Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 60: what you’re looking at

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

62 THE METAL MONSTER vast and ordered movement; marchings and counter-marchings of hosts greater even than those Golden Hordes of Genghis which ages agone had washed about the outer bases of the very peaks that hid this place. Came, too, flitting shadowings of huge shapes, unnameable, moving swiftly beside our way; gleamings that thrust themselves through the veils like wheeling javelins of flame. | And always, always, everywhere that constant movement, rhythmic, terrifying—like myriads of feet of creatures of an unseen, stranger world marking time just outside the threshold of our own. Preparing, drilling there in some wide vestibule of space between the known and the un- known, alert and menacing—poised for the signal which would send them pouring over it. Once again I seemed to stand upon the brink of an abyss of incredible revelation, striving helplessly, struggling for realization—and so strug- gling became aware that our speed was swiftly slackening, the roaring blast dying down, the veils before us thinning. They cleared away. I saw Drake and Ventnor straighten up; raised myself to my own aching knees. We were at one end of a vortex, a funneling within the radiant va- pors; a funnel whose further end a mile ahead broadened out into.a huge circle, its mistily outlined edges impinging upon the towering scarp of the—city. It was as though before us lay, upon its side, a cone of crystalline clear air against whose curved sides some radiant medium heavier than air, lighter than water, pressed. | ‘The top arc of its prostrate base reached a thousand feet or more up the precipitous wall; above it all was hidden in sparking nebulosities that were like still clouds of greenly glimmering fireflies. Back from the curving sides of this cone, above it and below it, the pressing luminosi- ties stretched, into, it seemed, infinite distances. | ‘Through them, suddenly, thousands of bright beams began to dart, to dance, weaving and interweaving, shooting hither and yon—like myriads of great searchlights in a phosphorescent sea fog, like countless lances of the aurora thrusting through its own iridescent veils! And in the play of these beams was something appallingly ordered, appallingly rhythmic. ) It was—how can I describe it?—purposeful; purposeful as the geo-— metric shiftings of the Little Things of the ruins, of the summoning song of Norhala, of the Protean changes of the Smiting Shape and the Following Thing; and like all of these it was as laden with that baffling certainty of hidden meanings, of messages that the brain recognized as such yet knew it never could read. | The rays seemed to spring upward from the earth. Now they were ECOMC OOO (GO)