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VAMPIRES OF THE SUN.
It was a crater; a half mile on high and all of two thousand feet across ran the circular lip of its vast rim.

Above it was a circle of white and glaring sky in whose center flamed the sun.
And instantly, before my vision could grasp a tithe of that panorama, I knew that this place was the very heart of the City; its vital ganglion; its soul.
Around the crater lip were poised thousands of concave disks, vernal green, enormous.

They were like a border of gigantic, upthrust shields; and within each, emblazoned like a shield's device, was a blinding flower of flame--the reflected, dilated face of the sun.

Below this diadem hung, pendent, clusters of other disks, swarmed like the globular hiving of the constellation Hercules' captured stars.