Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 199: what you’re looking at

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

A, MERRITT 201 Where we had peered into the unfathomable, had glimpsed the in- finite, had heard and had seen the inexplicable, now was— Slag! The-amethystine ring from which had been streamed the circling veils was cracked and blackened; like a seam of coal it had stretched around the Pit—a crown of mourning. The veils were gone. The floor of the valley was fissured and blackened; its patterns, its writings burned away. As far as we could see stretched a sea of slag—coal black, vitrified and dead. Here and there black hillocks sprawled; huge pillars arose, bent and twisted as though they had been jettings of lava cooled into rigidity before they could sink back or break. These shapes clustered most thick- ly around an immense calcified mound. They were what were left of the battling Hordes, and the mound was what had been the Metal Monster. Somewhere there were the ashes of Norhala, sealed by fire in the urn of the Metal Emperor! From side to side of the Pit, in broken beaches and waves and hum- mocks, in blackened, distorted tusks and warped towerings, reaching with hideous pathos in thousands of forms toward the charred mound, was only slag. | From rifts and hollows still filled with water little wreaths of steam drifted. In those futile wraiths of vapor was ‘all that remained of the might of the Metal Monster. Catastrophe I had expected, tragedy I knew we would find—but I had looked for nothing so filled with the abomination of desolation, so frightful as was this. “Burned out!” muttered Drake. “Short-circuited and burned out! Like a dynamo—like an electric light!” “Destiny!” said Ventnor, “Destiny! Not yet was the hour struck for man to relinquish his sovereignty over the world. Destiny!” We began to pick our way down the heaped débris and out upon the plain. For all that day and part of another we searched for an opening out of the Pit. Everywhere was the incredible calcification. The surfaces that had been the smooth metallic carapaces with the tiny eyes deep within them, crumbled beneath the lightest blow. Not long would it be until un- der wind and rain they dissolved into dust and mud. And it grew increasingly obvious that Drake’s theory of the destruc- tion was correct. The Monster had been one prodigious magnet—or, rather, a prodigious dynamo. By magnetism, by electricity, it had lived and had been activated. Whatever the force of which the cones were built and that I have GOGO .S (GO)