Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 69: what you’re looking at

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

A. MERRITT. 71 What was their color? It came to me—that of the mysterious element which stains the sun’s corona, that diadem seen only when our day star is in eclipse; the unknown element which science has named coronium, which never yet has been found on earth and that may be electricity in its.one material form; electricity that is ponderable; force’ whose vibra- tions are keyed down to mass; power transmuted into substance. Thousands upon thousands the cones bristled, pyramiding to the base of one tremendous spire that tapered up almost to the top of the shaft itself. In their grouping the mind caught infinite calculations carried into infinity; an apotheSis of geometry compassing the rhythms of unknown spatial dimensions; concentration of the equations of the star hordes. The mathematics of the Cosmos. | | | From the left of the crystalline base swept an enormous sphere. It was twice the height of a tall man, and it was a paler blue than any of these Things I had seen, almost, indeed, an azure; different, too, in other subtle, indefinable ways. | Behind it glided a pair of the pyramidal shapes, their pointed tips higher by a yard or more than the top of the sphere. They paused—te- garding us. Out from the opposite arc of the crystal pedestal moved six other globes, somewhat smaller than the first and of a deep purplish luster. | | | They separated, lining up on each side of the leader now standing ‘a little in advance of the twin tetrahedrons, rigid and motionless as watch- ing guards. | | : | There they stood—that. enigmatic row, intent, studying us beneath their god or altar or machine of cones and disks within their-cylinder walled with light. | oe And at that moment there crystallized within my consciousness the sublimation of all the strangenesses of all that had gone before, a panic loneliness as though I had wandered into an alien world—a world as unfamiliar to humanity, as unfamiliar with it as our own would seem to a thinking, mobile crystal adrift among men. Norhala raised her white arms in salutation; from her throat came a lilting theme of her weirdly ordered, golden chanting. Was it speech, I wondered; and if so—prayer or entreaty or command? | The great sphere quivered and undulated. Swifter than the eye could follow it dilated; opened! | | Where the azure globe had been, flashed out a disk of flaming. splen- dors, the very secret soul of flowered flame! And simultaneously the pyramids leaped up and out behind it—two gigantic, four-rayed stars blazing with cold blue fires. The green auroral curtainings flared out, ran with streaming radiance ECOMC OOO (GO)