Speaker 1: Chapter thirty one of The Metal Monster. This is a
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Speaker 1: This reading by Lucy Burgoyne The Metal Monster by Abraham Merritt,
Speaker 1: chapter thirty one Slag. That night we slipped well. Awakening,
Speaker 1: we found that the storm had grown violent again, the
Speaker 1: wind roaring and the rain falling in such volume that
Speaker 1: it was impossible to make our way to the pit. Twice,
Speaker 1: as a matter of fact, we tried, but the smooth
Speaker 1: roadway was the torrent, and drenched even through our oils
Speaker 1: to the skin. We at last abandoned the attempt. Ruth
Speaker 1: and Drake drifted away together among the other chambers of
Speaker 1: the globe. They were absorbed in themselves, and we did
Speaker 1: not thrust ourselves upon them. All the day the torrents fell.
Speaker 1: We sat down that night to what was well nigh
Speaker 1: at the last of Ventnor's stores. Seemingly Ruth had forgotten Norhala.
Speaker 1: At least she spoke no more of her Martin. She said,
Speaker 1: can't we start back tomorrow? I want to get away,
Speaker 1: I want to get back to our own world as
Speaker 1: soon as the storm ceases, Ruth, he answered, we start,
Speaker 1: little sister, I too want you to get back quickly.
Speaker 1: The next morning, the storm had gone. We awakened soon
Speaker 1: after dawn into clear and brilliant light. We had a
Speaker 1: silent and hurried breakfast. The saddle bags were packed and
Speaker 1: strapped upon the pony. Within them were what we could
Speaker 1: carry of souvenirs from Norhala's home, a suit of lacedama,
Speaker 1: a pair of cloaks and sandals, the jeweled combs. Ruth
Speaker 1: and Drake at the side of the pony, Ventnor and
Speaker 1: I leading, we set forth toward the pit. We'll probably
Speaker 1: have to come back, Walter, he said, I don't believe
Speaker 1: the place is passable. I pointed. We were then just
Speaker 1: over the threshold of the Elfin globe. Where the veils
Speaker 1: had stretched between the perpendicular pillars of the cliffs was
Speaker 1: now a wide and ragged edged opening. The roadway, which
Speaker 1: had run so smoothly through the scarps, was blocked by
Speaker 1: a thousand foot barrier over it. Beyond it, I could
Speaker 1: see through the crystalline clarity of the air. Using mauls,
Speaker 1: we can climb it. Ventnor said. We passed on and
Speaker 1: reached the base of the barrier. An avalanche had dropped there.
Speaker 1: The barricade was the debris of the torn cliffs, their dust,
Speaker 1: their pebbles, their boulders. We toiled up, we reached the crest.
Speaker 1: We looked down upon the valley. When first we had
Speaker 1: seen it, we had gazed upon a sea of radiance,
Speaker 1: pierced with lanced forests, swept with gigantic gonfalons of flame.
Speaker 1: We had seen it emptied of its fiery mists, a
Speaker 1: vast slate covered with the choreography of a mathematical god.
Speaker 1: We had seen it filled with the symboling of the
Speaker 1: metal hordes, and dominated by the colossal integrate hieroglyph of
Speaker 1: the living City. We had seen it as a radiant lake,
Speaker 1: over which brooded we d suns, a lake of yellow
Speaker 1: flame froth, upon which a sparkling hail fell, within which
Speaker 1: reared island towers and a drowning mount running with cataracts
Speaker 1: of sun fires. Here we had watched a goddess woman,
Speaker 1: a being half of Earth, half of the unknown immuood,
Speaker 1: within a living tomb, a dying tomb of flaming mysteries.
Speaker 1: Had seen across shaped metal satan, a sullen, flaming crystal.
