And the Metal Emperor! Dulled and faint were his fires, dimmed his splendors; and fainter still were the violet luminescences of the watching Stars, the shimmering livery of his court.
The Keeper of the Cones! Were not its outstretched planes hovering lower and lower over the gleaming tablet; its tentacles moving aimlessly, feebly—wearily?
I had a sense of force being withdrawn from all about me. It was as though all the City were being drained of life—as though vitality were being sucked from it to feed this pyramid of radiance; drained from it to forge the thrusting spear piercing sunward.
The Metal People seemed to hang limply, inert; the living girders seemed to sag; the living columns to bend; to droop and to sway.
Twelve minutes.
With a nerve-racking crash one of the laden beams fell; dragging down with it others; bending, shattering in its fall a thicket of the horned columns. Behind us the sparkling eyes of the wall were dimmed, vacant—dying. Something of that hellish loneliness, that demoniac desire for immolation that had assailed us in the haunted hollow of the ruins began to creep over me.
The crowded crater was fainting. The life was going out of the City—its magnetic life, draining into the shaft of green fire.
Duller grew the Metal Emperor's glories.
Fourteen minutes.
“Goodwin,” cried Drake, “the life's going out of these Things! Going out with that ray they're shooting.”