Avon Fantasy Reader No. 9 — page 35: what you’re looking at

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

their cities and their ventilators, all the vast mechanism of their vast civili- zation lives on in mute witness of the power that made Man eternally. master over the machine! It must have been a great civilization. God alone knows how long this under-world has gone on like this and how long it _ will go on. Presumably the mechanism will wear out some day, and all | the great mechanical life of the planet will finally stop forever, but that day may not come for many years. I would that it might never come, -were that possible! Come, let us go into the building there, and see what we can find. Perhaps we may find some clue to the history of the race there. It « seems to have been a building of importance.” The north gates were open, and we advanced noiselessly down the smooth black corridor, with the malignant grey dust inches thick on the floor. For perhaps a hundred feet it ran, straight into the heart of the huge pile, smaller corridors branching off at regular intervals on either side. Then there was a second filigree gate, a gate of hardened gold, which rose in a groove “ at a touch on a small bronze lever. Later we found that the opening mecha- nism could be locked from the inside. Evidently the ancient priests did not entirely trust their congregations. Beyond the door lay the wonderland of the temple. There was a great oval room, hollow roc’s egg, rising to a rounded dome two hundred or two hundred and fifty feet above the smooth sea-green pavement, flecked with little golden motes. The black of the exterior did not show through, except ina breast high band that ran all around the great room. All of its mighty, smooth ovoid was of the snowiest of marbles, veined faintly with gold, with sea-green, and with the rosy metal. This last formed a veritable maze of fine veins in the very’ summit of the temple, filling all those dim upper spaces with its roseate mistiness. Beautiful was the temple, but there was that in the center of the great — hall that struck me literally speechless! In size it was larger than life, perhaps thirty feet from the smooth, cool greenness of the floor to the tip of the lifted trident, a wonderful, majestic figure, surely equal to the best of the work of the great sculptor Phidias. There in the rose-glow, rising above the sea- green paving, it seemed alive and almost holy. Our voices, our very thoughts were hushed by its grand, awesome presence. Truly, I felt in that pagan temple more of true, great universal religion, necessary and inevitable as Time, than I have before, or since, in any house of worship on Earth. Doc, too, felt it, for I saw him half-stumble, then stiffen, head back, and—expand. But for the helmet I should have heard the awed hiss of his indrawn breath. I lowered my head, half disbelieving the evidence of my eyes, then looked again. The level green of the floor rose smoothly up, twice a man’s height, into a toppling foam-fretted peak, a great billowing wave of stone so nearly like sea-water that I half expected it to break and come thundering down, delug- | ing us. From its highest crest, thrusting forth into the open air, sprang a triple team of winged horses, linked with thin gold chains to a golden chariot, 33 | Conmiclooolks. conn