Speaker 1: Judas betrayed itself. Where we had peered into the unfathomable,
Speaker 1: had glimpse the infinite, had heard and had seen the inexplicable,
Speaker 1: now was slag. The amethyst steene ring from which had
Speaker 1: been streamed the circling vales was cracked and blackened, like
Speaker 1: a seam of coal. It had stretched around the pit
Speaker 1: a crown of more. The vales were gone. The floor
Speaker 1: of the valley was fissured and blackened, its patterns, its writings,
Speaker 1: burned away. As far as we could see stretched a
Speaker 1: sea of slag, cold, black, vitrified and dead. Here and there,
Speaker 1: black kellocks sprawled. Huge pillars arose, bent and twisted, as
Speaker 1: though they had been jettings of lava, cooled into ridgity
Speaker 1: before they could sink back or break. These shapes clustered
Speaker 1: most thickly around an immense calcified mound. They were what
Speaker 1: were left of the battling Hordes, and the mound was
Speaker 1: what had been the Metal Monster. Somewhere there were the
Speaker 1: ashes of Norhala, sealed by fire in the urn of
Speaker 1: the Metal Emperor. From side to side of the pit,
Speaker 1: in broken beaches, and waves and hammocks in blackened, distorted
Speaker 1: tusks and warped towerings, reaching with hideous pathos in thousands
Speaker 1: of forms. Toward the charred mound was only slag from
Speaker 1: rifts and highs, still filled with water. Little reefs of
Speaker 1: steam drifted in those futile wrafts of vapor. Was all
Speaker 1: that remained of the mite of the metal monster catastrophe.
Speaker 1: I had expected tragedy, I knew we would find, But
Speaker 1: I had looked for nothing so filled with the abomination
Speaker 1: of desolation, so frightful as was this burned out, muttered drake,
Speaker 1: short circuited and burned out like a dynamo, like an
Speaker 1: electric light. Destiny, said Ventnor Destiny. Not yet was the
Speaker 1: hour struck for man to relinquish his sovereignty over the world. Destiny,
Speaker 1: We began to pick our way down the heaped debris
Speaker 1: and out upon the plain. For all that day and
Speaker 1: part of another we searched for an opening out of
Speaker 1: the pit. Everywhere was the incredible calcification. The surfaces that
Speaker 1: had been the smooth metallic carapaces, with the tiny eyes
Speaker 1: deep within them, crumbled beneath the lightest blow. Not long
Speaker 1: would it be until under wind and rain they dissolved
Speaker 1: into dust and mud, and it grew increasingly obvious that
Speaker 1: Drake's theory of the destruction was correct. The monster had
Speaker 1: been one prodigious magnet, or rather a prodigious dynamo by magnetism,
Speaker 1: by electricity. It had lived and had been activated. Whatever
Speaker 1: the force of which the cones were built, and that
Speaker 1: I have likened to energy made material, it was certainly
Speaker 1: akin to electromagnetic energies. When in the cataclysm that force
Speaker 1: was diffused, There had been created, a magnetic field of
Speaker 1: incredible intensity, had been concentrated, an electric charge of inconceivable magnitude.
Speaker 1: Discharging it had blasted the monster, short circuited it, and
Speaker 1: burned it out. But what was it that had led
Speaker 1: up to the cataclysm? What was it that had turned
Speaker 1: the metal monster upon itself? What disharmony had crept into
Speaker 1: the supernal order to set in motion the machinery of
Speaker 1: disintegration we could only injector the cruciform shape I have
Speaker 1: named the Keeper was the agent of destruction of what
Speaker 1: there could be no doubt in the ngramatic organism, which,
Speaker 1: while many still was one, and which retaining its integrity
Speaker 1: as a whole could disassociate manifold parts, yet still as
Speaker 1: a whole maintain an unseen contact and direction over them
Speaker 1: three miles of space. The Keeper had its place, its work,
Speaker 1: its duties. So too had that wondrous disc which visible
Speaker 1: and concentrate power, whose manifest leadership had made us name
Speaker 1: its emperor, and had not Norhala called the disk ruler.
Speaker 1: What were the responsibilities of these twain to the mass
Speaker 1: of the organism of which they were such imp I
Speaker 1: coughtant units? What were the laws they administered? The laws
Speaker 1: they must obey? Something certainly of that mysterious law which
Speaker 1: Materlink had called the spirit of the hive, and something
Speaker 1: infinitely greater like that which governs the swarming sunbeas of Hercules, Clustard, orbs.
