These were thickly studded with the flaming cruciform shapes, the opened cubes gleaming with their angry flares of reds and smoky yellows.

From the tentacles of many swung immense shields like those which ringed the hall of the great cones.
And as the sledges beat, ever over their bent heads poured from the crosses a flood of crimson lightnings.

Out of the concave depths of the shields whipped lashes of blinding flame.

With ropes of fire they knouted the Things the sledges struck, the sullen crimson levins blasted.
Now I could see the Shapes that attacked.

Grotesque; spined and tusked, spiked and antlered, wenned and breasted; as chimerically angled, cusped and cornute as though they were the superangled, supercornute gods of the cusped and angled gods of the Javanese, they strove against the sledge-headed and smiting, the multiarmed and blasting square towers.
High as them, as huge as they, incomparably fantastic, in dozens of shifting forms they battled.
More than a mile from the stumbling City stood ranged like sharpshooters a host of solid, bristling-legged towers.