As a forge upon
whose shouting anvils was being shaped a new world.
A new world? A metal world!
The thought spun through my mazed brain, was gone--
and not until long after did I remember it. For suddenly
all that clamor died; the lightnings ceased; all the flitting
radiances paled and the sea of flaming splendors grew
thin as moving mists. The storming shapes dulled with
them, seemed to darken into the murk.
Through the fast-waning light and far, far away--
miles it seemed on high and many, many miles in length
--a broad band of fluorescent amethyst shone. From it
dropped curtains, shimmering, nebulous as the marching
folds of the aurora; they poured, cascaded, from the
amethystine band.
Huge and purple-black against their opalescence bulked
what at first I thought a mountain, so like was it to one
of those fantastic buttes of our desert Southwest when
their castellated tops are silhouetted against the setting
sun; knew instantly that this was but subconscious striving
to translate into terms of reality the incredible.
It was a City!
A city full five thousand feet high and crowned with
countless spires and turrets, titanic arches, stupendous
domes! It was as though the man-made cliffs of lower
New York were raised scores of times their height,
stretched a score of times their length.
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