You
see the same air of careless competence around a well-managed circus
lot.

King and I followed the Gray Mahatma down into the bowl, and under his
directions seated ourselves exactly in the middle, King and I back to
back and the Mahatma a little way from us and also with his back turned.
In that position my back was toward the door we had entered by, but I
was able to see nine narrow openings in the opposite wall about twenty
feet higher than the ledge, and those openings may have had something to
do with what followed, although I can't prove it.

Old gray-beard, who had admitted us, stood on the ledge like a picture
of St. Simon Stylites, folding his arms under his flowing beard and
looking almost ready to plunge downward, as if the bowl were a swimming
tank.

However, he suddenly filled his great scrawny breast with air and boomed
out one word. The golden light ceased to exist. There was no period of
going, as there is even with electric light. He spoke, and it was not.
Nothing whatever was visible. I held a finger up, and poked my eye
before I knew it.

Then all at once there began the most delicious music, like Ariel
singing in mid-air. It was subdued, but as clear as the ripple of a
mountain stream over pebbles, and there was absolutely no locating it,
for it seemed to come from everywhere at once, even from underneath us.
And simultaneously with the music there began to be a dim light, which
was all the more impossible to locate because it was never the same
color in two places, nor even in one place for longer than a note of
music lasted.

"Observe!" boomed the Gray Mahatma's solemn voice. "Color and sound are
one. Both are vibration. You shall behold the color harmonies."

Presently the connection between sound and color began to be obvious.
Each note had its color, and as that note was sounded the color appeared
in a thousand places.

It was Eastern music. It filled the cavern, and as the pulse of it
quickened the light danced, colors shooting this and that way like
shuttles weaving a new sky. But there were no drum-beats yet, and the
general effect was rather of dreaminess.

When the old gray-beard's voice boomed out at last from the ledge above
us, and light and music ceased simultaneously, the effect was
nauseating. It went to the pit of your stomach. The instantaneous
darkness produced vertigo. You felt as if you were falling down an
endless pit, and King and I clutched each other. The mere