But
they hushed, all at once and quite abruptly, when he stood still at
center stage, his arms straight out from his shoulders, and went
rigid, and began to tremble with a massive inner dynamism. Nobody
present had ever seen anyone stand so still and yet so strangely
mobile. He laid his head back until his scalp contacted his spine,
that far back, and opened his throat, and a sound rose in the
auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and
terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor, and it
gathered into a roar that sucked at the hearing itself, and coalesced
into a voice that penetrated into the sinuses and finally into the
very minds of those hearing it, taking itself higher and higher, more
and more awful and beautiful, the originating ideal of all such
sounds ever made, of the foghorn and the ship’s horn, the
locomotive’s lonesome whistle, of opera singing and the music of
flutes and the continuous moanmusic of bagpipes. And suddenly it all
went black. And that time was gone forever.
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