Down struck the flails, the sledges.Beneath the blows the buildings burst like eggshells, their fragments burying the throngs fighting for escape in the thoroughfares that threaded them.Over their ruins we moved.
Down and ever down crashed the awful sledges.And ever under them the city crumbled.
There was a spider Shape that crawled up the wide stairway hammering into the stone those who tried to flee before it.
Stride by stride the Destroying Things ate up the city.
I felt neither wrath nor pity.Through me beat a jubilant roaring pulse--as though I were a shouting corpuscle of the rushing hurricane, as though I were one of the hosts of smiting spirits of the bellowing typhoon.
Through this stole another thought--vague, unfamiliar, yet seemingly of truth's own essence.Why, I wondered, had I never recognized this before? Why had I never known that these green forms called trees were but ugly, unsymmetrical excrescences? That these high projections of towers, these buildings were deformities?
That these four-pronged, moving little shapes that screamed and ran were--hideous?
They must be wiped out! All this misshapen, jumbled, inharmonious ugliness must be wiped out! It must be ground down to smooth unbroken planes, harmonious curvings, shapeliness--harmonies of arc and line and angle!
Something deep within me fought to speak--fought to tell me that this thought was not human thought, not my thought--that it was the reflected thought of the Metal Things!
It told me--and fiercely it struggled to make me realize what it was that it told.Its insistence was borne upon little despairing, rhythmic beatings--throbbings that were like the muffled sobbings of the drums of grief.Louder, closer came the throbbing; clearer with it my perception of the inhumanness of my thought.
The drum beat tapped at my humanity, became a dolorous knocking at my heart.
It was the sobbing of Cherkis!
The gross face was shrunken, the cheeks sagging in folds of woe; cruelty and wickedness were wiped from it; the evil in the eyes had been washed out by tears.Eyes streaming, bull throat and barrel chest racked by his sobbing, he watched the passing of his people and his city.
And relentlessly, coldly, Norhala watched him--as though loath to lose the faintest shadow of his agony.
Now I saw we were close to the top of the mount.
Packed between us and the immense white structures that crowned it were thousands of the people.They fell on their knees before us, prayed to us.They tore at each other, striving to hide themselves from us in the mass that was themselves.They beat against the barred doors of the sanctuaries; they climbed the pillars; they swarmed over the golden roofs.
There was a moment of chaos--a chaos of which we were the heart.Then temple and palace cracked, burst;were shattered; fell.I caught glimpses of gleaming sculptures, glitterings of gold and of silver, flashing of gems, shimmering of gorgeous draperies--under them a weltering of men and women.
We closed down upon them--over them!
The dreadful sobbing ceased.I saw the head of Cherkis swing heavily upon a shoulder; the eyes closed.
The Destroying Things touched.Their flailing arms coiled back, withdrew into their bodies.They joined, forming for an instant a tremendous hollow pillar far down in whose center we stood.They parted; shifted in shape?
rolled down the mount over the ruins like a widening wave --crushing into the stone all over which they passed.
Afar away I saw the gleaming serpent still at play--still writhing among, still obliterating the few score scattered fugitives that some way, somehow, had slipped by the Destroying Things.
We halted.For one long moment Norhala looked upon the drooping body of him upon whom she had let fall this mighty vengeance.
Then the metal arm that held Cherkis whirled.
Thrown from it, the cloaked form flew like a great blue bat.It fell upon the flattened mound that had once been the proud crown of his city.A blue blot upon desolation the broken body of Cherkis lay.
A black speck appeared high in the sky; grew fast--the lammergeier.
"I have left carrion for you--after all!" cried Norhala.
With an ebon swirling of wings the vulture dropped beside the blue heap--thrust in it its beak.
