Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 105: what you’re looking at

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

A. MERRITT 107 I noted that its grinding surface was studded thickly with the smaller pyramids and that the tips of these were each capped with what seemed to be faceted gems gleaming with the same pale yellow radiance as the Shrine of the Cones. | The column was bending; the wheel approaching. Drake seized me by the arm, drew me swiftly back into the mists. We were shrouded in their silences. Step by step we went. on, peering for the edge of the shelf, feeling in fancy that prodigious wheeled face stealing upon us; afraid to look behind lest in looking we might step too close to the unseen verge. Yard after yard we slowly covered. Suddenly the vapors thinned; we passed out of them— | A chaos of sound beat about us. The clanging of a million anvils; the clamor of a million forges; the crashing of a hundred years of thun- der; the roarings of a thousand hurricanes. The prodigious bellowings of the Pit beating against us now as they had when we had flown down the long ramp into the depths of the Sea of Light. Instinct with unthinkable power was that clamor; the very voice of Force. Stunned, nay blinded, by it, we covered ears and eyes. , As before, the clangor died, leaving in its wake a bewildered silence. Then that silence began to throb with a vast humming, and through that humming rang a murmur as that of a river of diamonds. ‘We opened our eyes, felt awe grip our throats as though a hand had clutched them. | Difficult, difficult almost beyond thought is it for me now to essay to draw in words the scene before us then. For although I can set down what it was we saw, I nor any man can transmute into phrases its es- sence, its spirit, the intangible wonder that was its synthesis—the ap- pallingly beautiful, soul-shaking strangeness of it, its grandeur, its fan- tasy, and its alien terror. . : The Domain of the Metal Monster—it was filled like a chalice with Its will; was the visible expression of that will. We stood at the very rim of a wide ledge. We looked down into an immense pit, shaped into a perfect oval, thirty miles in length I judged, and half that as wide, and rimmed with colossal precipices. We were at the upper end of this deep valley and on the tip of its axis; | mean that it stretched longitudinally before us along the line of greatest length. Five hundred feet below was the pit’s floor. Gone were the clouds of light that had-obscured it the night before; the air crystal clear; every detail standing out with stereoscopic sharpness. | _ First the eyes rested upon a broad band of fluorescent amethyst, ring- ing the entire rocky wall. It girdled the cliffs at a height of ten thou- sand feet, and from this flaming zone, as though it clutched them, fell ECOMC OOO (GO)