Publisher's Synopsis
THERE it was! The abrupt liberation of sound! As he timed it with his watch, Bassettlikened it to the trump of an archangel. Walls of cities, he meditated, might well fall downbefore so vast and compelling a summons. For the thousandth time vainly he tried toanalyse the tone-quality of that enormous peal that dominated the land far into the strongholds of the surrounding tribes. The mountain gorge which was its source rang to therising tide of it until it brimmed over and flooded earth and sky and air. With thewantonness of a sick man's fancy, he likened it to the mighty cry of some Titan of the ElderWorld vexed with misery or wrath. Higher and higher it arose, challenging and demandingin such profounds of volume that it seemed intended for ears beyond the narrow confinesof the solar system. There was in it, too, the clamour of protest in that there were no earsto hear and comprehend its utterance.-Such the sick man's fancy. Still he strove to analyse the sound. Sonorous as thunder wasit, mellow as a golden bell, thin and sweet as a thrummed taut cord of silver-no; it wasnone of these, nor a blend of these. There were no words nor semblances in his vocabularyand experience with which to describe the totality of that sound.Time passed. Minutes merged into quarters of hours, and quarters of hours into half-hours, and still the sound persisted, ever changing from its initial vocal impulse yet neverreceiving fresh impulse-fading, dimming, dying as enormously as it had sprung intobeing. It became a confusion of troubled mutterings and babblings and colossalwhisperings. Slowly it withdrew, sob by sob, into whatever great bosom had birthed it, until it whimpered deadly whispers of wrath and as equally seductive whispers of delight, striving still to be heard, to convey some cosmic secret, some understanding of infiniteimport and value. It dwindled to a ghost of sound that had lost its menace and promise, and became a thing that pulsed on in the sick man's consciousness for minutes after it hadceased. When he could hear it no longer, Bassett glanced at his watch. An hour had elapsedere that archangel's trump had subsided into tonal nothingness.Was this, then, his dark tower?-Bassett pondered, remembering his Browning and gazingat his skeleton-like and fever-wasted hands. And the fancy made him smile-of ChildeRoland bearing a slug-horn to his lips with an arm as feeble as his was. Was it months, oryears, he asked himself, since he first heard that mysterious call on the beach atRingmanu? To save himself he could not tell. The long sickness had been most long. Inconscious count of time he knew of months, many of them; but he had no way of estimatingthe long intervals of delirium and stu