We spiralize through a tubular stairway to
an immense height--a tube of stone, like a Titanic organ pipe, filled
with waves of sound pouring down like a deluge. Undulations
tremendous, yet not intolerable: we soon learned their origin.
Reaching a small door, I turned aside, and came where the great bell
was hung, which twenty men were engaged in ringing. It was a
_fete_ day. I crept inside the frame, and stood actually under
the colossal mass, as it swung like a world in its spheric chime. A
new sense was developed, such as I had heard of the deaf possessing. I
seemed existing in a new medium. I _felt_ the sound in my lungs,
in my bones, on all my nerves to the minutest fibre, and yet it did
not stupefy nor stun me with a harsh clangor. It was _deep_,
DEEP. It was an abyss, gorgeously illuminated of velvet softness, in
which I floated. The sound was fluid like water about me. I closed my
eyes. Where was I? Had some prodigious monster swallowed me, and, like
another Jonah, had I "gone down beneath the bottoms of the mountains"?
I escaped from that perilous womb of sound, and ascended still higher.
There was the mystery of that nocturnal minstrelsy.
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