As my gaze swept away I noted with a curious relief that the tiny eye-points were no longer sparkling with their enigmatic life, that they were dulled and dim once more.
Before me, glimmering pallidly, bristled the mount of the Cones.

Around its crystal base glittered immense egg-shaped diamond incandescences.
They were both rayless and strangely--lightless; they threw no shadows nor did their lambency lessen the dimness.

Beside each of these curious luminosities stood one of the sullen-fired, cruciform shapes--the Things that now I knew for the opened cubes.
They were smaller than the Keeper, indeed less than half his height.
They were ranged in an almost unbroken crescent around the visible arc of the immense pedestal--and now I saw that the lights were a few feet closer to that pedestal than they.

Egg-shaped as I have said, the wider end was undermost, resting in a broad cup upheld by a slender pedicle silvery-gray and metallic.
"They're building out the base," whispered Drake.

"The Cones got so big they have to give them more room." "Magnetism," I whispered in return.