The prodigious bellowings of the Pit beating against us now as they had when we had flown down the long ramp into the depths of the Sea of Light.
Instinct with unthinkable power was that clamor; the very voice of Force.

Stunned, nay BLINDED, by it, we covered ears and eyes.
As before, the clangor died, leaving in its wake a bewildered silence.
Then that silence began to throb with a vast humming, and through that humming rang a murmur as that of a river of diamonds.
We opened our eyes, felt awe grip our throats as though a hand had clutched them.
Difficult, difficult almost beyond thought is it for me now to essay to draw in words the scene before us then.

For although I can set down what it was we saw, I nor any man can transmute into phrases its essence, its spirit, the intangible wonder that was its synthesis--the appallingly beautiful, soul-shaking strangeness of it, its grandeur, its fantasy, and its alien terror.
The Domain of the Metal Monster--it was filled like a chalice with Its will; was the visible expression of that will.
We stood at the very rim of a wide ledge.

We looked down into an immense pit, shaped into a perfect oval, thirty miles in length I judged, and half that as wide, and rimmed with colossal precipices.

We were at the upper end of this deep valley and on the tip of its axis; I mean that it stretched longitudinally before us along the line of greatest length.
Five hundred feet below was the pit's floor.