The violet mist grew brighter, more distinct. I knew the shells were bursting near it, and that the arc would reach it soon. The faithful old machine lumbered rapidly on over the wild and twisted rocky desert—a waste as terrible as the mountains of the moon!
In fact, that crater-pitted floor bore a curious resemblance to the typical lunar landscape, and the forces that produced them must have been similar.
Then the mist cleared, and I saw the form of the thing that gave the violet light! It was scores of feet thick, and hundreds tall! It was a vast smooth cylinder of violet fire! It shone like metal, which was white hot and seen through violet glass! The color of it ran and flickered on the surface! Violet sheets and bands crawled and flashed upon it, and violet flame flowed away from it in many little tongues. The thing was perfectly smooth and cylindrical, five hundred feet in height—a Titanic "monolith" of metal!
Still the Omnimobile lumbered irresistibly onward. The little gun crashed regularly, and the shells threw up the earth about that weird cylinder half a mile ahead. And the great white flame of the arc was playing far out toward it like the sword of the angel of death!
I saw a cluster of curious gleaming machines about the base of the great cylinder. One of my shells must have struck them, for they suddenly seemed to collapse and dissolve in a cloud of white smoke.
Abruptly a huge, terrible bar of green fire rose from the top of the cylinder almost like an extension of it—it was like a beam of green light from a vast searchlight. But it bent and twisted, as if it were alive! It moved like a snake, writhed toward me!
And then came the catastrophe!
A great pit in the rocky desert suddenly appeared before me—a hundred-foot chasm! I made a wild attempt to swing the machine around it. But, busy with the arc, the generators, and the gun, I had seen it too late. The brink loomed before me! Desperately I set the brakes. The machine paused jerkily, hesitated, then leaped over the rim! For a breathless second it fell down the sheer crater wall! I had no time to use the rockets! It crashed heavily upon the rocks!
I was torn from my seat and flung cruelly against the side of the conning-tower! My helmet was knocked off! And on the instant, a red storm of fear broke about me! It beat down on my brain like a rain of horror! It throbbed with an archaic rhythm, stirring strange emotions that overruled my reason and volition! Terror swept about me like a fierce wind from a hot desert of death, picking up my soul and sweeping it away to a fate unnamable!
I struggled with it terribly, with all my will. But it beat down my feeble barriers like a resistless tide. It burned away my will like a hot flame in my brain!