low; was not more than four feet above the floor.
The sturdy, dwarfed pilasters supporting it thrust up in crowded copses,
merging through distance into apparent solidity.

Now, too, I realized, as I had not when looking down from above, how
stupendous the structure rising from the crystal foundation was.

I began to wonder how so thin a support could bear the mount bristling
above it--then remembered what it was that at first had flown from them,
shrinking them, and at last had fed and swelled them.

Light! Weightless magnetic ions; swarms of electric ions; the misty
breath of the infinite energy breathing upon, condensing upon, them.
Could it be that the Cones for all their apparent mass had little,
if any, weight? Like ringed Saturn, thousands of times Earth's bulk,
flaunting itself in the Heavens--yet if transported to our world so
light that rings and all it would float like a bubble upon our oceans.
The Cones towered above me--close, so close.

The Cones were weightless. How I knew I cannot say--but now, almost
touching them, I did know. Nebulous, yet solid, were they; compact, yet
tenuous, dense and unsubstantial.

Again the thought came to me--they were force made visible; energy made
concentrate into matter.

We skirted, seeking for the tablet over which the Keeper had hovered;
the mechanism which, under his tentacles, had shifted the circling
shields, thrust the spear of green fire into the side of the wounded
sun. Hesitantly I touched the crystal base; the edge was warm, but
whether this warmth came from the dazzling rain which we had just
watched build it outward or whether it was a property inherent with the
substance itself I do not know.

Certainly there was no mark upon it to show where the molten mists had
fallen. It was diamond hard and smooth. The nearest cones were but a
scant nine feet from its rim.

Suddenly we saw the tablet; stood beside it. The shape of a great T,
glimmering with a faint and limpid violet phosphorescence, it might have
been, in shape and size, the palely shining shadow of the Keeper. It was
a foot above the floor, and had apparently no connection with the cones.

It was made of thousands of close-packed tiny octagonal rods the tops of
some of which were cupped, of others pointed; none was more than half
an inch in width. There was about it a suggestion of wedded crystal
and metal--as about its burden was the suggestion of mated energy and
matter.

The rods were mova