The Metal People seemed to hang limply, inert; the living girders seemed to sag; the living columns to bend; to droop and to sway. Twelve minutes. With a nerve-racking crash one of the laden beams fell; dragging down with it others; bending, shattering in its fall a thicket of the horned columns. Behind us the sparkling eyes of the wall were dimmed, vacant--dying. Something of that hellish loneliness, that demoniac desire for immolation that had assailed us in the haunted hollow of the ruins began to creep over me. The crowded crater was fainting. The life was going out of the City--its magnetic life, draining into the shaft of green fire. Duller grew the Metal Emperor's glories. Fourteen minutes. “Goodwin,” cried Drake, “the life's going out of these Things! Going out with that ray they're shooting.” Fifteen minutes. I watched the tentacles of the Keeper grope over the tablet. Abruptly the flaming pyramid darkened--WENT OUT. The radiant pillar hurtled upward like a thunder-bolt; vanished in space. Before us stood the mount of cones, shrunken to a sixth of its former size. Sixteen minutes. All about the crater-lip the ringed shields tilted; thrust themselves on high, as though behind each was an eager lifting arm. Below them the hived clusters of disks changed from globules into wide coronets. Seventeen minutes. I dropped my wrist; seized the glasses from Drake; raised them to the sun. For a moment I saw nothing--then a tiny spot of white incandescence shone forth at the lower edge of the great spot. It grew into a point of radiance, dazzling even through the shadowed lenses. I rubbed my eyes; looked again. It was still there, larger--blazing with an ever increasing and intolerable intensity. I handed the glasses to Drake, silently. “I see it!” he muttered. “I see it! And THAT did it--that! Goodwin!” There was panic in his cry. “Goodwin! The spot! it's widening! It's widening!” I snatched the glasses from him. I caught again the dazzling flashing. But whether Drake HAD seen the spot widen, change--to this day I do not know. To me it seemed unchanged--and yet--perhaps it was not. It may be that under that finger of force, that spear of light, that wound in the side of our sun HAD opened further-- That the sun had winced! I do not to this day know. But whether it had or not--still shone the intolerably brilliant light. And miracle enough that was for me. Twenty minutes--subconsciously I had gone on counting--twenty minutes-- 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.