ed through a crisis such
as this before. Would he prevail, would he keep his head? Would he
avoid or balk the thousand and one little subterfuges, tricks, and
traps that the hostile traders would prepare for him--prepare with a
quickness, a suddenness that all but defied the sharpest, keenest
watchfulness?

Was the gong never going to strike? He found himself, all at once, on
the edge of the Wheat Pit. It was jammed tight with the crowd of
traders and the excitement that disengaged itself from that tense,
vehement crowd of white faces and glittering eyes was veritably
sickening, veritably weakening. Men on either side of him were shouting
mere incoherencies, to which nobody, not even themselves, were
listening. Others silent, gnawed their nails to the quick, breathing
rapidly, audibly even, their nostrils expanding and contracting. All
around roared the vague thunder that since early morning had shaken the
building. In the Pit the bids leaped to and fro, though the time of
opening had not yet come; the very planks under foot seemed spinning
about in the first huge warning swirl of the Pit's centripetal
convulsion. There was dizziness in the air. Something, some infinite
immeasurable power, onrushing in its eternal courses, shook the Pit in
its grasp. Something deafened the ears, blinded the eyes, dulled and
numbed the mind, with its roar, with the chaff and dust of its
whirlwind passage, with the stupefying sense of its power, coeval with
the earthquake and glacier, merciless, all-powerful, a primal basic
throe of creation itself, unassailable, inviolate, and untamed.

Had the trading begun? Had the gong struck? Landry never knew, never so
much as heard the clang of the great bell. All at once he was fighting;
all at once he was caught, as it were, from off the stable earth, and
flung headlong into the heart and centre of the Pit. What he did, he
could not say; what went on about him, he could not distinguish. He
only knew that roar was succeeding roar, that there was crashing
through his ears, through his very brain, the combined bellow of a
hundred Niagaras. Hands clutched and tore at him, his own tore and
clutched in turn. The Pit was mad, was drunk and frenzied; not a man of
all those who fought and scrambled and shouted who knew what he or his
neighbour did. They only knew that a support long thought to be secure
was giving way; not gradually, not evenly, but by horrible collapses,
and equally horrible upward lea