I moved through a closely woven yet fluid mass of cobwebs. I had the fantastic idea that if I so willed I could slip over the edge of the blocks, crawl about their sides without falling—like a fly on the vertical faces of a huge sugar loaf.
I drew beside Ventnor. He was staring ahead, striving, I knew, to pierce the mists for some glimpse of Ruth.
He turned to me, his face drawn with anxiety, his eyes feverish.
“Can you see them, Walter?” His voice shook. “God—why did I ever let her go like that? Why did I let her go alone?”
“They’ll be close ahead, Martin.” I spoke out of a conviction I could not explain. “Whatever it is we’re bound for, wherever it is the woman’s taking us, she means to keep us together—for a time at least. I’m sure of it.”
“She said—follow.” It was Drake beside us. “How the hell can we do anything else? We haven’t any control over this bird we’re on. But she has. What she meant, Ventnor, is that it would follow her.”
“That’s true”—new hope softened the haggard face—“that’s true—but is it? We’re reckoning with creatures that man’s imagination never conceived—nor could conceive. And with this—woman—human in shape, yes, but human in thought—never. How then can we tell—”
He turned once more, all his consciousness concentrated in his searching eyes.
Drake’s rifle slipped from his hand.
He stooped to pick it up; then tugged with both hands. The rifle lay immovable.
I bent and strove to aid him. For all the pair of us could do, the rifle might have been a part of the gleaming surface on which it rested. The tiny, deepset star points winked up—
“They’re—laughing at us!” grunted Drake.
“Nonsense,” I answered, and tried to check the involuntary shuddering that shook me, as I saw it shake him. “Nonsense. These blocks are great magnets—that’s what holds the rifle; what holds us, too.”
“I don’t mean the rifle,” he said; “I mean those points of lights—the eyes—”
There came from Ventnor a cry of almost anguished relief. We straightened. Our head shot above the mists like those of swimmers from water. Unnoticed, we had been climbing out of them.
And a hundred yards ahead of us, cleaving them, veiled in them almost to the shoulders, was Norhala, red-gold tresses steaming; and close beside her were the brown curls of Ruth. At her brother’s cry she turned and her arm flashed out of the veils with reassuring gesture.
A mile away was an opening in the valley’s mountainous wall; toward it we were speeding. It was no ragged crevice, no nature split fissure; it gave the impression of a gigantic doorway.
“Look,” whispered Drake.
Between us and the vast gateway, gleaming triangles began to break through the vapors, like the cutting fins of sharks, glints of round bodies like gigantic porpoises—the vapors seethed with them. Quickly the fins and rolling curves were all about us. They centered upon the portal, streamed through—a horde of the metal things, leading us, guarding us, playing about us.
And weird, unutterably weird was that spectacle—the vast and silent vale with its still, smooth vapors like a coverlet of cloud; the regal head of Norhala sweeping over them; the dull glint and gleam of the metal paradoxes flowing, in ordered motion, all about us; the titanic gateway, glowing before us.
We were at its threshold; over it.
CHAPTER VIII
THE DRUMS OF THUNDER
Upon that threshold the mists foamed like breaking billows, then ceased abruptly to be. Keeping exactly the distance I had noted when our gaze had risen above the fog, glided the block that bore Ruth and Norhala. In the strange light of the place into which we had emerged—and whether that place was canyon, corridor, or tunnel I could not then determine—it stood out sharply.
One arm of Norhala held Ruth—and in her attitude I sensed a shielding intent, guardianship—the first really human impulse this shape of mystery and beauty had revealed.
In front of them swept score upon score of her familiars—no longer dully lustrous, but shining as though cut from blue and polished steel. They—marched—in ordered rows, globes and cubes and pyramids; moving sedately now as units.
I looked behind me; out of the spume boiling at the portal, were pouring forth other scores of the Metal Things, darting through like divers through a wave. And as they drew into our wake and swam into the light, their dim lustre vanished like a film; their surfaces grew almost radiant.
Whence came the light that set them gleaming? Our pace had slackened—I looked about me. The walls of the cleft or tunnel were perpendicular, smooth and shining with a cold, metallic, greenish glow.
Between the walls, like rhythmic flashing of fire-flies, pulsed soft and fugitive glimmerings that carried a sense of the infinitely minute—of electrons, it came to me, rather than atoms. Their irradiance was greenish, like the walls; but I was certain that these corpuscles did not come from them.
They blinked and faded like motes within a shifting sunbeam; or, to use a more scientific comparison, like colloids within the illuminated field of the ultramicroscope; and like these latter it was as though the eyes took in not the minute particles themselves but their movement only.
Save for these gleamings the light of the place, although crepuscular, was crystalline clear. High above us—five hundred, a thousand feet—the walls merged into a haze of clouded beryl.
Rock certainly the cliffs were—but rock cut and planed, smoothed and polished and plated!
Yes, that was it—plated. Plated with some metallic substance that was itself a reservoir of luminosity and from which, it came to me, pulsed the force that lighted the winking ions. But who could have done such a thing? For what purpose? How?
And the meticulousness, the perfection of these smoothed cliffs struck over my nerves as no rasp could, stirring a vague resentment, an irritated desire for human inharmonies, human disorder.
Absorbed in my examination I had forgotten those who must share with me my doubts and dangers. I felt a grip on my arm.
“If we get close enough and I can get my feet loose from this damned thing I’ll jump,” Drake said.
“What?” I gasped, blankly, startled out of my preoccupation. “Jump where?”
I followed his pointing finger. We were rapidly closing upon the other cube; it was now a scant twenty paces ahead; it seemed to be stopping. Ventnor was leaning forward, quivering with eagerness.
“Ruth!” he called. “Ruth—are you all right?”
Slowly she turned to us—my heart gave a great leap, then seemed to stop. For her sweet face was touched with that same unearthly tranquillity which was Norhala’s; in her brown eyes was a shadow of that passionless spirit brooding in Norhala’s own; her voice as she answered held within it more than echo of Norhala’s faint, far-off golden chiming.
“Yes,” she sighed;
