Why, I wondered, had I never recognized this before?
Why had I never known that these green forms called trees were but ugly, unsymmetrical excrescences?
That these high projections of towers, these buildings were deformities?
That these four-pronged, moving little shapes that screamed and ran were--hideous?
They must be wiped out! All this misshapen, jumbled, inharmonious ugliness must be wiped out! It must be ground down to smooth unbroken planes, harmonious curvings, shapeliness--harmonies of arc and line and angle! Something deep within me fought to speak--fought to tell me that this thought was not human thought, not my thought--that it was the reflected thought of the Metal Things! It told me--and fiercely it struggled to make me realize what it was that it told.

Its insistence was borne upon little despairing, rhythmic beatings--throbbings that were like the muffled sobbings of the drums of grief.

Louder, closer came the throbbing; clearer with it my perception of the inhumanness of my thought.
The drum beat tapped at my humanity, became a dolorous knocking at my heart.
It was the sobbing of Cherkis! The gross face was shrunken, the cheeks sagging in folds of woe; cruelty and wickedness were wiped from it; the evil in the eyes had been washed out by tears.

Eyes streaming, bull throat and barrel chest racked by his sobbing, he watched the passing of his people and his city.
And relentlessly, coldly, Norhala watched him--as though loath to lose the faintest shadow of his agony.
Now I saw we were close to the top of the mount.

Packed between us and the immense white structures that crowned it were thousands of the people.