And, though I saw nothing in the room but faintly luminous patches
where the beds stood, and the two tin baths upon the floor, a vivid
scene rose before my mind’s eye that stirred poignant emotions I was
wholly at a loss to explain. The consciousness of some potent magical
life stirred in my veins, a vaster horizon, and a larger purpose than
anything I had known hitherto in my strict and conventional English
life and my quaint worship in a pale-blue tin tabernacle where all was
ugly, cramped, and literally idolatrous.
“And the gongs so faintly ringing,” I cried.
Julius turned quickly and thrust his face closer into mine. Then he
stood up beside the open window and drew in a deep breath of the June
night air.
“Ah, you remember that?” he said, with eyes aglow. “The gongs--the big
singing gongs! There you had a bit of clean, deep memory right out of
the centre. No wonder you feel excited...!”
And he explained to me, though I scarcely recognised the voice or
language, so strongly did the savour of shadowy past days inform them,
how it was in those old temples when the world was not cut off from
the rest of the universe, but claimed some psychical kinship with all
the planetary and stellar forces, that each planet was represented by
a metal gong so attuned in quality and pitch as to vibrate in sympathy
with the message of its particular rays, sound and colour helping and
answering one another till the very air trembled and pulsed with the
forces the light brought down. No doubt, Julius’s words, vibrating
with earnestness, completed my confusion while they intensified my
enjoyment, for I remember how carried away I was by this picture of the
temples acting as sounding-boards to the sky, and by his description
of the healing powers of the light and sound thus captured and
concentrated.
The spirit of comedy peeped in here and there between the entr’actes,
as it were, for even the peaceful and studious Goldie was also
included in these adventures of forgotten days, sometimes consciously,
sometimes unconsciously.
“By the gods!” Julius exclaimed, springing up, “I’ve an idea! We’ll try
it on Goldie, and see what happens!”
“Try what?” I whispered, catching his own excitement.
“Gongs, discs and planet,” was the reply.
I stared at him through the gloom. Then I glanced towards the
unconscious victim.
“There’s no harm. We’ll imagine this is one of the old temples, and
we’ll do an experiment!” He touched me on the back. Excitement ran
through me. Something caught me from the past. I watched him with an
emotion that was half amazement, half alarm.
In a moment he had the looking-glass balanced upon the window-ledge at
a perilous angle, reflecting the faint starlight upon the head of the
sleeping Goldingham. Any minute I feared it would fall with a crash
upon the lawn below, or break into smithereens upon the floor. Julius
fixed it somehow with a hair-brush and a towel against the sash.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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