Avon Fantasy Reader No. 9 — page 27: what you’re looking at

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

Rising once more from our pit, we sped to the foot of the cliffs, then rose vertically, parallel to their face. At last we topped the great jet rampart, over a mile in height, and gaze out over the bare surface of the smooth, flat plain, leveled as if by arti- feial means, where no vegetation grew, no crystal jutted, no pit sank, only that hard, smooth surface stretching endlessly away into the distance. It was like some great pillar of rock pushed up from the nether-world into the light of day, unruffled, cold and cruel, hard as only the compressed rock of a world heart can be. Yet the plain was, in truth, not entirely level, not totally ynruffled. Far away, at the limit of the gaze, loomed an angular black mass. We sped toward it over the pitiless surface of the plateau. It grew, bulked huge, and towered above us. It was a city, a great, black, towering city of the plateau. In twenty great terraces, each a hundred feet in height, it towered nearly half a mile above the plain. The base was square, perhaps a mile on a side, and in the center ‘ . of each side, flanked by a pair of huge tapering amethyst obelisks, was a gate. Other opening in the sides of the lower terrace there was none, but in the higher ones were circular ports, twenty or thirty feet in diameter, placed _ midway of each wall, one facing each point of the compass. And atop the highest terrace, at the very summit of the gigantic pile, perched on the needle-tip of a great black cone, was a mighty crystal globe, glinting coldly in the glare of the sun. We floated close to the nearest gate, a peaked half-oval of deepest green, so dark as to be nearly black. Indeed, we looked a second time at the rock of the walls and of the plain to see if they, too, were not of the same color as the gates, but they were black, the same glossy jet. The green of the gate was unbroken, except for the.very center, where a pale blue ellipse, seem- ingly of metal, glowed. It seemed to radiate light of its own, but it was cold to the touch, deathly cold. And around its rim, as around the edge of the gate, ran a ribbon of pure soft gold, worked and tooled into millions of deli- cate geometric weavings. The wall itself, as we viewed it closely, showed no joint, no sign of block or mortise. It seemed carved from the plateau as one might carve a shrine from the rock of a granite mountain. And over every square inch of its surface ran the twining lines of the delicate geometric filigree, a veritable maze of lines and angles and arcs in low relief, incredibly fine, and in very obvious order, in fixed relation to one another, though we could detect no repetition. Always there was some tiny variation in form that broke the monotony and made fantasy. It was truly wonderful, and strangely beau- tiful. . At last we left it, forced by the passing of time to continue our explora- tion. We rose above the floor of the first terrace, level and smooth as the plain itself, and advanced over the black seamless paving to the wall of the second terrace, and the gold-rimmed opening. It was closed with a disk of transparent crystal, through which we could dimly see the black cylinder of J00KS-COoM