usand jointed upright
pistons; that as closely as I can present it in images of things we know
is the picture of the Hammering Things.

Behind them stood a second row, high as they and as angular. From them
extended scores of girdered arms. These were thickly studded with the
flaming cruciform shapes, the opened cubes gleaming with their angry
flares of reds and smoky yellows. From the tentacles of many swung
immense shields like those which ringed the hall of the great cones.

And as the sledges beat, ever over their bent heads poured from the
crosses a flood of crimson lightnings. Out of the concave depths of
the shields whipped lashes of blinding flame. With ropes of fire
they knouted the Things the sledges struck, the sullen crimson levins
blasted.

Now I could see the Shapes that attacked. Grotesque; spined and tusked,
spiked and antlered, wenned and breasted; as chimerically angled, cusped
and cornute as though they were the superangled, supercornute gods of
the cusped and angled gods of the Javanese, they strove against the
sledge-headed and smiting, the multiarmed and blasting square towers.

High as them, as huge as they, incomparably fantastic, in dozens of
shifting forms they battled.

More than a mile from the stumbling City stood ranged like sharpshooters
a host of solid, bristling-legged towers. Upon their tops spun gigantic
wheels. Out of the centers of these wheels shot the radiant lances,
hosts of spears of intensest violet light. The radiance they volleyed
was not continuous; it was broken, so that the javelin rays shot out in
rhythmic flights, each flying fast upon the shafts of the others.

It was their impact that sent forth the thunderous drumming. They struck
and splintered against the walls, dropping from them in great gouts of
molten flame. It was as though before they broke they pierced the wall,
the Monster's side, bled fire.

With the crashing of broadsides of massed batteries the sledges smashed
down upon the bristling attackers. Under the awful impact globes and
pyramids were shattered into hundreds of fragments, rocket bursts of
blue and azure and violet flame, flames rainbowed and irised.

The hammer ends split, flew apart, were scattered, were falling showers
of sulphurous yellow and scarlet meteors. But ever other cubes swarmed
out and repaired the broken smiting tips. And always where a tusked and
cornute shape had been battered down, disintegrated, another arose
as huge and