ng ceased. I saw the head of Cherkis swing heavily
upon a shoulder; the eyes closed.

The Destroying Things touched. Their flailing arms coiled back, withdrew
into their bodies. They joined, forming for an instant a tremendous
hollow pillar far down in whose center we stood. They parted; shifted
in shape? rolled down the mount over the ruins like a widening
wave--crushing into the stone all over which they passed.

Afar away I saw the gleaming serpent still at play--still writhing
along, still obliterating the few score scattered fugitives that some
way, somehow, had slipped by the Destroying Things.

We halted. For one long moment Norhala looked upon the drooping body of
him upon whom she had let fall this mighty vengeance.

Then the metal arm that held Cherkis whirled. Thrown from it, the
cloaked form flew like a great blue bat. It fell upon the flattened
mound that had once been the proud crown of his city. A blue blot upon
desolation the broken body of Cherkis lay.

A black speck appeared high in the sky; grew fast--the lammergeier.

"I have left carrion for you--after all!" cried Norhala.

With an ebon swirling of wings the vulture dropped beside the blue
heap--thrust in it its beak.

CHAPTER XXVII. "THE DRUMS OF DESTINY"

Slowly we descended that mount of desolation; lingeringly, as though the
brooding eyes of Norhala were not yet sated with destruction. Of human
life, of green life, of life of any kind there was none.

Man and tree, woman and flower, babe and bud, palace, temple and
home--Norhala had stamped flat. She had crushed them within the
rock--even as she had promised.

The tremendous tragedy had absorbed my every faculty; I had had no time
to think of my companions; I had forgotten them. Now in the painful
surges of awakening realization, of full human understanding of that
inhuman annihilation, I turned to them for strength. Faintly I wondered
again at Ruth's scantiness of garb, her more than half nudity; dwelt
curiously upon the red brand across Ventnor's forehead.

In his eyes and in Drake's I saw reflected the horror I knew was in
my own. But in the eyes of Ruth was none of this--sternly, coldly
triumphant, indifferent to its piteousness as Norhala herself, she
scanned the waste that less than an hour since had been a place of
living beauty.

I felt a shock of repulsion. After all, those who had been destroyed
so ruthlessly could not ALL have been wholly evil. Yet mother and
blo