es, the clash and thump of trolley
cars, street-hawkers' cries, and the sound of sea-waves breaking on the
shore.

"You hear Bombay," said the Mahatma. Then we all sat down in line.

It was actual physical torture until you were used to it, and I doubt
whether you could get used to it without somebody to educate you--some
scientist to show you how to defend your nerves against that outrageous
racket. For the sounds were all out of adjustment and proportion.
Nothing was in key. It was as if the laws of acoustics had been lifted,
and sound had gone crazy.

At one moment, apropos of nothing and disconnected from all other
sounds, you could hear a man or a woman speaking as distinctly as if the
individual were up there under the dome; then a chaos of off-key notes
would swallow the voice, and the next might be a dog's bark or a
locomotive whistle. The only continuously recognizable sounds were a
power station and the thunder of waves along the harbor front, and it
sounded much more thunderous than it should have done at that season of
the year.

The tuning of an orchestra does not nearly approximate the confusion;
for the members of the orchestra are all trying to find one pitch and
are gradually hitting it, whereas every sound within that cavern seemed
to be pitched and keyed differently.

"This is our latest," said the Mahatma. "It is only for two or three
hundred years that we have been studying this phenomenon. It may
possibly take us two or three hundred years more before we can control
it."

I wanted to ask questions, but could not because the cursed inharmony
made my senses reel. Nevertheless, you could hear other sounds
perfectly. When I struck my hand on the rock floor I could hear the slap
at least as distinctly as normal; possibly a little more so. And when
the Gray Mahatma spoke, each word was separate and sharp.

"Now you shall hear another city," he said. "Observe that the voices of
cities are as various as men's. No two are alike. Sound and color are
one and the same thing differently expressed, and the graduations of
both are infinite."

He caught the eye of one of the men.

"Calcutta!" he said, in a voice not exactly of command, yet certainly
not of deference.

Without acknowledging the order in any other way, the man got on his
knees and picked up an enormous tuning fork, whose prongs were about
three feet long, and he made some adjustment in the fork of it that took
about five minutes. He mi