Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 186: what you’re looking at

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

188 FHE METAL MONSTER Now I became conscious that within the City—within the body of the Metal Monster—there raged a strife colossal as this without. From it came a vast volcanic roaring. Up from its top shot tortured flames, cascades ant fountains of frenzied Things: that looped and struggled, writhed over its edge, hurled themselves back; battling chimerae which against the glittering heavens traced luminous symbols of agony. Shrilled a stronger wailing. Up from behind the ray hurling Towers shot hosts of globes. Thousands of palely azure, metal moons they soared: warrior moons charging in meteor rush and streaming with fluttering battle pennons of violet flame. High they flew; they curved over the mile high back of the Monster; they dropped upon it. — Arose to meet them immerise cglumns of the cubes; battered against the spheres; swept them over and down into the depths. Hundreds fell, broken—but thousands held their place. I saw them twine about the pillars—writhing columns of interlaced cubes and globes straining like monstrous serpents while all along their coils the open disks and crosses smote with the scimitars of their lightnings. In the wall of the City appeared a shining crack; from top to bottom it ran; it widened into a rift from which a flood of radiance gushed. Out of this rift poured a thousand-foot-high torrent of horned globes. Only for an instant they flowed.. The rift closed upon them, catching those still emerging in a colossal vise..It crunched them. Plain through the turmoil came a dreadful—bursting roar. Down from the closing jaws of the vise dripped a stream of frag- iments that flashed and flickered—and died. And now in the wall was no trace of the breach. A hurricane of radiant lances swept it. Under them a mile wide sec- tion of the living scarp split away; dropped like an avalanche. Its fall revealed great spaces, huge vaults and chambers filled with warring lightnings—out from them came roaring, bellowing thunders. Swiftly from each side of the gap a metal curtaining of the cubes joined. Again the wall was whole. I turned my stunned gaze from the City—swept over the valley. Everywhere, in towers, in writhing coils, in whipping flails, in waves that smote and crashed, in countless forms and combinations the Metal Hordes battled. Here were pillars against which metal billows rushed and were broken; there were metal comets that crashed high above the mad turmoil. | From streaming silent veil to veil—north and south, east and west the Monster slew itself beneath its racing, flaming banners, the tempests of its lightnings. The tortured hulk of the.City lurched; it swept toward us. Before it blotted out from our eyes the Pit I saw that the crystal spans upon the ECOMC OOO (GO)