Awesome walls of black jungle towered along its banks; barriers of violet-flowering thorns, interwoven with deadly purple vines; brakes of towering canes that whipped out at anything moving like living swords; gigantic trees laden with black moss that was blood-sucking death.
Above the jungle hung the low, smoky sky, the red sun huge and sullen in the west.
Hal Samdu, at the steering-sweep, roared suddenly:
“The city! There it is!”
Like another black mountain it rose, dim in the red murk, colossal beyond belief.
Above the jungle, its smooth walls leaped up, infinitely, incredibly up, to strange ebon towers and huge fantastic mechanisms.
A black metropolis, designed by madmen and built by giants.
Breathless wonder and awed unease overcame the four ragged men on the raft, gazing at the city they had crossed the abysm of space and a savage continent to reach.
They stood with heads back, gaping mutely at the unguessable, titanic mechanisms that topped the summits of its walls.
“Aladoree!” muttered Hal Samdu, at last.
“There!” ,
“So Adam Ulnar thought,” said Jay Kalam.
“In that higher central tower—can you see it, dim in the red, above the rest?”
“Yes, I see it.
But how can we get there?
What good is my club— against those machines on the walls!
We are no more than ants!”
“Ah, that’s the word, Hal!” said Giles Habibula.
“Ants!
We’re nothing but miserable creeping ants!
Ah, me, those wicked walls look a mile high, indeed! And the evil towers and those fearful machines half a mile more on top of them!
Nothing but silly little ants!
Except —a precious ant could climb the walls!”
The others kept silent.
They stared over the river’s yellow, raging floor, over the dark jungle barrier, at the black, unbelievable mass of the city against the sky.
Jay Kalam stood grave with thought.
John Star pictured the girl Aladoree as he last had seen her, gray eyes demurely cool, hair a sunlit glory of brown and red and gold.
Could her quiet, fresh beauty really be still living, he wondered, shut up in the mass of somber metal ahead?
The mighty current carried them on.
Beyond a bend they saw the base of the black walls, rising sheer from the yellow river; plunging up a full mile, a vertical, unbroken barrier of dead-black metal.
Hours went by, and the yellow tide bore them on.
The city marched up out of the crimson haze, ever more awful, the bulk of it swelling to blot out half the red sky with gleaming black metal, the titanic machines that crowned it frowning down with the threat of unknown death.
A palpable atmosphere of dread and horror hung over that unearthly metropolis, a sense of evil power and hostile strength, of ancient wisdom and monstrous science, for it had endured since the Earth was new.
The four ragged creatures on the raft gazed on those marching walls with a hopeless horror.
Their minds sank prostrate with realization that, unless their puny efforts could free the girl imprisoned there, the makers of this pile of black metal had also shaped the doom of mankind.
The city seemed dead at first, a somber necropolis, too old for any life.
But presently they saw movement along the walls.
A black spider-ship spread titanic vanes, and rose silently from a high platform to vanish in the red sky eastward.
“We must cover ourselves,” said Jay Kalam.
“They might be watching.”
He had them screen the raft with broken branches, to look like driftwood. And the river carried them on toward the mighty wall.
They were gazing upward in awe-struck silence when Hal Samdu cried:
“See them moving!
Above the wall!”
And the others could presently distinguish the creatures that moved, still tiny with many miles of distance—the ancient masters of this aged planet!
John Star had glimpsed one of the Medusae on Mars, that thing in the gondola swung from the black flier, whose weapon had struck him down.
A swollen, greenish surface, wetly heaving; a huge, ovoid eye, luminous and purple.
But these were the first he had fully seen.
They drifted above the wall like little green balloons.
Their eyes were tiny dark points in their bulging sides—each had four eyes, spaced at equal distances about its circumference.