Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 139: what you’re looking at

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

A. MERRITT 141 | : y into the unwinking brazier _ then laid upon the central block to shape. A goblin workman the Thing seemed, standing there, so intent upon and so busy with its forgings. . There were scores of these animate. machines: they paid no slightest heed to us as we slipped by them, clinging as closely to the wall of the immense workshop as we could. We passed a company of other Shapes which stood two by two and close together, their tops wide spinning wheels through which the ten- _ drils of an opened globe fed translucent, colorless ingots—the substance it seemed to me of which Norhala’s shadowy walls were made, the crystal of which the bars that built out the base of the Cones were formed. The ingots passed between the whirling faces; emerged from them as slender, long cylinders; were seized as they slipped down by a crouching block, whose place as it glided away was instantly taken by another. In many bewildering forms, intent upon unknown activities directed toward unguessable ends, the composite, animate mechanisms labored. And all the place was filled with a goblin bustle, trollish rack- etings, ringing of gnomish anvils, ‘clanging of kobold forges—a clam- orous cavern filled with metal Nibelungens. _ We came to the opening of another passage, a doorway piercing the walls of the workshop. Its incline, though steep, was not dangerous. Into it we stepped; climbed onward it seemed interminably. Far ahead of us at last appeared the outline of its further entrance, sil- houetted against and filled with a brighter luminosity. We drew near; ‘stopped cautiously as its threshold, peering out. Well it was that we had hesitated. Before us was open space—an abyss in the body of the Metal Monster. The corridor opened into it like a window. Thrusting out our heads, we saw an unbroken wall both above and below. Half a mile away was its opposite side. Over this pit was a misty sky and not more than a thousand feet above and black against the heavens was the lip ‘of it— the cornices of this cHasm‘within the City. Far, far beneath us we watched the Hordes throw themselves across the abyss in webs of curving arches and girder-straight bridges; gigan- tic we knew these spans must be yet dwarfed to slender footways by distance. Over them moved. hurrying companies; trom them came flashings, glitterings—prismatic, sun. golden; plutonic scarlets, molten blues; javelins of colored light piercing upward from unfolded cubes and globes and pyramids crossing them or from busy bearers of the shining fruits of the mysterious workshops, ECOMC OOO (GO)