. As my gaze swept away I noted
with a curious relief that the tiny eye-points were no longer sparkling
with their enigmatic life, that they were dulled and dim once more.

Before me, glimmering pallidly, bristled the mount of the Cones. Around
its crystal base glittered immense egg-shaped diamond incandescences.
They were both rayless and strangely--lightless; they threw no shadows
nor did their lambency lessen the dimness. Beside each of these curious
luminosities stood one of the sullen-fired, cruciform shapes--the Things
that now I knew for the opened cubes.

They were smaller than the Keeper, indeed less than half his height.
They were ranged in an almost unbroken crescent around the visible arc
of the immense pedestal--and now I saw that the lights were a few feet
closer to that pedestal than they. Egg-shaped as I have said, the wider
end was undermost, resting in a broad cup upheld by a slender pedicle
silvery-gray and metallic.

"They're building out the base," whispered Drake. "The Cones got so big
they have to give them more room."

"Magnetism," I whispered in return. "Electricity--they drew down from
the sun spot. And it was more than that--I saw the Cones grow under it.
It fed them as it fed the Hordes--but the Cones grew. It was as though
the shields and the Cones turned pure energy into substance."

"And if we hadn't been pretty thoroughly magnetized to start with it
would have done for us," he said.

We watched the operation going on in front of us. The cross shapes had
bent, hinging above the transverse arms. They bowed in absolute unison
as at some signal. Down from the horizontal plane of each whipped the
long and writhing tentacles.

At the foot of every one I could now perceive a heap of some faintly
glistening material. The tendrils coiled among this, then drew up
something that looked like a thick rod of crystal. The bent planes
straightened; simultaneously they thrust the crystalline bars toward the
incandescences.

There came a curious, brittle hissing. The ends of the rods began to
dissolve into dazzling, diamond rain, atomically minute, that passing
through the egg-shaped lights poured upon the periphery of the pedestal.
Rapidly the bars melted. Heat there must be in these lights, terrific
heat--yet the Keeper's workers seemed impervious to it.

As the ends of the bars radiated into the annealing mist I saw the
tentacles creep closer and ever closer to the rayless flame through
which