Chapter XXIV.

       Ruszark

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      Smoothly moved the colossal shape; on it we rode as easily as though cradled. It did not glide — it strode.

      The columned legs raised themselves, bending from a thousand joints. The pedestals of the feet, huge and massive as foundations for sixteen-inch guns, fell with machinelike precision, stamping gigantically.

      Under their tread the trees of the forest snapped, were crushed like reeds beneath the pads of a mastodon. From far below came the sound of their crashing. The thick forest checked the progress of the Shape less than tall grass would that of a man.

      Behind us our trail was marked by deep, black pits in the forest’s green, clean cut and great as the Mark upon the poppied valley. They were the footprints of the Thing that carried us.

      The wind streamed and whistled. A flock of the willow warblers arose, sworled about us with manifold beating of little frightened wings. Norhala’s face softened, her eyes smiled.

      “Go — foolish little ones,” she cried, and waved her arms. They flew away, scolding.

      A lammergeier swooped down on wide funereal wings; it peered at us; darted away toward the cliffs.

      “There will be no carrion there for you, black eater of the dead, when I am through,” I heard Norhala whisper, eyes again somber.

      Steadily grew the dawn light; from Norhala’s lips came again the chanting. And now that paean, the reckless pulse of the monster we rode, began to creep through my own veins. Into Drake’s too, I knew, for his head was held high and his eyes were clear and bright as hers who sang.

      The jubilant pulse streamed through the hands that held us, throbbed through us. The pulse of the Thing — sang!

      Closer and closer grew the cliffs. Down and crashing down fell the trees, the noise of their fall accompanying the battle chant of the Valkyr beside me like wild harp chords of storm-lashed surf. Up to the precipices the forest rolled, unbroken. Now the cliffs loomed overhead. The dawn had passed. It was full day.

      Cutting up through the towering granite scarps was a rift. In it the black shadows clustered thickly. Straight toward that cleft we sped. As we drew near, the crest of the Shape began swiftly to lower. Down we sank and down — a hundred feet, two hundred; now we were two score yards above the tree tops.

      Out shot a neck, a tremendous serpent body. Crested it was with pyramids; crested with them, too, was its immense head. Thickly the head bristled with them, poised motionless upon spinning globes as huge as they. For hundreds of feet that incredible neck stretched ahead of us and for twice as far behind a monstrous, lizard-shaped body writhed.

      We rode now upon a serpent, a glittering blue metal dragon, spiked and knobbed and scaled. It was the weird steed of Norhala flattening, thrusting out to pierce the rift.

      And still as when it had reared on high beat through it the wild, triumphant, questing pulse. Still rang out Norhala’s chanting.

      The trees parted and fell upon each side of us as though we were some monster of the sea and they the waves we cleft.

      The rift enclosed us. Lower we dropped; were not more than fifty feet above its floor. The Thing upon which we rode was a torrent roaring through it.

      A deeper blackness enclosed us — a tunneling.

      Through that we flowed. Out of it we darted into a widening filled with wan light drifting down through a pinnacle fanged mouth miles on high. Again the cleft shrunk. A thousand feet ahead was a crack, a narrowing of the cleft so small that hardly could a man pass through it.

      Abruptly the metal dragon halted.

      Norhala’s chanting changed; became again the arrogant clarioning. And close below us the huge neck split. It came to me then that it was as though Norhala were the overspirit of this chimera — as though it caught and understood and obeyed each quick thought of hers.

      As though, indeed, she was a PART of it — as IT was in reality a part of that infinitely greater Thing, crouching there in its lair of the Pit — the Metal Monster that had lent this living part of itself to her for a steed, a champion. Little time had I to consider such matters.

      Up thrust the Shape before us. Into it raced and spun Things angled, Things curved and Things squared. It gathered itself into a Titanic pillar out of which, instantly, thrust scores of arms.

      Over them great globes raced; after these flew other scores of huge pyramids, none less than ten feet in height, the mass of them twenty and thirty. The manifold arms grew rigid. Quiet for a moment, a Titanic metal Briareous, it stood.

      Then at the tips of the arms the globes began to spin — faster, faster. Upon them I saw the hosts of the pyramids open — as one into a host of stars. The cleft leaped out in a flood of violet light.

      Now for another instant the stars which had been motionless, poised upon the whirling spheres, joined in their mad spinning. Cyclopean pin wheels they turned; again as one they ceased. More brilliant now was their light, dazzling; as though in their whirling they had gathered greater force.

      Under me I felt the split Thing quiver with eagerness.

      From the stars came a hurricane of lightning! A cataract of electric flame poured into the crack, splashed and guttered down the granite walls. We were blinded by it; were deafened with thunders.

      The face of the precipice smoked and split; was whirled away in clouds of dust.

      The crack widened — widened as a gulley in a sand bank does when a swift stream rushes