The ingots passed between the whirling faces; emerged from them as slender, long cylinders; were seized as they slipped down by a crouching block, whose place as it glided away was instantly taken by another.In many bewildering forms, intent upon unknown activities directed toward unguessable ends, the composite, animate mechanisms labored.And all the place was filled with a goblin bustle, trollish racketings, ringing of gnomish anvils, clanging of kobold forges--a clamorous cavern filled with metal Nibelungens.
We came to the opening of another passage, a doorway piercing the walls of the workshop.Its incline, though steep, was not dangerous.
Into it we stepped; climbed onward it seemed interminably.
Far ahead of us at last appeared the outline of its further entrance, silhouetted against and filled with a brighter luminosity.We drew near; stopped cautiously at its threshold, peering out.
Well it was that we had hesitated.Before us was open space--an abyss in the body of the Metal Monster.
The corridor opened into it like a window.Thrusting out our heads, we saw an unbroken wall both above and below.Half a mile away was its opposite side.Over this pit was a misty sky and not more than a thousand feet above and black against the heavens was the lip of it--the cornices of this chasm within the City.
Far, far beneath us we watched the Hordes throw themselves across the abyss in webs of curving arches and girder-straight bridges; gigantic we knew these spans must be yet dwarfed to slender footways by distance.Over them moved hurrying companies; from them came flashings, glitterings--prismatic, sun golden; plutonic scarlets, molten blues; javelins of colored light piercing upward from unfolded cubes and globes and pyramids crossing them or from busy bearers of the shining fruits of the mysterious workshops.
And as they passed the bridges swung up, coiled and thrust themselves from sight through openings that closed behind them.Ever, as they passed, close on their going whipped out other spans so that always across that abyss a sentient, shifting web was hung.
We drew back, stared into each other's white face.Panic swept through me, in quick, alternate pulse of ice and fire.For crushingly, no longer to be denied, came certainty that we were lost within the mazes of this incredible City--lost in the body of the Metal Monster which that City was.There was a sick despair in my heart as we turned and slowly made our way back along the sloping corridor.
A hundred yards, perhaps, we had gone in silence before we stopped, gazing stupidly at an opening in the wall beside us.The portal had not been there when we had passed--of that I was certain.
"It's opened since we went by," whispered Drake.
We peered through it.The passage was narrow; its pave led downward.For a moment we hesitated, the same foreboding in both our minds.And yet--among the perils that crowded in upon us what choice had we? There could be no more danger there than here.
Both ways were--ALIVE, both obedient to impulses over which we had no more control and no more way of predetermining than mice in some complex, man-made trap.
Furthermore, this shaft also ran downward, and although its pitch was less and it did not therefore drop as quickly toward that level we sought and wherein lay the openings of escape into the outer valley, it fell at right angles to the corridor through which we had come.
We knew that to retrace our steps now would but take us back to the forges and thence to the hall of the Cones and the certain peril waiting for us there.
We stepped into this opened way.For a little distance it ran straightly, then turned and sloped gently upward;and a little distance more we climbed.Then suddenly, not a hundred yards from us, gushed out a flood of soft radiance, opalescent, filled with pearly glimmerings and rosy shadows of light.
It was as though a door had opened into some world of luminescence.From it the lambent torrent poured; billowed down upon us.In its wake came music--if music the mighty harmonies, the sonorous chords, the crystalline themes and the linked chaplet of notes that were like spiralings of tiny golden star bells could be named.
