with that awful speed unchecked were hurtling throughthe blackness over the shaft of phosphorescence, the ribbon of palelight that I had watched pierce it and knew now was but another span ofthe cubes that but a little before had fled past us. Beneath the span,on each side of it, I sensed illimitable void.
We were over; rushing along in darkness. There began a mighty tumult,a vast crashing and roaring. The clangor waxed, beat about us withtremendous strokes of sound.
Far away was a dim glowing, as of rising sun through heavy mists ofdawn. The mists faded--miles away gleamed what at first glimpse seemedindeed to be the rising sun; a gigantic orb, whose lower limb justtouched, was sharply, horizontally cut by the blackness, as though atits base that blackness was frozen.
The sun? Reason returned to me; told me this globe could not be that.
What was it then? Ra-Harmachis, of the Egyptians, stripped of his wings,exiled and growing old in the corridors of the Dead? Or that mockingluminary, the cold phantom of the God of light and warmth which the oldNorsemen believed was set in their frozen hell to torment t
he damned?
I thrust aside the fantasies, impatiently. But sun or no sun, lightstreamed from this orb, light in multicolored, lanced rays, banishingthe blackness through which we had been flying.
Closer we came and closer; lighter it grew about us, and by the growinglight I saw that still beside us ran the abyss. And even louder, morethunderous, became the clamor.
At the foot of the radiant disk I glimpsed a luminous pool. Into it, outof the depths, protruded a tremendous rectangular tongue, gleaming likegray steel.
On the tongue an inky shape appeared; it lifted itself from the abyss,rushed upon the disk and took form.
Like a gigantic spider it was, squat and horned. For an instant it wassilhouetted against the smiling sphere, poised itself--and vanishedthrough it.
Now, not far ahead, silhouetted as had been the spider shape, blackenedinto sight a cube and on it Ruth and Norhala. It seemed to hover, towait.
"It's a door," Drake's shout beat thinly in my ears against thehurricane of sound.
What I thought had been an orb was indeed a gateway, a portal; and itwas gigantic.
The light streamed through it, the flaming colors, the lightning glare,the drifting shadows were all beyond it. The suggestion of sphere hadbeen an illusion, born of the darkness in which we were moving and inits own luminescence.
And I saw that the steel tongue was a ramp, a slide, dropping down intothe gulf.
Norhala raised her hands high above her head. Up from the darkness flewan incredible shape--like a monstrous, armored flat-backed crab; angledspikes protruded from it; its huge body was spangled with darting,greenish flames.
It swept beneath us and by. On its back were multitudinous breasts fromwhich issued blinding flashes--sapphire blue, emerald green, sun yellow.It hung poised as had that other nightmare shape, standing out jet blackand colossal, rearing upon columnar legs, whose outlines were those ofalternate enormous angled arrow-points and lunettes. Swiftly its formshifted; an instant it hovered, half disintegrate.
Now I saw spinning spheres and darting cubes and pyramids click into newpositions. The front and side legs lengthened, the back legs shortened,fitting themselves plainly to what must be a varying angle of descentbeyond.
And it was no chimera, no kraken of the abyss. It was a car made ofthe Metal Things. I caught again the flashes and thought that they werejewels or heaps of shining ores carried by the conscious machine.
It vanished. In its place hung poised the cube that bore the enigmaticwoman and Ruth. Then they were gone and we stood where but an instantbefore they had been.
We were high above an ocean of living light--a sea of incandescentsplendors that stretched mile upon uncounted mile away and whoseincredible waves streamed thousands of feet in air, flew in giganticbanners, in tremendous streamers, in coruscating clouds of varicoloredflame--as though torn by the talons of a mighty wind.
My dazzled sight cleared, glare and blaze and searing incandescencetook form, became ordered. Within the sea of light I glimpsed shapescyclopean, unnameable.
They moved slowly, with an awesome deliberateness. They shone darklywithin the flame-woven depths. From them came the volleys of thelightnings.
Score upon score of them there were--huge and enigmatic. Their flaminglevins threaded the shimmering veils, patterned them, as though theywere the flying robes of the very spirit of fire.
And the tumult was as ten thousand Thors, smiting with hammers againstthe enemies of Odin. As a forge upon whose shouting anvils was beingshaped a new world.
A new world? A metal world!
The thought spun through my mazed brain, was gone--and not untillong after did I remember it. For suddenly all that clamor died; thelightnings ceased; all the flitting radiances paled and the sea offlaming splendors grew thin as moving mists. The storming shapes dulledwith them, seemed to darken into the murk.
Through the fast-waning light and far, far away--miles it seemed on highand many, many miles in length--a broad band of fluorescent amethystshone. From it dropped curtains, shimmering, nebulous as the marchingfolds of the aurora; they poured, cascaded, from the amethystine band.
Huge and purple-black against their opalescence bulked what at first Ithought a mountain, so like was it to one of those fantastic buttes ofour desert Southwest when their castellated tops are silhouetted againstthe setting sun; knew instantly that this was but subconscious strivingto translate into terms of reality the incredible.
It was a City!
A city full five thousand feet high and crowned with countless spiresand turrets, titanic arches, stupendous domes! It was as though theman-made cliffs of lower New York were raised scores of times theirheight, stretched a score of times their length. And weirdly enough itdid suggest those same towering masses of masonry when one sees themblacken against the twilight skies.
The pit darkened as though night were filtering down into it; the vast,purple-shadowed walls of the city sparkled out with countless lights.From the crowning arches and turrets leaped broad filaments of flame,flashing, electric.
Was it my straining eyes, the play of the light and shadow--or werethose high-flung excrescences shifting, changing shape? An icyhand stretched out of the unknown, stilled my heart. For theywere shifting--arches and domes, turrets and spires; were melting,reappearing in ferment; like the lightning-threaded, rolling edges ofthe thundercloud.
I wrenched my gaze away; saw that our platform had come to rest upon abroad and silvery ledge close to the curving frame of the portal and nota yard from where upon her block stood Norhala, her arm clasped aboutthe rigid form of Ruth. I heard a sigh from Ventnor, an exclamation fromDrake.
Before one of us could cry out to Ruth, the cube glided to the edge ofthe shelf, dipped out of sight.
That upon which we rode trembled and sped after it.
There came a sickening sense of falling; we lurched against each other;for the first time the pony whinnied, fearfully. Then with awful speedwe were flying down a wide, a glistening, a steeply angled ramp into thePit, straight toward the half-hidden, soaring escarpments flashing afar.
Far ahead raced the Thing on which stood woman and maid. Their hairstreamed behind them, mingled, silken web of brown and shining veilof red-gold; little clouds of sparkling corpuscles threaded them, likeflitting swarms of fire-flies; their bodies were nimbused with tiny,flickering tongues of lavender flame.
About us, above us, began again to rumble the countless drums of thethunder.