Down upon them poured a shower of arrows from the
soldiers. I heard the shouts of their captains; they rushed.
They had courage--those men--yes!

Again came the woman's cry--golden, peremptory.

Sphere and block and pyramid ran together, seemed to
seethe. I had again that sense of a quicksilver melting.
Up from them thrust a thick rectangular column.
Eight feet in width and twenty feet high, it shaped itself.
Out from its left side, from right side, sprang arms
--fearful arms that grew and grew as globe and cube and
angle raced up the column's side and clicked into place
each upon, each after, the other. With magical quickness
the arms lengthened.

Before us stood a monstrous shape; a geometric prodigy.
A shining angled pillar that, though rigid, immobile,
seemed to crouch, be instinct with living force striving to
be unleashed.

Two great globes surmounted it--like the heads of some
two-faced Janus of an alien world.

At the left and right the knobbed arms, now fully fifty
feet in length, writhed, twisted, straightened; flexing
themselves in grotesque imitation of a boxer. And at the end
of each of the six arms the spheres were clustered thick,
studded with the pyramids--again in gigantic, awful, parody
of the spiked gloves of those ancient gladiators who