Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 126: what you’re looking at

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

128 THE METAL MONSTER Faster danced the radiant beams. The crater was a cauldron of green fires through which the conical rays angled and interwove, crossed and mingled. And where they mingled, where they crossed, flamed out suddenly immense rayless orbs; palpitant for an instant, then dissolving in spiraling, feathery spray of pallid emerald incandescences. Stronger and stronger beat the pulse of returning life. A jetting stream struck squarely upon the Metal Emperor. Out blazed his splendors—jubilant. His golden zodiac, no longer tarnished and dull, ran with sun flames; the wondrous rose was a racing, lambent - miracle. | | Up snapped the Keeper; towered behind him, all flickering scarlets and leaping yellows—no longer wrathful or sullen. The place dripped radiance; was filling like a chrisom with radiance, Us, too, the sparkling mists bathed. - 7 I was conscious of a curiously wild exhilaration; a quickening of the pulse; an abnormally rapid breathing. I stooped to touch Drake; sparks leaped from my outstretched fingers, great green sparks that crackled as they impacted upon him. He gave them no heed; but stared With fascinated eyes upon the crater. Now from every side broke a tempest of gem fires. From every girder and column, from every arras, pendent and looping, burst dia- mond glitterings, ruby luminescences, lanced flames of molten emerald and sapphires, flashings of amethyst and opal, meteoric iridescences, dazzling spectrums. | The hollow was a cave of some Aladdin of the Titans. ablaze with - enchanted hoards. It was a place of gems ensorcelled, gems in which imprisoned: hosts of the Jinns of Light beat sparkling against their crystal walls to escape. _ I thrust the fantasies from me. Fantastic enough was this reality— globe and pyramid and cube of the Metal People opening wide, bathing in, drinking from the radiant maelstrom that faster and ever faster swirled’ about them. | | “Feeding!” It was Drake’s awed voice. “Feeding on the sun!” The circling shields were raising themselves, lifting themselves higher above the crater-lip. Into the crowded cylinder came now only the rays from the high circlets, the streams from the huge wheel above the still growing cones. Up and up the shields rose, but by what mechanism raised I could not see. Their motion ceased; in all their thousands they turned. Over the City’s top and out into the oval valley they poured their torrents of light; flooding it, deluging it even as they had this pit that was the City’s heart. Feeding, I knew, those other Metal Hordes without. — GOGO .S (GO)