Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 106: what you’re looking at

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

108 THE METAL MONSTER the curtains of sparkling mist, the enigmatic, sound-slaying vapors. But now I saw that all of these veils wereenot motionless like those through which we had just passed. To the northwest they were pulsing like the aurora, and like the aurora they were shot through with swift iridescences, spectrums, polychromatic gleamings. And always these were ordered, geometric—like immense and flitting prismatic crystals flying swiftly to the very edges of the veils, then darting as swiftly back. From zone and veils the gaze leaped to the incredible City towering not two miles away from us. Blue black, shining, sharply cut as though from polished steel, it reared full five thousand feet on high! How great it was I could not tell, for the height of its precipitous walls barred the vision. The frowning facade turned toward us was, I estimated, five miles in length. Its colossal scarp struck the eyes like a blow; its shadow, falling upon us, checked the heart. It was over- powering—dreadful as that midnight city of Dis that Dante saw rising up from another pit. It was a metal city, mountainous. Featureless, smooth, the immense wall of it heaved heavenward. It should have been blind, that vast oblong face—but it was not blind. From it radiated alertness, vigilance. It seemed to gaze toward us as though every foot were manned with sentinels; guardians invisible to the eyes whose concentration of watchfulness was caught by some subtle hidden sense higher than sight. It was a metal city, mountainous and—aware. About its base were huge openings. Through and around these portals swirled hordes of the Metal People; in units and in combinations com- ing and going, streaming in and out, forming as they came and went patterns about. the openings like the fretted spume of great breakers surging into, retreating from, ocean-bitten gaps in some iron-bound coast. From the immensity of the City the eyes dropped back to the Pit in which it lay. Its floor was plaquelike, a great plane smooth as though turned by potter’s wheel, broken by no mound nor hillock, slope nor terrace; level, horizontal, flawlessly flat. On it was no green living thing —no tree nor bush, meadow nor covert. : It was alive with movement. A ferment that was as purposeful as it - was mechanical, a ferment symmetrical, geometrical, supremely or- dered— | | The surging of the Metal Hordes. There they moved beneath us, these enigmatic beings, in a countless host. They marched and countermarched in battalions, in regiments, in armies. Far to the south | glimpsed a company of colossal shapes ECOMC OOO (GO)