as formidable pouring forth upon the squared tower its
lightnings, tearing at it with colossal spiked and hooked claws, beating
it with incredible spiked and globular fists that were like the clenched
hands of some metal Atlas.

As the striving Shapes swayed and wrestled, gave way or thrust forward,
staggered or fell, the bulk of the Monster stumbled and swayed, advanced
and retreated--an unearthly motion wedded to an amorphous immensity that
flooded the watching consciousness with a deathly nausea.

Unceasingly the hail of radiant lances poured from the spinning wheels,
falling upon Towered Shapes and City's wall alike. There arose a
prodigious wailing, an unearthly thin screaming. About the bases of the
defenders flashed blinding bursts of incandescence--like those which had
heralded the flight of the Flying Thing dropping before Norhala's house.

Unlike them they held no dazzling sapphire brilliancies; they were
ochreous, suffused with raging vermilion. Nevertheless they were factors
of that same inexplicable action--for from thousands of gushing lights
leaped thousands of gigantic square pillars; unimaginable projectiles
hurled from the flaming mouths of earth-hidden, titanic mortars.

They soared high, swerved and swooped upon the lance-throwers. Beneath
their onslaught those chimerae tottered, I saw living projectiles and
living target fuse where they met--melt and weld in jets of lightnings.

But not all. There were those that tore great gaps in the horned
giants--wounds that instantly were healed with globes and pyramids
seething out from the Cyclopean trunk. Ever the incredible projectiles
flashed and flew as though from some inexhaustible store; ever uprose
that prodigious barrage against the smiting rays.

Now to check them soared from the ranks of the besiegers clouds of
countless horned dragons, immense cylinders of clustered cubes studded
with the clinging tetrahedrons. They struck the cubed projectiles head
on; aimed themselves to meet them.

Bristling dragon and hurtling pillar stuck and fused or burst with
intolerable blazing. They fell--cube and sphere and pyramid--some half
opened, some fully, in a rain of disks, of stars, huge flaming crosses;
a storm of unimaginable pyrotechnics.

Now I became conscious that within the City--within the body of the
Metal Monster--there raged a strife colossal as this without. From it
came a vast volcanic roaring. Up from its top shot tortured flames,
cascade