course, was mere suggestion--a trick of the senses of the sort that
makes your mouth water when you see another fellow suck a lemon.

You could even hear the crows that sit on the trees in the park and caw
at passers-by. You could hear the organ in a Christian church, and the
snarl of a pious Moslem reading from the Koran. There was the click of
ponies' hoofs, the whirring and honk of motor-cars, the sucking of
Hoogli River, booming of a steamer-whistle, roars of trains, and the
peculiar clamor of Calcutta's swarms that I can never hear without
thinking of a cobra with its hood just ready to raise.

In the sea of noises in the dome one instantly stood out--the voice of a
man speaking English with a slightly babu accent. For exactly as long as
the reverberations of those two tuning forks lasted, you could hear him
declaiming, and then his voice faded away into the ocean of noise like a
rock that has shown for a moment above the surface of a maelstrom.

"That is a member of the legislature, where ignorant men in all-night
session make laws for fools to break," said the Gray Mahatma.

Signing to King and me to remain seated, he himself crossed the floor to
where the master-tuner sat, and squatting down beside him began picking
up tuning forks and striking one against the other. Each time he did
that some city sound or other distinguished itself for a moment, exactly
as the theme appears in music; only some of the vibrations seemed to jar
against others instead of blending with them, and when that happened the
effect was intensely disagreeable.

At last he struck a combination that made me jump as effectually as
sudden tooth-ache. Some of the other sounds had affected King more, but
that particular one passed him by and tortured me. Watching with his
head a little to one side the Gray Mahatma instantly began striking
those two forks as rapidly as if he were clapping hands, increasing the
vehemence with each stroke.

If I had stayed there I would have been stark mad or dead within five
minutes. I felt as if I were being vibrated asunder--as if my whole body
were resolving into its component parts. I lay on the floor with my head
in both hands, and I daresay yelled with agony, but I don't know about
that.

At any rate King understood and acted instantly. He seized me under the
arms and dragged me face-downward to the door, where he had to drop me
in order to find how to open the thing. Having accomplished that, he
dra