Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 299: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

strange than any described in the folklore of any planet ina setting which he realized no man could adequately describe. Below were metal blocks, the mine barracks and offices, sufficient to house half a million men. They crept up the side of a concave cliff like a stairway until they nearly touched the embedded edge of the mine roof. Curving down into the white stones of the valley was a spun silica wall a hundred meters high, studded at thirty-pace intervals by cannon turrets. The “ mine, the roof, the wall, all were contained in an immense cavern which was reached through a hundred- and-eighty- kilometer tunnel seven kilometers in diameter. The light had no apparent source, seeming to exude from cliffs and ceiling and ground, possibly from the perfectly formed, sharp boulders, the size of ships, strewn everywhere, lodged everywhere, even hanging from the ceiling. These were a translucent white and constituted the product of the mine. Up and down the wall went the lashing trajectories of the arc cannon, raking over the scorched and smoking ground, reaching in hysterical fury at the lumbering attackers. Gedso lon Brown put a pocket glass to his eye and looked wonderingly at the scene. He had heard here and there through space that such things had existed. He had reserved judgment for one could never tell what tale might next crawl through the vast spaces of the Empire. But the descriptions he had heard, probably because no man ever came back from the Crystal Mines unless he was high officer, had been gross underestimates. Gedso lon Brown was not of delicate constitution and he had been near too many battles to become shaky about anything. Further, nervousness was not part of his temperament. But he did not care to look at those things. CORniclooo SS CO