The corridor had ended and--had shut us out from itself.

"Bounced!" exclaimed Drake.

And incongruous, flippant, colloquial as was that word, I know none that
would better describe my own feelings.

We were BOUNCED out upon a turret jutting from the barrier. And before
us lay spread the most amazing, the most extraordinary fantastic scene
upon which, I think, the vision of man has rested since the advent of
time.

CHAPTER XX. VAMPIRES OF THE SUN

It was a crater; a half mile on high and all of two thousand feet across
ran the circular lip of its vast rim. Above it was a circle of white and
glaring sky in whose center flamed the sun.

And instantly, before my vision could grasp a tithe of that panorama, I
knew that this place was the very heart of the City; its vital ganglion;
its soul.

Around the crater lip were poised thousands of concave disks, vernal
green, enormous. They were like a border of gigantic, upthrust shields;
and within each, emblazoned like a shield's device, was a blinding
flower of flame--the reflected, dilated face of the sun. Below this
diadem hung, pendent, clusters of other disks, swarmed like the globular
hiving of the constellation Hercules' captured stars. And each of these
prisoned the image of our sun.

A hundred feet below us was the crater floor.

Up from it thrust a mountainous forest of the pallidly radiant cones;
bristling; prodigious. Tier upon tier, thicket upon thicket, phalanx
upon phalanx they climbed. Up and up, pyramidically, they flung their
spiked hosts.

They drew together two thousand feet above us, clustering close about
the foot of a single huge spire which thrust itself skyward above them.
The crest of this spire was truncated. From its shorn tip radiated
scores of long and slender spokes holding in place a thousand feet wide
wheel of wan green disks whose concave surfaces, unlike those smooth
ones girding the crater, were curiously faceted.

This amazing structure rested upon a myriad-footed base of crystal,
even as had that other cornute fantasy beside which we had met the great
Disk. But it was in size to that as--as Leviathan to a minnow. From it
streamed the same baffling suggestion of invincible force transmuted
into matter; energy coalesced into the tangible; power made concentrate
in the vestments of substance.

Half-way between crater lip and floor began the hordes of the Metal
People.

In colossal animate cheveau-de-frise of hundred-foot gi