, as though our flight had broken whatever
bonds had bound them, a clamor arose from the host; a wild shouting,
a clanging of swords on shields. I shot a glance behind. They were in
motion, advancing slowly, hesitatingly as yet--but I knew that soon that
hesitation would pass; that they would sweep down upon us, engulf us.

"To the crevice," I shouted to Drake. He paid no heed to me, nor did
Ruth--their gaze fastened upon the swathed woman.

Ventnor's hand shot out, gripped my shoulder, halted me. She had thrown
up her head. The cloudy METALLIC hair billowed as though wind had blown
it.

From the lifted throat came a low, a vibrant cry; harmonious, weirdly
disquieting, golden and sweet--and laden with the eery, minor wailings
of the blue valley's night, the dragoned chamber.

Before the cry had ceased there poured with incredible swiftness out of
the crevice score upon score of the metal things. The fissures vomited
them!

Globes and cubes and pyramids--not small like those of the ruins, but
shapes all of four feet high, dully lustrous, and deep within that
luster the myriads of tiny points of light like unwinking, staring eyes.

They swirled, eddied and formed a barricade between us and the armored
men.

Down upon them poured a shower of arrows from the soldiers. I heard the
shouts of their captains; they rushed. They had courage--those men--yes!

Again came the woman's cry--golden, peremptory.

Sphere and block and pyramid ran together, seemed to seethe. I had
again that sense of a quicksilver melting. Up from them thrust a thick
rectangular column. Eight feet in width and twenty feet high, it shaped
itself. Out from its left side, from right side, sprang arms--fearful
arms that grew and grew as globe and cube and angle raced up the
column's side and clicked into place each upon, each after, the other.
With magical quickness the arms lengthened.

Before us stood a monstrous shape; a geometric prodigy. A shining angled
pillar that, though rigid, immobile, seemed to crouch, be instinct with
living force striving to be unleashed.

Two great globes surmounted it--like the heads of some two-faced Janus
of an alien world.

At the left and right the knobbed arms, now fully fifty feet in
length, writhed, twisted, straightened; flexing themselves in grotesque
imitation of a boxer. And at the end of each of the six arms the spheres
were clustered thick, studded with the pyramids--again in gigantic,
awful, parody