There came another meteor burst of light. Where the cube had been was now a tremendous, fiery cross—a cross inverted.
Its upper arm arose to twice the length either of its horizontals or the square that was its foot. In its opening it must have turned, for its—FACE—was toward us and away from the Cones, its body hid the Disk, and almost all the surfaces of the two watchful Stars.
Eighty feet at least in height, this cruciform shape stood. It flamed and flickered with angry, smoky crimsons and scarlets; with sullen orange glowings and glitterings of sulphurous yellows. Within its fires were none of those leaping, multicolored glories that were the Metal Emperor's; no trace of the pulsing, mystic rose; no shadow of jubilant sapphire; no purple royal; no tender, merciful greens nor gracious opalescences. Nothing even of the blasting violet of the Stars.
All angry, smoky reds and ochres the cross blazed forth—and in its lurid glowings was something sinister, something real, something cruel, something—nearer to earth, closer to man.
“The Keeper of the Cones and the Metal Emperor!” muttered Drake. “I begin to get it—yes—I begin to get—Ventnor!”
Once more the pulse, the avid throbbing shook the crater. And as swiftly in its wake rushed back the stillness, the silence.
The Keeper turned—I saw its palely lustrous blue metallic back. I drew out my little field-glasses, focussed them.
The Cross slipped sidewise past the Disk, its courtiers, its stellated guardians. As it went by they swung about with it; ever facing it.
And now at last was clear a thing that had puzzled greatly—the mechanism of that opening process by which sphere became oval disk, pyramid a four-pointed star and—as I had glimpsed in the play of the Little Things about Norhala, could see now so plainly in the Keeper—the blocks took this inverted cruciform shape.
The Metal People were hollow!