od; from the canteens
we drank. We did not talk. Each knew what the other was thinking;
infrequently, and thank the eternal law that some call God for that,
come crises in which speech seems not only petty but when against it the
mind rebels as a nauseous thing.

This was such a time. At last I drew myself to my feet.

"Let's be going," I said.

The corridor stretched straight before us; along it we paced. How far we
walked I do not know; mile upon mile, it seemed. It broadened abruptly
into a vast hall.

And this hall was filled with the Metal Hordes--was a gigantic workshop
of them. In every shape, in every form, they seethed and toiled about
it. Upon its floor were heaps of shining ores, mounds of flashing gems,
piles of ingots, metallic and crystalline. High and low throughout
flamed the egg-shaped incandescences; floating furnaces both great and
small.

Before one of these forges, close to us, stood a Metal Thing. Its body
was a twelve-foot column of smaller cubes. Upon the top was a hollow
square formed of even lesser blocks--blocks hardly larger than the
Little Things themselves. In the center of the open rectangle was
another shaft, its top a two-foot square plate formed of a single cube.

From the sides of the hollow square sprang long arms of spheres, each
tipped by a tetrahedron. They moved freely, slipping about upon their
curved points of contact and like a dozen little thinking hammers,
the pyramid points at their ends beat down upon as many thimble shaped
objects which they thrust alternately into the unwinking brazier then
laid upon the central block to shape.

A goblin workman the Thing seemed, standing there, so intent upon and so
busy with its forgings.

There were scores of these animate machines; they paid no slightest
heed to us as we slipped by them, clinging as closely to the wall of the
immense workshop as we could.

We passed a company of other Shapes which stood two by two and close
together, their tops wide spinning wheels through which the tendrils
of an opened globe fed translucent, colorless ingots--the substance it
seemed to me of which Norhala's shadowy walls were made, the crystal of
which the bars that built out the base of the Cones were formed.

The ingots passed between the whirling faces; emerged from them as
slender, long cylinders; were seized as they slipped down by a crouching
block, whose place as it glided away was instantly taken by another. In
many bewildering