Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 107: what you’re looking at

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

A, MERRITT 109 like mobile, castellated and pyramidal mounts. They were circling, weaving about each other with incredible rapidity—like scores of great pyramids crowned with gigantic turrets and dancing. From these turrets came vivid flashes, lightning bright—on their wake the rolling echoes of faraway thunder. | Out of the north sped a squadron of obelisks from whose tops famed and flared the immense spinning wheels, appearing at this distance like fiery whirling disks. ) | Up from their setting the Metal People lifted themselves in a thou sand incredible shapes, shapes squared and globed and spiked and shifting swiftly into other thousands as incredible. I saw a mass of them draw themselves up into the likeness of a tent skyscraper high; hang so for an instant, then writhe into a monstrous chimera of a dozen towering legs that strode away like a gigantic headless and bodiless tarantula in steps two hundred feet long. I watched mile-long lines of them shape and reshape into circles, into interlaced lozenges and pen- tagons—then lift in great columns and shoot through the air in unim- aginable barrage. © | Through all this incessant movement I sensed plainly purpose, knew that it was definite activity toward a definite end, caught the clear suggestion of drill, of maneuver. , And when the shiftings of the Metal Hordes permitted we saw that all the flat floor of the valley was stripped and, checkered, stippled and tessellated with every color, patterned with enormous lozenges and. squares, rhomboids and parallelograms, pentagons and hexagons and diamonds, lunettes, circles and spirals; harlequined yet harmonious; instinct with a grotesque suggestion of a super-Futurism. — But always this patterning was ordered, always coherent. As though it were a page on which was spelled some untranslatable other world message. | | ) Fourth Dimensional revelations by some Euclidean deity! Command- ments traced by some mathematical God! | ‘Looping across the vale, emerging from the sparkling folds of the southernmost curtainings and vanishing into the gleaming veils of the easternmost, ran a broad ribbon of pale-green jade; not straightly but with manifold convolutions and flourishes. It was like a sentence in Arabic. It was margined with sapphire blue. Al! along its twisting course two broad bands of jet margined the cerulean shore. It was spanned by scores of flashing crystal arches. Nor were these bridges—even {rom that distance I knew they were no bridges. From them came the crystalline murmurings. | | a Jade? This stream jade? If so then it must be in truth molten, for I ECOMC OOO (GO)