Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 185: what you’re looking at

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

A. MERRITT 187 bursts of blue and azure and violet flame, flames rainbowed and irised. The hammer ends split, flew apart, were scattered, were falling show- ers of sulphurous yellow and scarlet meteors. But ever other cubes swarmed out and repaired the broken smiting tips. And always where a tusked and cornute shape had been battered down, disintegrated, an- other arose as huge and as formidable pouring forth upon the squared tower its lightnings, tearing at it with colossal spiked and hooked claws, beating it with incredible spiked and globular fists that were like the clenched hands of some metal Atlas. As the striving Shapes swayed and wrestled, gave way or thrust for- ward, staggered or fell, the bulk of the Monster stumbled and swayed, advanced and retreated—an unearthly motion wedded to an amorphous immensity that flooded the watching consciousness with a deathly nausea. Unceasingly the hail of radiant lances poured from the spinning wheels, falling upon Towered Shapes and City’s wall alike. There arose a prodigious wailing, an unearthly thin screaming. About the bases of the defenders flashed blinding bursts of incandescence — like those which had heralded the flight of the Flying Thing dropping before Norhala’s house. Unlike them they held no dazzling sapphire brilliancies; they were ochreous, suffused with raging vermilion. Nevertheless they were factors of that same inexplicable action—for from thousands of gushing lights leaped thousands of gigantic square pillars; unimaginable projectiles hurled from the flaming mouths of earth-hidden, titanic mortars. They soared high, swerved and swooped upon the lance-throwers. Beneath their onslaught those chimerae tottered, I saw living projectiles and living target fuse where they met—melt and weld,in jets of light- nings. But not all. There were those that tore great gaps in the horned giants —wounds that instantly were healed with globes and pyramids seething out from the Cyclopean trunk. Ever the incredible projectiles flashed and flew as though from some inexhaustible store; ever uprose that prodigious barrage against the smiting rays. 7 Now to check them soared from the ranks of the besiegers clouds of countless horned dragons, immense cylinders of clustered cubes studded with the clinging tetrahedrons, They struck the cubed projectiles head on; aimed themselves to meet them. . _Bristling dragon and hurtling pillar struck and fused or burst with intolerable blazing. They fell—cube and sphere and pyramid—some half opened, some fully, in a rain of disks, of stars, huge Haming) crosses; a storm of unimaginable pyrotechnics. GOGO .S (GO)