High and low throughout flamed the egg-shaped incandescences; floating furnaces both great and small.
Before one of these forges, close to us, stood a Metal Thing.

Its body was a twelve-foot column of smaller cubes.

Upon the top was a hollow square formed of even lesser blocks--blocks hardly larger than the Little Things themselves.

In the center of the open rectangle was another shaft, its top a two-foot square plate formed of a single cube.
From the sides of the hollow square sprang long arms of spheres, each tipped by a tetrahedron.

They moved freely, slipping about upon their curved points of contact and like a dozen little thinking hammers, the pyramid points at their ends beat down upon as many thimble shaped objects which they thrust alternately into the unwinking brazier then laid upon the central block to shape.
A goblin workman the Thing seemed, standing there, so intent upon and so busy with its forgings.
There were scores of these animate machines; they paid no slightest heed to us as we slipped by them, clinging as closely to the wall of the immense workshop as we could.
We passed a company of other Shapes which stood two by two and close together, their tops wide spinning wheels through which the tendrils of an opened globe fed translucent, colorless ingots--the substance it seemed to me of which Norhala's shadowy walls were made, the crystal of which the bars that built out the base of the Cones were formed.
The ingots passed between the whirling faces; emerged from them as slender, long cylinders; were seized as they slipped down by a crouching block, whose place as it glided away was instantly taken by another.