 What causes the shaking of the mountain?
WHEN THE MOUNTAIN SHOOK By Robert Abernathy Illustrated by Kelly Freas [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction March 1954. Dark was the Ryzga mountain and forbidding; steep were its cliffs and sheer its crevasses. But its outward perils could not compare with the Ryzgas themselves, who slept within, ready to wake and conquer.... Strangely it towered among the cliffs and snow-slopes of the surrounding ranges: an immense and repellently geometric cone, black, its sides blood-tinted by the dying sun. Now, if her father and his kinsmen overtook them, it would be death for Var, and for Neena living shame. Which of the two was worse was no longer a simple problem to Var, who had grown much older in the last days. While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to the crags that loomed over the pass, and to the frozen ground underfoot. It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening from the crevices of the rock. Now they were descending the steeper face of the sierra, and the way led over bottomless crevasses, sheer drops and sheer ascents, sheets of traitorous glare ice. Place after place had to be crossed on the air, and both grew weary with the effort such crossings cost. The light shone watery and dim from beneath the hoary back of the glacier, and as they came nearer they saw why: the cave entrance was sealed by a sheet of ice, a frozen waterfall that fell motionless from the rocks above. Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their childhood; but neither had been here before. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff; then he struck it boldly with his fist. They had expected something more—an ancient giant, a tower of wisdom and strength. Var saw with some surprise that all the walls were sheathed in ice—warm to the touch, bound fast against melting by the Watcher's will. Behind them began a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to descend sheet-wise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into lengthening icicles.
 Machines
 The awakening of the Ryzgas  Machines  Earthquakes and tremors  Dreams spun by the Ryzgas