"I begin to get it--yes--I begin to get--Ventnor!" Once more the pulse, the avid throbbing shook the crater.

And as swiftly in its wake rushed back the stillness, the silence.
The Keeper turned--I saw its palely lustrous blue metallic back.

I drew out my little field-glasses, focussed them.
The Cross slipped sidewise past the Disk, its courtiers, its stellated guardians.

As it went by they swung about with it; ever facing it.
And now at last was clear a thing that had puzzled greatly--the mechanism of that opening process by which sphere became oval disk, pyramid a four-pointed star and--as I had glimpsed in the play of the Little Things about Norhala, could see now so plainly in the Keeper--the blocks took this inverted cruciform shape.
The Metal People were hollow! Hollow metal--boxes! In their enclosing sides dwelt all their vitality--their powers--themselves! And those sides were--everything that THEY were! Folded, the oval disk became the sphere; the four points of the star, the square from which those points radiated; shutting became the pyramid; the six faces of the cubes were when opened the inverted cross.
Nor were these flexible, mobile walls massive.

They were indeed, considering the apparent mass of the Metal Folk, most astonishingly fragile.