The Metal Monster | Page 9

I were reconciled to spending
another night in the peaceful vale. Plodding along, deep in thought, I was startled by his
exclamation.
He was staring at a point some hundred yards to his right. I followed his gaze.
The towering cliffs were a scant half mile away. At some distant time there had been an
enormous fall of rock. This, disintegrating, had formed a gently-curving breast which
sloped down to merge with the valley's floor. Willow and witch alder, stunted birch and
poplar had found roothold, clothed it, until only their crowding outposts, thrusting
forward in a wavering semicircle, held back seemingly by the blue hordes, showed where
it melted into the meadows.
In the center of this breast, beginning half way up its slopes and stretching down into the
flowered fields was a colossal imprint.
Gray and brown, it stood out against the green and blue of slope and level; a rectangle all
of thirty feet wide, two hundred long, the heel faintly curved and from its hither end, like
claws, four slender triangles radiating from it like twenty-four points of a ten-rayed star.
Irresistibly was it like a footprint--but what thing was there whose tread could leave such
a print as this?
I ran up the slope--Drake already well in advance. I paused at the base of the triangles
where, were this thing indeed a footprint, the spreading claws sprang from the flat of it.
The track was fresh. At its upper edges were clipped bushes and split trees, the white
wood of the latter showing where they had been sliced as though by the stroke of a
scimitar.
I stepped out upon the mark. It was as level as though planed; bent down and stared in
utter disbelief of what my own eyes beheld. For stone and earth had been crushed,
compressed, into a smooth, microscopically grained, adamantine complex, and in this
matrix poppies still bearing traces of their coloring were imbedded like fossils. A cyclone
can and does grip straws and thrust them unbroken through an inch board--but what force
was there which could take the delicate petals of a flower and set them like inlay within
the surface of a stone?
Into my mind came recollection of the wailings, the crashings in the night, of the weird
glow that had flashed about us when the mist arose to hide the chained aurora.
"It was what we heard," I said. "The sounds--it was then that this was made."
"The foot of Shin-je!" Chiu-Ming's voice was tremulous. "The lord of Hell has trodden
here!"

I translated for Drake's benefit.
"Has the lord of Hell but one foot?" asked Dick, politely.
"He bestrides the mountains," said Chiu-Ming. "On the far side is his other footprint.
Shin-je it was who strode the mountains and set here his foot."
Again I interpreted.
Drake cast a calculating glance up to the cliff top.
"Two thousand feet, about," he mused. "Well, if Shin-je is built in our proportions that
makes it about right. The length of this thing would give him just about a two thousand
foot leg. Yes--he could just about straddle that hill."
"You're surely not serious?" I asked in consternation.
"What the hell!" he exclaimed, "am I crazy? This is no foot mark. How could it be? Look
at the mathematical nicety with which these edges are stamped out--as though by a die--
"That's what it reminds me of--a die. It's as if some impossible power had been used to
press it down. Like-- like a giant seal of metal in a mountain's hand. A sigil-- a seal--"
"But why?" I asked. "What could be the purpose--"
"Better ask where the devil such a force could be gotten together and how it came here,"
he said. "Look--except for this one place there isn't a mark anywhere. All the bushes and
the trees, all the poppies and the grass are just as they ought to be.
"How did whoever or whatever it was that made this, get here and get away without
leaving any trace but this? Damned if I don't think Chiu-Ming's explanation puts less
strain upon the credulity than any I could offer."
I peered about. It was so. Except for the mark, there was no slightest sign of the unusual,
the abnormal.
But the mark was enough!
"I'm for pushing up a notch or two and getting into the gorge before dark," he was
voicing my own thought. "I'm willing to face anything human--but I'm not keen to be
pressed into a rock like a flower in a maiden's book of poems." Just at twilight we drew
out of the valley into the pass. We traveled a full mile along it before darkness forced us
to make camp. The gorge was narrow. The far walls but a hundred