The Lost World Classics - Ultimate Collection. Жюль Верн

to our passing. Closer we crept — were only a scant score of rods from that colossal mechanism. I noted that the crystal foundation was set low; was not more than four feet above the floor. The sturdy, dwarfed pilasters supporting it thrust up in crowded copses, merging through distance into apparent solidity.

      Now, too, I realized, as I had not when looking down from above, how stupendous the structure rising from the crystal foundation was.

      I began to wonder how so thin a support could bear the mount bristling above it — then remembered what it was that at first had flown from them, shrinking them, and at last had fed and swelled them.

      Light! Weightless magnetic ions; swarms of electric ions; the misty breath of the infinite energy breathing upon, condensing upon, them. Could it be that the Cones for all their apparent mass had little, if any, weight? Like ringed Saturn, thousands of times Earth’s bulk, flaunting itself in the Heavens — yet if transported to our world so light that rings and all it would float like a bubble upon our oceans. The Cones towered above me — close, so close.

      The Cones were weightless. How I knew I cannot say — but now, almost touching them, I did know. Nebulous, yet solid, were they; compact, yet tenuous, dense and unsubstantial.

      Again the thought came to me — they were force made visible; energy made concentrate into matter.

      We skirted, seeking for the tablet over which the Keeper had hovered; the mechanism which, under his tentacles, had shifted the circling shields, thrust the spear of green fire into the side of the wounded sun. Hesitantly I touched the crystal base; the edge was warm, but whether this warmth came from the dazzling rain which we had just watched build it outward or whether it was a property inherent with the substance itself I do not know.

      Certainly there was no mark upon it to show where the molten mists had fallen. It was diamond hard and smooth. The nearest cones were but a scant nine feet from its rim.

      Suddenly we saw the tablet; stood beside it. The shape of a great T, glimmering with a faint and limpid violet phosphorescence, it might have been, in shape and size, the palely shining shadow of the Keeper. It was a foot above the floor, and had apparently no connection with the cones.

      It was made of thousands of close-packed tiny octagonal rods the tops of some of which were cupped, of others pointed; none was more than half an inch in width. There was about it a suggestion of wedded crystal and metal — as about its burden was the suggestion of mated energy and matter.

      The rods were movable; they formed a keyboard unimaginably complex; a keyboard whose infinite combinations were like a Fourth Dimensional chess game. I saw that only the swarms of tentacles that were the Keeper’s hands and these only could be masters of its incredible intricacies. No Disk — not even the Emperor, no Star shape could play on it, draw out its chords of power.

      But why? Why had it been so made that sullen flaming Cross alone could release its hidden meanings, made articulate its interwoven octaves? And how were its messages conveyed? Up to its bases pressed the dormant cubes — that under it they lay as well I did not doubt.

      There was no visible copula of the tablet with cones; no antennae between it and the circled shields. Could it be that the impulses released by the Keeper’s coilings passed through the Metal People of the pave on the upthrust Metal People of the crater rim who held the shields?

      That WAS unthinkable — unthinkable because if so this mechanism was superfluous.

      The swift response to the communal will that we had observed showed that the Metal Monster needed nothing of this kind for transmission of the thought of any of its units.

      There was some gap here — a gap that the grouped consciousness could not bridge without other means. Clearly that was true — else why the tablet, why the Keeper’s travail?

      Was each of these tiny rods a mechanism akin, in a fashion, to the sending keys of the wireless; were they transmitters of subtle energy in which was enfolded command? Spellers-out of a super-Morse carrying to each responsive cell of the Metal Monster the bidding of those higher units which were to It as the brain cells are to us? That, advanced as the knowledge it implied might be, was closer to the heart of the possible.

      I bent, determined, despite the well-nigh unconquerable shrinking I felt, to touch the tablet’s rods.

      A flickering shadow fell upon me; a flock of pulsating ochreous and scarlet shadows —

      The Keeper glowed above us!

      In a life that has had its share of dangers, its need for quick decisions, I recognize that few indeed of my reactions to peril have been more than purely instinctive; no more consciously courageous nor intellectually dissociate from the activating stimulus than the shrinking of the burned hand from the brand, the will-to-live dictated rush of the cornered animal upon the thing menacing it.

      One such higher functioning was when I followed Larry O’Keefe and Lakla, the Handmaiden, out to what we believed soul-destroying death in a place almost as strange as this; another was now. Deliberately, detachedly, I studied the angrily flaming Shape.

      Compared to it we were as a pair of Hop-o’-my-Thumbs to the Giant; had it been man-shaped we would have come less than a third way up to its knees. I focussed my attention upon the twenty-foot-wide square that was the Keeper’s foot. Its surface was jewel smooth, hyaline — yet beneath it was a suggestion of granulation, of close-packed, innumerable, microscopic crystals.

      Within these grains whose existence was more sensed than seen glowed dull red light, smoky and sullen. At each end of the square, close to the bottom, was a diamond-shaped lozenge, cabochon, perhaps a yard in width. These were dim yellow, translucent, with no suggestion of the underlying crystallization. Sense organs I set them down to be — similar to the great ovals within the Emperor’s golden zone.

      My gaze traveled up to the transverse arms. They stretched sixty feet from tip to tip. At each tip were two more of the diamond figures, not dull but burning angrily with orange-and-scarlet luster. In the center of the beam was something that might have been a smoldering rubrous reflection of the Emperor’s pulsing multicolored rose had each of the petals of the latter been clipped and squared.

      It deepened toward its heart into a singular pattern of vermilion latticings. Into the entire figure ran numerous tiny rivulets of angry crimson and orange light, angling in interwoven patterns with never a curve nor arching.

      Set at intervals between them were what looked like octagonal rosettes filled with slender silvery flutings, wan striations — like — it came to me — immense chrysanthemum buds, half opened, and carved in gray jade.

      Above towered the gigantic vertical beam. Toward its top I glimpsed a huge square of flaring crimsons and bright topaz; two other diamonds stared down upon us from just beneath it — like eyes. And over all its height the striated octagons clustered.

      I felt myself lifted, floated upward. Drake’s hand shot out, clung to me as together we drifted up the living wall. Opposite the latticed heart of the square-petaled rose our flight was checked. There for an instant we hung. Then the octagonal symbols stirred, unfolded like buds —

      They were the nests of the Keeper’s tentacles, and out from them the whiplike tendrils uncoiled, shot out and writhed toward us.

      My skin flinched from their touch; my body, held in the unseen grip, was motionless. Yet when they touched their contact was not unpleasant. They were like flexible strands of glass; their smooth tips questioned us, passing through our hair, searching our faces, writhing over our clothing.

      There was a pulse in the great clipped rose, a rhythmic throbbing of vermilion fire that ran into it from the angled veins, beat through the latticed nucleus and throbbed back whence it had come. The huge, high square of scarlet and yellow was liquid flame; the diamond organs beneath it seemed to smoke, to send out swirls of orange red vapor.

      Holding us so the Keeper studied us.

      The rhythm of the square rose, became the rhythm of my own mind. But here was none of the vast, serene and elemental calm that Ruth had described as emanating