第51章

Up from their setting the Metal People lifted themselves in a thousand incredible shapes, shapes squared and globed and spiked and shifting swiftly into other thousands as incredible.I saw a mass of them draw themselves up into the likeness of a tent skyscraper high; hang so for an instant, then writhe into a monstrous chimera of a dozen towering legs that strode away like a gigantic headless and bodiless tarantula in steps two hundred feet long.

I watched mile-long lines of them shape and reshape into circles, into interlaced lozenges and pentagons--then lift in great columns and shoot through the air in unimaginable barrage.

Through all this incessant movement I sensed plainly purpose, knew that it was definite activity toward a definite end, caught the clear suggestion of drill, of maneuver.

And when the shiftings of the Metal Hordes permitted we saw that all the flat floor of the valley was stripped and checkered, stippled and tessellated with every color, patterned with enormous lozenges and squares, rhomboids and parallelograms, pentagons and hexagons and diamonds, lunettes, circles and spirals; harlequined yet harmonious;instinct with a grotesque suggestion of a super-Futurism.

But always this patterning was ordered, always COHERENT.

As though it were a page on which was spelled some untranslatable other world message.

Fourth Dimensional revelations by some Euclidean deity! Commandments traced by some mathematical God!

Looping across the vale, emerging from the sparkling folds of the southernmost curtainings and vanishing into the gleaming veils of the easternmost, ran a broad ribbon of pale-green jade; not straightly but with manifold convolutions and flourishes.It was like a sentence in Arabic.

It was margined with sapphire blue.All along its twisting course two broad bands of jet margined the cerulean shore.

It was spanned by scores of flashing crystal arches.Nor were these bridges--even from that distance I knew they were no bridges.From them came the crystalline murmurings.

Jade? This stream jade? If so then it must be in truth molten, for I caught its swift and polished rushing! It was no jade.It was in truth a river; a river running like a writing across a patterned plane.

I looked upward--up to the circling peaks.They were a stupendous coronet thrusting miles deep into the dazzling sky.I raised my glasses, swept them.In color they were an immense and variegated flower with countless multiform petals of stone; in outline they were a ring of fortresses built by fantastic unknown Gods.

Up they thrust--domed and arched, spired and horned, pyramided, fanged and needled.Here were palisades of burning orange with barbicans of incandescent bronze;there aiguilles of azure rising from bastions of cinnabar red; turrets of royal purple, obelisks of indigo; titanic forts whose walls were splashed with vermilion, with citron yellows and with rust of rubies; watch towers of flaming scarlet.

Scattered among them were the flashing emeralds of the glaciers and the immense pallid baroques of the snow fields.

Like a diadem the summits ringed the Pit.Below them ran the ring of flashing amethyst with its aural mists.

Between them lay the vast and patterned flat covered with still symbol and inexplicable movement.Under their summits brooded the blue black, metallic mass of the Seeing City.