kling path between us and them was gone--was
fading out close behind us as we swept onward.

Faster and faster grew our pace. The cylindrical wall loomed close. A
high oblong portal showed within it. Into this we were carried. Before
us stretched a corridor precisely similar to that which, closing upon
us, had forced us completely out into the hall.

Unlike that passage, its floor lifted steeply--a smooth and shining
slide up which no man could climb. A shaft, indeed, which thrust upward
straight as an arrow at an angle of at least thirty degrees and whose
end or turning we could not see. Up and up it cleared its way through
the City--through the Metal Monster--closed only by the inability of
the eye to pierce the faint luminosity that thickened by distance became
impenetrable.

For an instant we hovered upon its threshold. But the impulse, the
command, that had carried us thus far was not to stop here. Into it and
up it we were thrust, our feet barely touching the glimmering surface;
lifted by the force that emanated from its floor, carried on by the
force that pressed out from the sides.

Up and up we went--scores of feet--hundreds--

CHAPTER XXII. THE ENSORCELLED CHAMBER

"Goodwin!" Drake broke the silence; desperately he was striving to keep
his fear out of his voice. "Goodwin--this isn't the way to get out.
We're going up--farther away all the time from the--the gates!"

"What can we do?" My anxiety was no less than his, but my realization of
our helplessness was complete.

"If we only knew how to talk to these Things," he said. "If we could
only have let the Disk know we wanted to get out--damn it, Goodwin, it
would have helped us."

Grotesque as the idea sounded, I felt that he spoke the truth. The
Emperor meant no harm to us; in fact in speeding us away I was not at
all sure that he had not deliberately wished us well--there was that
about the Keeper--

Still up we sped along the shaft. I knew we must now be above the level
of the valley.

"We've got to get back to Ruth! Goodwin--NIGHT! And what may have
HAPPENED to her?"

"Drake, boy"--I dropped into his own colloquialism--"we're up against
it. We can't help it. And remember--she's there in Norhala's home. I
don't believe, I honestly don't believe, Dick, that there's any danger
as long as she remains there. And Ventnor ties her fast."

"That's true," he said, more hopefully. "That's true--and probably
Norhala is with her by now."

"I do