Argosy All-Story Weekly, Vol. 124, No. 3 — page 103: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE METAL MONSTER. pair ahead. I saw the fleshless jaws clamp, the mists that were the reflections of the light upon his eyes flashed. The jaws opened to speak. Abruptly, upon the skeletons in front of us the flesh dropped back! Girl and wo- man stood there once again robed in beauty! So swift was that transition from - the grisly unreal to the normal that even to my matter-of-fact mind it smacked of necromancy. The next instant the three of us stood looking at each other, clothed once more in the flesh, and the pony no longer the steed of death, but our shaggy haired, patient little companion! | The light had changed; the high violet had gone from it; it was shot with yellow | By it I gleamings like fugitive sunbeams. saw that we were passing through a wide corridor that seemed to stretch unending. The yeHow light grew stronger. - “That light wasn’t exactly the Roent- gen variety,” Drake interrupted my ab- sorption in our surroundings. “And I hope to the. Lord it’s as different as it seemed. If it’s not we may be up against a lot of trouble.” “ Trouble?” I asked. ‘‘ More trouble than we’re in?” I added, a trifle satirically. “X-ray burns,” he answered, “ and no way to treat them in this place—if we live to want treatment,” he ended grimly. “T° don’t think we were subjected to their action long enough, Dick,” I began, and was silent. The corridor had opened without warn- ing into a place for whose immensity I have no images that are adequate. It was a chamber—if chamber a place can be called that was vaster than ten score of the Great Halls of Karnac in one; great as that fabled hall in dread Amenti where Osiris sits throned between the Searcher of Hearts and the Eater of Souls, judging the jostling hosts of the newly dead! Temple it was-in its immensity, its sol- emn vastness—but unlike any temple ever raised by human toil. Within its silence brooded a spirit unearthly, gigantic. In no ruin of giants’ work in earth youth now crumbling under the weight of time had I ever sensed a shadow of the strangeness with which this was instinct; no—nor in 417 the shattered fanes that once had held the gods of old Egypt, nor in the pillared shrines of ancient Greece nor imperial Rome, nor mosque, basilica or cathedral. All these had been dedicated to gods that whether created by humanity as sci- ence believes, or creators of humanity as their worshipers believed, still held in them that essence we term human. The spirit, the force, that filled this place had in it nothing, nothing of the human! No place? Yes, there was one—Stone- henge. Within that mystic monolithic cir- cle I had felt a something akin to this, as inhuman, a brooding spirit stony, stark, un- yielding—as though not men but a people of stone had raised the’great Menhirs. This was a sanctuary built by a people of. metal! It was filled with a soft yellow glow like pale sunshine. Up from its floor arose hundreds of tremendous, square pillars, down whose polished sides the crocus light seemed to flow. So wide was the space be- tween them that Notre Dame itself might have been placed within it—nor would its highest towers have reached their tops! The floor was covered with the softly gleaming saffron like a carpet of woven radiance. Far, far as the gaze could reach the col- umns ‘marched, oppressively ordered, ap- | pallingly mathematical; from their very massiveness was distilled a sense of power, mysterious, mechanical yet—living; some- thing priestly, hierophantic— as though they were guardians of a shrine. Now I saw whence came the light suffus- ing this place. High up among the pillars floated scores of orbs that shone like pale gilt frozen suns. Great and small through all the upper levels these strange luminaries gleamed, fixed and motionless, hanging un- supported in space. Out from their shin- ing spherical surfaces darted rays of the same pale gold, rigid, unshifting, with that same suggestion of frozen stillness! “They look. like big Christmas-tree stars,” muttered Drake. “I can’t get ’em, Doc—are they lights—or what?” “‘They’re lights,” I answered. ‘ Of course they are. They’re not matter—not metal, I mean—” COUMIUC AOOLK Colin