Speaker 1: Had there evolved within the Keeper of the Cones, guardian
Speaker 1: and engineer, as it seemed to have been ambition, had
Speaker 1: there risen within it a determination to wrest power from
Speaker 1: the Disk to take its place as ruler? How Else
Speaker 1: explained that conflict I had sensed when the Emperor had
Speaker 1: plucked Drake and Me from the Keeper's grip that night
Speaker 1: following the orgy of the Feeding. How Else explained that
Speaker 1: duel in the shattered hall of the Cones, whose end
Speaker 1: had been the signal for the final cataclysm. How else
Speaker 1: explain the alignment of the cubes behind the Keeper against
Speaker 1: the globes and pyramids, remaining loyal to the will of
Speaker 1: the disk. We discuss this vent not an eye. This world,
Speaker 1: he mused, is a place of a struggle. Air and
Speaker 1: sea and land, and all things that dwell within and
Speaker 1: on them must battle for life. Earth, not Mars, is
Speaker 1: the planet of war. I have a theory, he hesitated,
Speaker 1: that the globe magnetic currents, which are the nerved forths
Speaker 1: of this globe of ours, were what fed the metal things.
Speaker 1: Within those currents is the spirit of Earth, and always
Speaker 1: they have been supercharged with strife, with Hatred's warfare. These
Speaker 1: drawn in by the things as they fed. Did it
Speaker 1: happen that the Keeper became tuned to them, that it
Speaker 1: absorbed and responded to them, growing even more sensitive to
Speaker 1: these forces, until it reflected humanity? Who knows? Goodwin? Who
Speaker 1: can tell? Enigma? Unless the explanations I have hazarded be accepted,
Speaker 1: must remain that monstrous suicide and enigma, save for inconclusive theories,
Speaker 1: must remain the question of the monster's origin. If answers
Speaker 1: there were, they were lost forever in the slag we trod.
Speaker 1: It was afternoon of the second day that we found
Speaker 1: a rift in the blasted wall of the valley. We
Speaker 1: decided to try it. We had not dared to take
Speaker 1: the road by which Norhala had led us into the city.
Speaker 1: The giant slide was broken and climbable, But even if
Speaker 1: we could have passed safely through the tunnel of the Abbyss,
Speaker 1: there still was left the chasm over which we could
Speaker 1: have thrown no bridge. And if we could have bridged it,
Speaker 1: still at that road's end was the cliff whose sharp
Speaker 1: Norhala had sealed with her lightnings. So we entered the
Speaker 1: rift of our wanderings thereafter, I need not write. From
Speaker 1: the rift, we emerged into a maze of the valleys,
Speaker 1: and after a month in that wilderness, living upon what
Speaker 1: game we could shoot, we found a road that led
Speaker 1: us in to Guyancy. In another six weeks we were
Speaker 1: home in America. My story is finished there in the
Speaker 1: trans Himalayan wilderness is the blue globe that was the
Speaker 1: weird home of the lightning which, and looking back, I
Speaker 1: feel now she could not have been all woman. There
Speaker 1: is the vast pit, with its coronet of fantastic peaks,
Speaker 1: its symboled calcined floor, and the crumbling body of the inexplicable,
Speaker 1: the incredible thing which alive was the shadow of extinction,
Speaker 1: an her elation, hovering to hurl itself upon humanity. That
Speaker 1: shadow is gone, that Paul withdrawn. But to me till
Speaker 1: each of us four who saw those phenomena, their lesson
Speaker 1: remains ineradicable, giving a new strength and purpose to us,
Speaker 1: teaching us a new humility. For in that vast crucible
Speaker 1: of life of which we are so small a part,
Speaker 1: what other shapes may even now be rising to submerge us?
Speaker 1: In that vast reservoir of force, that is the mystery
Speaker 1: fuelled infinite through which we roll, What other shadows may
Speaker 1: be speeding upon us? Who knows? End of Chapter thirty one,
Speaker 1: End of The Metal Monster by Abraham Merrick