They drew together two thousand feet above us, clustering close about the foot of a single huge spire which thrust itself skyward above them. The crest of this spire was truncated. From its shorn tip radiated scores of long and slender spokes holding in place a thousand feet wide wheel of wan green disks whose concave surfaces, unlike those smooth ones girding the crater, were curiously faceted. This amazing structure rested upon a myriad-footed base of crystal, even as had that other cornute fantasy beside which we had met the great Disk. But it was in size to that as--as Leviathan to a minnow. From it streamed the same baffling suggestion of invincible force transmuted into matter; energy coalesced into the tangible; power made concentrate in the vestments of substance. Half-way between crater lip and floor began the hordes of the Metal People. In colossal animate cheveau-de-frise of hundred-foot girders they thrust themselves out from the curving walls--walls, I knew, as alive as they! From these Brobdignagian beams they swung in ropes and clusters--spheres and cubes studded as thickly with the pyramids as ever Titan's mace with spikes. Group after bizarre group they dropped; pendulous. Coppices of slender columns of thistled globes sprang up to meet the festooned joists. Between the girders they draped themselves in long, stellated garlands; grouped themselves in innumerable, kaleidoscopic patterns. They clicked into place around the golden turret in which we crouched. In fantastic arrases they swayed in front of us--now hiding by, now revealing through their quicksilver interweavings the mounts of the Cones. And steadily those flowing in below added to their multitudes; gliding up cable and pillar; building out still further the living girders, stringing themselves upon living festoon and living garland, weaving in among them, changing their shapes, rewriting their symbols. They swung and threaded swiftly, in shifting arabesque, in Gothic traceries, in lace-like fantasies; utterly bizarre, unutterably beautiful--crystalline, geometric always. Abruptly their movement ceased--so abruptly that the stoppage of all the ordered turmoil had the quality of appalling silence. An unimaginable tapestry bedight with incredible broidery, the Metal People draped the vast cup. Pillared it as though it were a temple. Garnished it with their bodies as though it were a shrine. Across the floor toward the Cones glided a palely lustrous sphere. In shape only a globe like all its kind, yet it was invested with power; it radiated power as a star does light; was clothed in unseen garments of supernal force. In its wake drifted two great pyramids; after them ten spheres but little smaller than the Shape which led. “The Metal Emperor!” breathed Drake. On they swept until they reached the base of the Cones. They paused at the edge of the crystal tabling. They turned.