The Metal Monster | Page 7

as he made away with Chiu-Ming's artful
concoctions.

Drake sighed, drawing out his pipe.
"A cook, a marvel of a cook. Where did you get him?"
Briefly I told him.
Then a silence fell upon us. Suddenly the sun dipped down behind the flank of the stone
giant guarding the valley's western gate; the whole vale swiftly darkened--a flood of
crystal-clear shadows poured within it. It was the prelude to that miracle of unearthly
beauty seen nowhere else on this earth--the sunset of Tibet.
We turned expectant eyes to the west. A little, cool breeze raced down from the watching
steeps like a messenger, whispered to the nodding poppies, sighed and was gone. The
poppies were still. High overhead a homing kite whistled, mellowly.
As if it were a signal there sprang out in the pale azure of the western sky row upon row
of cirrus cloudlets, rank upon rank of them, thrusting their heads into the path of the
setting sun. They changed from mottled silver into faint rose, deepened to crimson.
"The dragons of the sky drink the blood of the sunset," said Chiu-Ming.
As though a gigantic globe of crystal had dropped upon the heavens, their blue turned
swiftly to a clear and glowing amber--then as abruptly shifted to a luminous violet A soft
green light pulsed through the valley.
Under it, like hills ensorcelled, the rocky walls about it seemed to flatten. They glowed
and all at once pressed forward like gigantic slices of palest emerald jade, translucent,
illumined, as though by a circlet of little suns shining behind them.
The light faded, robes of deepest amethyst dropped around the mountain's mighty
shoulders. And then from every snow and glacier-crowned peak, from minaret and
pinnacle and towering turret, leaped forth a confusion of soft peacock flames, a host of
irised prismatic gleamings, an ordered chaos of rainbows.
Great and small, interlacing and shifting, they ringed the valley with an incredible
glory--as if some god of light itself had touched the eternal rocks and bidden radiant souls
stand forth.
Through the darkening sky swept a rosy pencil of living light; that utterly strange, pure
beam whose coming never fails to clutch the throat of the beholder with the hand of
ecstasy, the ray which the Tibetans name the Ting-Pa. For a moment this rosy finger
pointed to the east, then arched itself, divided slowly into six shining, rosy bands; began
to creep downward toward the eastern horizon where a nebulous, pulsing splendor arose
to meet it.
And as we watched I heard a gasp from Drake. And it was echoed by my own.
For the six beams were swaying, moving with ever swifter motion from side to side in

ever-widening sweep, as though the hidden orb from which they sprang were swaying
like a pendulum.
Faster and faster the six high-flung beams swayed--and then broke--broke as though a
gigantic, unseen hand had reached up and snapped them!
An instant the severed ends ribboned aimlessly, then bent, turned down and darted
earthward into the welter of clustered summits at the north and swiftly were gone, while
down upon the valley fell night.
"Good God!" whispered Drake. "It was as though something reached up, broke those rays
and drew them down-- like threads."
"I saw it." I struggled with bewilderment. "I saw it. But I never saw anything like it
before," I ended, most inadequately.
"It was PURPOSEFUL," he whispered. "It was DELIBERATE. As though something
reached up, juggled with the rays, broke them, and drew them down like willow withes."
"The devils that dwell here!" quavered Chiu-Ming.
"Some magnetic phenomenon." I was half angry at myself for my own touch of panic.
"Light can be deflected by passage through a magnetic field. Of course that's it.
Certainly."
"I don't know." Drake's tone was doubtful indeed. "It would take a whale of a magnetic
field to have done THAT --it's inconceivable." He harked back to his first idea. "It was
so--so DAMNED deliberate," he repeated.
"Devils--" muttered the frightened Chinese.
"What's that?" Drake gripped my arm and pointed to the north. A deeper blackness had
grown there while we had been talking, a pool of darkness against which the mountain
summits stood out, blade-sharp edges faintly luminous.
A gigantic lance of misty green fire darted from the blackness and thrust its point into the
heart of the zenith; following it, leaped into the sky a host of the sparkling spears of light,
and now the blackness was like an ebon hand, brandishing a thousand javelins of tinseled
flame.
"The aurora," I said.
"It ought to be a good one," mused Drake, gaze intent upon it. "Did you notice the big
sun spot?"
I shook my head.
"The biggest I ever saw. Noticed it first at dawn this morning. Some little aurora

lighter--that