lf disintegrate.

Now I saw spinning spheres and darting cubes and pyramids click into new
positions. The front and side legs lengthened, the back legs shortened,
fitting themselves plainly to what must be a varying angle of descent
beyond.

And it was no chimera, no kraken of the abyss. It was a car made of
the Metal Things. I caught again the flashes and thought that they were
jewels or heaps of shining ores carried by the conscious machine.

It vanished. In its place hung poised the cube that bore the enigmatic
woman and Ruth. Then they were gone and we stood where but an instant
before they had been.

We were high above an ocean of living light--a sea of incandescent
splendors that stretched mile upon uncounted mile away and whose
incredible waves streamed thousands of feet in air, flew in gigantic
banners, in tremendous streamers, in coruscating clouds of varicolored
flame--as though torn by the talons of a mighty wind.

My dazzled sight cleared, glare and blaze and searing incandescence
took form, became ordered. Within the sea of light I glimpsed shapes
cyclopean, unnameable.

They moved slowly, with an awesome deliberateness. They shone darkly
within the flame-woven depths. From them came the volleys of the
lightnings.

Score upon score of them there were--huge and enigmatic. Their flaming
levins threaded the shimmering veils, patterned them, as though they
were the flying robes of the very spirit of fire.

And the tumult was as ten thousand Thors, smiting with hammers against
the enemies of Odin. As a forge upon whose shouting anvils was being
shaped a new world.

A new world? A metal world!

The thought spun through my mazed brain, was gone--and not until
long after did I remember it. For suddenly all that clamor died; the
lightnings ceased; all the flitting radiances paled and the sea of
flaming splendors grew thin as moving mists. The storming shapes dulled
with them, seemed to darken into the murk.

Through the fast-waning light and far, far away--miles it seemed on high
and many, many miles in length--a broad band of fluorescent amethyst
shone. From it dropped curtains, shimmering, nebulous as the marching
folds of the aurora; they poured, cascaded, from the amethystine band.

Huge and purple-black against their opalescence bulked what at first I
thought a mountain, so like was it to one of those fantastic buttes of
our desert Southwest when their castellated tops are silhouetted against
th