Chapter 31: Slag!

That night we slept well. Awakening, we found that the storm had grown violent again; the wind roaring and the rain falling in such volume that it was impossible to make our way to the Pit. Twice, as a matter of fact, we tried; but the smooth roadway was a torrent, and, drenched even through our oils to the skin, we at last abandoned the attempt. Ruth and Drake drifted away together among the other chambers of the globe; they were absorbed in themselves, and we did not thrust ourselves upon them. All the day the torrents fell.

We sat down that night to what was well-nigh the last of Ventnor’s stores. Seemingly Ruth had forgotten Norhala; at least, she spoke no more of her.

“Martin,” she said, “can’t we start back tomorrow? I want to get away. I want to get back to our own world.”

“As soon as the storm ceases, Ruth,” he answered, “we start. Little sister--I too want you to get back quickly.”

The next morning the storm had gone. We awakened soon after dawn into clear and brilliant light. We had a silent and hurried breakfast. The saddlebags were packed and strapped upon the pony. Within them were what we could carry of souvenirs from Norhala’s home--a suit of lacquered armor, a pair of cloaks and sandals, the jeweled combs. Ruth and Drake at the side of the pony, Ventnor and I leading, we set forth toward the Pit.

“We’ll probably have to come back, Walter,” he said. “I don’t believe the place is passable.”

I pointed--we were then just over the threshold of the elfin globe. Where the veils had stretched between the perpendicular pillars of the cliffs was now a wide and ragged-edged opening.

The roadway which had run so smoothly through the scarps was blocked by a thousand foot barrier. Over it, beyond it, I could see through the crystalline clarity of the air the opposing walls.

“We can climb it,” Ventnor said. We passed on and reached the base of the barrier. An avalanche had dropped there; the barricade was the debris of the torn cliffs, their dust, their pebbles, their boulders. We toiled up; we reached the crest; we looked down upon the valley.

When first we had seen it we had gazed upon a sea of radiance pierced with lanced forests, swept with gigantic gonfalons of flame; we had seen it emptied of its fiery mists--a vast slate covered with the chirography of a mathematical god; we had seen it filled with the symboling of the Metal Hordes and dominated by the colossal integrate hieroglyph of the living City; we had seen it as a radiant lake over which brooded weird suns; a lake of yellow flame froth upon which a sparkling hail fell, within which reared islanded towers and a drowning mount running with cataracts of sun fires; here we had watched a goddess woman, a being half of earth, half of the unknown immured within a living tomb--a dying tomb--of flaming mysteries; had seen a cross-shaped metal Satan, a sullen flaming crystal Judas betray--itself.

Where we had peered into the unfathomable, had glimpsed the infinite, had heard and had seen the inexplicable, now was--

Slag!

The amethystine ring from which had been streamed the circling veils was cracked and blackened; like a seam of coal it had stretched around the Pit--a crown of mourning. The veils were gone. The floor of the valley was fissured and blackened; its patterns, its writings burned away. As far as we could see stretched a sea of slag--coal black, vitrified and dead.

Here and there black hillocks sprawled; huge pillars arose, bent and twisted as though they had been jettings of lava cooled into rigidity before they could sink back or break. These shapes clustered most thickly around an immense calcified mound. They were what were left of the battling Hordes, and the mound was what had been the Metal Monster.

Somewhere there were the ashes of Norhala, sealed by fire in the urn of the Metal Emperor!

From side to side of the Pit, in broken beaches and waves and hummocks, in blackened, distorted tusks and warped towerings, reaching with hideous pathos in thousands of forms toward the charred mound, was only slag.

From rifts and hollows still filled with water little wreaths of steam drifted. In those futile wraiths of vapor was all that remained of the might of the Metal Monster.

Catastrophe I had expected, tragedy I knew we would find--but I had looked for nothing so filled with the abomination of desolation, so frightful as was this.

“Burned out!” muttered Drake. “Short-circuited and burned out! Like a dynamo--like an electric light!”

“Destiny!” said Ventnor. “Destiny! Not yet was the hour struck for man to relinquish his sovereignty over the world. Destiny!”

We began to pick our way down the heaped debris and out upon the plain. For all that day and part of another we searched for an opening out of the Pit.

Everywhere was the incredible calcification. The surfaces that had been the smooth metallic carapaces with the tiny eyes deep within them, crumbled beneath the lightest blow. Not long would it be until under wind and rain they dissolved into dust and mud.

And it grew increasingly obvious that Drake’s theory of the destruction was correct. The Monster had been one prodigious magnet--or, rather, a prodigious dynamo. By magnetism, by electricity, it had lived and had been activated.