It cast a cadent spray high to the heavens.
Over it the heavens glittered as though they were a shield held by fearful gods.

Through the maelstrom staggered a mountainous bulk; a gleaming leviathan of pale blue metal caught in the swirling tide of some incredible volcano; a huge ark of metal breasting a deluge of flame.
And the drumming we heard as of hollow beaten metal worlds, the shouting tempests of cannonading stars, was the breaking of these incandescent crests, the falling of the lightning spindrift, the rhythmic impact of the lanced rays upon the glimmering mountain that reeled and trembled as they struck it.
The reeling mountain, the struggling leviathan, was--the City! It was the mass of the Metal Monster itself, guarded by, stormed by, its own legions that though separate from it were still as much of it as were the cells that formed the skin of its walls, its carapace.
It was the Metal Monster tearing, rending, fighting for, battling against--itself.
Mile high as when I had first beheld it was the inexplicable body that held the great heart of the cones into which had been drawn the magnetic cataracts from our sun; that held too the smaller hearts of the lesser cones, the workshops, the birth chamber and manifold other mysteries unguessed and unseen.

By a full fourth had its base been shrunken.
Ranged in double line along the side turned toward us were hundreds of dread forms--Shapes that in their intensity bore down upon, oppressed with a nightmare weight, the consciousness.
Rectangular, upon their outlines no spike of pyramid, no curve of globe showing, uncompromisingly ponderous, they upthrust.

Upon the tops of the first rank were enormous masses, sledge shaped--like those metal fists that had battered down the walls of Cherkis's city but to them as the human hand is to the paw of the dinosaur.
Conceive this--conceive these Shapes as animate and flexible; beating down with the prodigious mallets, smashing from side to side as though the tremendous pillars that held them were thousand jointed upright pistons; that as closely as I can present it in images of things we know is the picture of the Hammering Things.
Behind them stood a second row, high as they and as angular.

From them extended scores of girdered arms.