The Keeper of the Cones! Were not its outstretched
planes hovering lower and lower over the gleaming tablet;
its tentacles moving aimlessly, feebly--wearily?
I had a sense of force being withdrawn from all about
me. It was as though all the City were being drained of
life--as though vitality were being sucked from it to feed
this pyramid of radiance; drained from it to forge the
thrusting spear piercing sunward.
The Metal People seemed to hang limply, inert; the living
girders seemed to sag; the living columns to bend; to
droop and to sway.
Twelve minutes.
With a nerve-racking crash one of the laden beams fell;
dragging down with it others; bending, shattering in its
fall a thicket of the horned columns. Behind us the
sparkling eyes of the wall were dimmed, vacant--dying.
Something of that hellish loneliness, that demoniac desire
for immolation that had assailed us in the haunted hollow
of the ruins began to creep over me.
The crowded crater was fainting. The life was going out
of the City--its magnetic life, draining into the shaft
of green fire.
Duller grew the Metal Emperor's glories.
Fourteen minutes.
"Goodwin," cried Drake, "the life's going out of these
Things! Going out with that ray they're shooting."
Fifteen minutes.
I watched the tentacles of the Keeper grope over the
tablet.
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