Titans of Chaos

A smaller tower, this one made of brown stone, with narrow archer slits instead of windows, roseup to one side of the first tower, throwing soil and rocks each way. Dirt, like black water, dribbledand trickled down its eaves.

A third tower, this one in the burned zone, reared aloft out of the earth, carrying a cluster ofstumps and ash on its head. A fourth tower a hundred yards beyond reared up, but was caught ina tangle of shattered and smoldering tree trunks, and could only get half its windows above theground.

Quentin's eyes were focused behind me: Awe and astonishment had robbed him of expression.

I turned. There were more towers behind me. At least two dozen, rearing up, taller than theburned trees around them.

And trapdoors were opening, some slowly, some quickly. Not one, not ten, but hundreds. I sawdoors an acre wide, rising up, carrying huge segments of the landscape with them, lifting rocksand tree stumps. Deep in these vast doors could be seen the heads of staircases fit for giants, insetwith ivory ramparts, five hundred yards wide. There were battlements and windows like gemsbeing pulled up to the surface, carried by the posts that lifted up these titanic roofs.

And beyond these hundred doors, one vast door that ran from horizon to horizon made itselfknown.

The hills opened.

Imagine that all the mountains and hills that embraced a quarter of the horizon, as far to thenorth and south as could be seen without turning, were not hills at all, but the rooftops and turretsand tower-tops of a buried city: and not merely a city, but also its suburbs, and a goodly section ofthe surrounding farms and villages.

Now imagine that all the million columns supporting the roofs and towers, halls, palaces,esplanades, and wintergar-dens of that underground countryside moved upward with oneponderous, silent, earthquake-potent thrust Those roofs and tower-tops with all the countless tonsof rock atop them, and all the wide acres of burned forest-tops crowning them, were all movedupward with untroubled, infinite strength.

That was what we saw.

Vast pillars of ivory and marble pushed the miles of hillside, rock and trees and stream andwoods, birds' nests and salt lick and brush, earth and stone and steaming wreckage of foreststump, acre upon acre, upward. A hundred yards aloft, two hundred, more.

Upward and upward. The underside of the hollow hills gleamed with the reflections of thatceiling, like a firmament, of a world that shone up from underfoot.