Plunging torrents battered them. Merciless currents sucked them down.
Savage whirlpools spun them under smothering foam.
All in roaring blackness.
John Star gasped for breath, strangled in the foam.
He fought the current that carried him down. Down and down!
Resistless pressure crushed his body.
He endured the agony of suffocation.
Desperately he tried to swim, and wild water mocked him.
It carried him up— and down again.
When he came up a second time, he contrived to stay afloat; he swam away from the chaos of the fall.
They had poured into a vast, cavernous reservoir, completely dark.
Its vast extent he could guess only by the rolling thunder of reverberation from its roof.
He shouted as he swam, and heard with keenest joy Giles Habibula’s plaintive wheeze:
“Ah, lad, you lived through it!
It was an awful time, lad.
A fearful thing, lad, to be diving over mortal waterfalls, in this wicked dark.
“But I’ve still my precious bottle of wine.”
Hal Samdu hailed them, then. A little later they came upon Jay Kalam.
They all swam away from the thunder, and came at last to the side of the tank which was slick, unclimbable metal.
“Ah, so we must drown, like so many kittens in a blessed bucket!” wailed Giles Habibula.
“After all the dreadful perils we’ve been through. Ah, mortal me!”
They swam along the slimy wall, until they came blindly to a great metal float with a taut chain above it—it must be, Jay Kalam said, the mechanism that measured the level of the water.
They climbed the chain.
It brought them up at last, with weary limbs and blistered hands, to the vast drum upon which it was wound.
There they saw a feeble gleam of red, and they crept toward it along the great axle-shaft of the drum, wet and slippery with condensation.
Scrambling over the immense bearing of the shaft, they found a little circular hole in the roof of the tank—it must have been left for attention to the bearings.
They climbed through it, Giles Habibula sticking until the others pulled him out, and so at last, on top of the reservoir, they were fairly within the city.
They stood on the lower edge of a conical black metal roof, a dizzy drop of two thousand feet below them, and the slope too steep for comfort.
Standing there on that perilous brink, John Star felt a staggering impact of nightmare strangeness and bewildering confusion.
Buildings, towers, stacks, tanks, machines, all loomed up about him, a black fantastic forest against the lurid sky, appallingly colossal.
The tallest structures reached, he soberly estimated, two miles high.
If this black metropolis of the monstrous Medusae had order or plan, he did not grasp it.
The black wall had seemed to enclose a regular polygon. But within all was strange, astounding, incomprehensible, to the point of stunning dismay.
There were no streets, but merely yawning cavernous abysms between mountainous black structures.
The Medusae had no need of streets.
They didn’t walk, they floated!
Doors opened upon sheer space, at any level from the surface to ten thousand feet.
The stupendous ebon buildings had no regular height or plan, some were square, some cylindrical or domed, some terraced, some —like the reservoir upon which they stood—sheerly vertical.
All among them were bewildering machines of unguessable function— save that a few were apparently aerial or interstellar fliers, moored on landing stages—but all black, ugly, colossal; dread instrumentalities of a science older than the life of Earth.
The four stood there for a little time in a shaken bewilderment, caution forgotten.
“Bless my precious eyes!” moaned Giles Habibula.
“No streets. No ground. No level space. All a tangle of wicked black metal.
We’ll get nowhere unless we sprout some blessed wings!”
“That must be the central tower,” observed Jay Kalam, “the black fort Commander Ulnar spoke of.
Still miles away.”
He pointed to a square, forbidding, tremendous pile, towering up amazingly in the red and murky distance, a very mountain of black and alien metal, landing stages which carried colossal spider-ships and large machines of unguessable use, projecting from its frowning walls.
Weary, hopeless, he shook his head.
“We must get back,” he whispered, “and hide till dusk.”
“Or the monstrous things,” apprehensively promised Giles Habib-ula, “will see———”
“One, I think,” broke in John Star, “already has!”