Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 68: what you’re looking at

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

70. THE METAL MONSTER Ventnor’s fingers upon her white shoulder, staining its purity, marring it-like a blasphemy. ae For an instant I hung behind, watching their figures grow misty with- in the shining shadows; then followed hastily. Entering the mists I was conscious of a pleasant tingling, an acceleration of the pulse, an increase of that sense of well-being which, I grew suddenly aware, had since the beginning of our strange journey minimized the nervous attri- tion of constant contact with the abnormal. Striving to classify, to reduce to order, my sensations I drew close to the others, overtaking them in a dozen paces. A dozen paces more and we stepped out of the curtainings. CHAPTER XI The Metal Emperor E STOOD at the edge of a well whose walls were of that same green vaporous iridescence through which we had just come, but finer grained, compact; as though here the corpuscles of which they were woven were far closer spun. Thousands of feet above us the mighty cylinder uprose, and in the lessened circle that was its mouth I glimpsed the bright stars; and knew by this it opened into the free air. All of half a mile in diameter was this shaft, and ringed regularly along its height by wide amethystine bands—like rings of a hollow pis- ton. They were, in color, replicas of that I had glimpsed before our de- scent into this place and against whose gleaming cataracts the outlines of the incredible city had lowered. And they were in’motion, spinning smoothly, and swiftly. - Only one swift glance I gave them, my eyes held by a most extraor- eee eet could not find the word for it— tnen. | Its base was a scant hundred yards from where we had paused and concentric with the sides of the pit. It stood upon a thick circular ped- estal of what appeared to be cloudy rock crystal supported by hundreds of thick rods of the same material. Up from it lifted the structure, a thing of glistening'cones and spin- ~ ping golden disks; fantastic yet disquietingly symmetrical; bizarre as an angled headdress worn by. a mountainous Javanese god—yet coldly. painfully mathematical. In every direction the cones pointed, seem- ingly interwoven of strands of metal and of light. GOGO .S (GO)