Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 108: what you’re looking at

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

110 | THE MET AL MONSTER caught its swift and polished rushing! It was no jade. It was in truth a river: a river running like a writing across a patterned plane. I looked upward—up to the circling peaks. They were a stupendous coronet thrusting miles deep into the dazzling sky. I raised my glasses, swept them. In color they were an immense and variegated flower with countless multiform petals of stone; in outline they were a ring of fortresses built by fantastic unknown Gods. | Up they thrust—domed and arched, spired and horned, pyramided, fanged and needled. Here were palisades of burning orange with barbicans of incandescent bronze; there aiguilles of azure rising from bastions of cinnibar red; turrets of royal purple, obelisks of indigo; titanic forts whose walls were splashed with vermilion, with citron yellows and with rust of rubies; watch towers of flaming scarlet. Scattered among them were the flashing emeralds of the glaciers and the immense pallid baroques of the snow fields. | Like a diadem the summits ringed the Pit. Below them ran the ring of flashing amethyst with its aural mists. Between them lay the vast and patterned flat covered with still symbol and inexplicable movement. Under their summits brooded the blue black, metallic mass of the See- ing City. | Within circling walls, over plain and from the City hovered a cosmic spirit not to be understood by man. Like an emanation of stars and space, it was yet gem fine and gem hard, crystalline and. metallic, lapidescent and— | Conscious! | Down from the ledge, where we stood fell a steep ramp, similar to that by which, in the darkness, we had descended. It dropped at an angle of at least forty-five degrees; its. surface was smooth and polished. Through the mists at our back stole a shining block. It paused, seemed to perk itself; spun so that in turn each of its six faces took us in. I felt myself lifted upon it by multitudes of little invisible hands; saw Drake whirling up beside me. I moved toward him—through the force that held us. A block swept away from the ledge, swayed for a moment. Under us, as though we were floating in air, the Pit lay stretched. There was a rapid readjustment, a shifting of our two selves upon another surface. I looked down upon a tremendous, slender pillar of the cubes, dropp'ng below, five hundred feet to the valley’s floor a column of, which the block that held us was the top. Gone was the whirling wheel that had crowned it, but I knew this for the Grinding Thing from which we had fled; the questing block had been its scout. As though curious to know more of us, the Shape ECOMC OOO (GO)