About the cratered girdle of the upthrust shields a glimmering mistiness was gathering; a translucent mist, beryl pale and beryl clear.In a heart-beat it had thickened into a vast and vaporous ring through whose swarms of corpuscles the sun's reflected image upon each disk shone clear--as though seen through clouds of transparent atoms of aquamarine.
Again the filaments of the Keeper moved--feebly.As one of the hosts of circling shields shifted downward.
Brilliant, ever more brilliant, waxed the fast-thickening mists.
Abruptly, and again as one, the disks began to revolve.
From every concave surface, from the surfaces of the huge circlets below them, flashed out a stream of green fire--green as the fire of green life itself.Corpuscular, spun of uncounted rushing, dazzling ions the great rays struck across, impinged upon the thousand-foot wheel that crowned the cones; set it whirling.
Over it I saw form a limpid cloud of the brilliant vapors.Whence came these sparkling nebulosities, these mists of light? It was as though the clustered, spinning disks reached into the shadowless air, sucked from it some unseen, rhythmic energy and transformed it into this visible, coruscating flood.
For now it was a flood.Down from the immense wheel came pouring cataracts of green fires.They cascaded over the cones; deluged them; engulfed them.
Beneath that radiant inundation the cones grew.Perceptibly their volume increased--as though they gorged themselves upon the light.No--it was as though the corpuscles flew to them, coalesced and built themselves into the structure.
Out and further out upon the base of crystal they crept.
And higher and higher soared their tips, thrusting, ever thrusting upward toward the whirling wheel that fed them.
Now from the Keeper's planes writhed the Keeper's tangle of tentacles, uncoiling eagerly, avidly, through the twenty feet of space between their source and the enigmatic mechanism they manipulated.The crater's disks tilted downward.Into the vast hollow shot their jets of green radiance, drenching the Metal Hordes, splashing from the polished walls wherever the Metal Hordes had left those living walls exposed.
All about us was a trembling, an accelerating pulse of life.Colossal, rhythmic, ever quicker, ever more powerfully that pulse throbbed--a prodigious vibration monstrously alive.
"Feeding!" whispered Drake."Feeding! Feeding on the sun!"Faster danced the radiant beams.The crater was a cauldron of green fires through which the conical rays angled and interwove, crossed and mingled.And where they mingled, where they crossed, flamed out suddenly immense rayless orbs; palpitant for an instant, then dissolving in spiralling, feathery spray of pallid emerald incandescences.
Stronger and stronger beat the pulse of returning life.
A jetting stream struck squarely upon the Metal Emperor.
Out blazed his splendors--jubilant.His golden zodiac, no longer tarnished and dull, ran with sun flames;the wondrous rose was a racing, lambent miracle.
Up snapped the Keeper; towered behind him, all flickering scarlets and leaping yellows--no longer wrathful or sullen.
The place dripped radiance; was filling like a chrisom with radiance.
Us, too, the sparkling mists bathed.
I was conscious of a curiously wild exhilaration; a quickening of the pulse; an abnormally rapid breathing.
I stooped to touch Drake; sparks leaped from my outstretched fingers, great green sparks that crackled as they impacted upon him.He gave them no heed; but stared with fascinated eyes upon the crater.
Now from every side broke a tempest of gem fires.
