ght have been turning the screw of a
micrometer; I could not see. Then, raising the fork above his shoulder,
he struck the floor with it, and a master-note as clear as the peal of a
bell went ringing up into the dome.

The effect was almost ridiculous. It made you want to laugh. Everybody
in the cavern smiled, and I daresay if the truth were known we had
discovered the mother-lode of comedy. That one note chased all the
others out of the dome as a dog might chase sheep--as the wind blows
clouds away--as a cop drives small boys off the grass. They actually
scampered out of hearing, and you couldn't imagine them hiding close by,
either; they were gone for good, and that one, clear master-note--the
middle F--went vibrating around and around, as if scouring out the very
smell of what had been there.

"That is the key-note of all nature," said the Mahatma. "All sounds, all
colors, all thoughts, all vibrations center in that note. It is the key
that can unlock them all."

The silence that followed when the last ringing overtone had gone off
galloping in its stride toward infinity was the most absolute and awful
silence I have ever had to listen to. The very possibility of sound
seemed to have ceased to exist. You could not believe that there could
be sound, nor remember what sound was like. A whole sense and its
functions had been taken from you, and the resultant void was dead--so
dead that no sense could live in it, unless fear is a sense. You could
feel horribly afraid, and I'll tell you what the fear amounted to:

There was a feeling that these men were fooling with the force that runs
the universe, and that the next stroke might be a mistake that would
result like the touching of two high-tension wires, multiplied to the
_nth_. You could not resist the suggestion that the world might burst in
fragments at any minute.

Meanwhile the fellow with the tuning fork fiddled again with some
adjustment on the thick portion of its stem, and presently whirling it
around his head as the old-time warriors used two-handed swords, he
brought it down on one of a circle of small anvils that were arranged
around him like the figures on a clock-face.

You could almost see Calcutta instantly! The miracle was the reverse of
the preceding one. The ringing, subdivided, sharp, discordant note he
struck was swallowed instantly in a sea of noise that seemed not only to
have color but even smell to it; you could smell Calcutta! But that, of