rders they thrust
themselves out from the curving walls--walls, I knew, as alive as they!

From these Brobdignagian beams they swung in ropes and clusters--spheres
and cubes studded as thickly with the pyramids as ever Titan's mace with
spikes. Group after bizarre group they dropped; pendulous. Coppices
of slender columns of thistled globes sprang up to meet the festooned
joists.

Between the girders they draped themselves in long, stellated garlands;
grouped themselves in innumerable, kaleidoscopic patterns.

They clicked into place around the golden turret in which we crouched.

In fantastic arrases they swayed in front of us--now hiding by, now
revealing through their quicksilver interweavings the mounts of the
Cones.

And steadily those flowing in below added to their multitudes; gliding
up cable and pillar; building out still further the living girders,
stringing themselves upon living festoon and living garland, weaving in
among them, changing their shapes, rewriting their symbols.

They swung and threaded swiftly, in shifting arabesque, in Gothic
traceries, in lace-like fantasies; utterly bizarre, unutterably
beautiful--crystalline, geometric always.

Abruptly their movement ceased--so abruptly that the stoppage of all the
ordered turmoil had the quality of appalling silence.

An unimaginable tapestry bedight with incredible broidery, the Metal
People draped the vast cup.

Pillared it as though it were a temple.

Garnished it with their bodies as though it were a shrine.

Across the floor toward the Cones glided a palely lustrous sphere. In
shape only a globe like all its kind, yet it was invested with power; it
radiated power as a star does light; was clothed in unseen garments of
supernal force. In its wake drifted two great pyramids; after them ten
spheres but little smaller than the Shape which led.

"The Metal Emperor!" breathed Drake.

On they swept until they reached the base of the Cones. They paused at
the edge of the crystal tabling. They turned.

There was a flashing as of a meteor bursting. The globe had opened into
that splendor of jewel fires before which had floated Norhala and Ruth.

I saw again the luminous ovals of sapphire, studding its golden zone,
the mystic rose of pulsing, petal flame, the still core of incandescent
ruby that was the heart of that rose.

Strangely I felt my own heart veer toward this--Thing; bowing before its
beauty and its strength; almost worshiping!