ng bodies--of the Metal
People themselves.

Its opening, as had been the closing of that other passage, was the
conscious, coordinate and voluntary action of the Things that formed
these mighty walls.

An action that obeyed, was directed by, the incredibly gigantic,
communistic will which, like the spirit of the hive, the soul of the
formicary, animated every unit of them.

A greater realization swept us. If THIS were true, then those pillars in
the vast hall, its towering walls--all this City was one living Thing!

Built of the animate bodies of countless millions! Tons upon countless
tons of them shaping a gigantic pile of which every atom was sentient,
mobile--intelligent!

A Metal Monster!

Now I knew why it was that its frowning facade had seemed to watch us
Argus-eyed as the Things had tossed us toward it. It HAD watched us!

That flood of watchfulness pulsing about us had been actual
concentration of regard of untold billions of tiny eyes of the living
block which formed the City's cliff.

A City that Saw! A City that was Alive!

No secret mechanism then--back darted my mind to that first terror--had
closed the wall, shutting from our sight Norhala at play with the Little
Things. None had opened the way for, had closed the way behind, the
coursing spheres. It had been done by the conscious action of the
conscious Things of whose living bodies was built this whole tremendous
thinking pile!

I think that for a moment we both went a little mad as that staggering
truth came to us. I know we started to run once more, side by side,
gripping like frightened children each other's hands. Then Drake
stopped.

"By all the HELL of this place," he said, solemnly, "I'll run no more.
After all--we're men. If they kill us, they kill us. But by the God who
made me I'll run from them no more. I'll die standing."

His courage steadied me. Defiantly we marched on. Up from below us, down
from the roof, out from the walls of our way the hosts of eyes gleamed
and twinkled upon us.

"Who could have believed it?" he muttered, half to himself. "A living
city of them! A living nest of them; a prodigious living nest of metal!"

"A nest?" I caught the word. What did it suggest? That was it--the nest
of the army ants, the city of the army ants, that Beebe had studied in
the South American jungles and once described to me. After all, was this
more wonderful, more unbelievable than that--the city of ants which was
formed by