He paused and listened. Then he sprang to his feet, aroused by a tremendous crash which deafened his ears, shook him as though a great gale blew, and filled his eyes, his mouth, his nostrils with some thick air or dust, he knew not which, that for a moment threatened to suffocate him. The loft above had fallen. CHAPTER V. Before this tremendous noise and confusion had arisen, Lavirotte had no means of ascertaining how time went. He was conscious of certain pauses and beats in the great noise of traffic above his head. The pauses and beats, he assumed, of traffic in the artery of time. But he knew nothing certain. He had kept no record whatever. He was conscious that there had been periods of activity and quiescence, just as he was conscious there had been periods of activity and quiescence in his youth, when he was a child. But, as in the remote past, he had lost all knowledge or record of the numbers of the period. His reason told him he could not have been a fortnight entombed. His memory told him nothing. Abroad in the busy street and lanes close to St. Prisca's Tower, the fall of the lowest loft made a prodigious commotion. First of all, there was the roar of noise accompanying the fall of the floor, and of the tons upon tons of stones and clay lying on the loft. Then out through the narrow windows of the tower sprang shafts of dust, forced furiously outward by the enormous pressure upon the air within. For a moment the tumultuous traffic of Porter Street was stopped, and men who would scarcely have minded the downfall of the warehouse out of which they were loading their vans or carts, stood in silent amazement at the inexplicable, tremendous subsidence which had occurred in the tower. Those men who were familiar with the place were all the more amazed, because they believed there had been no possibility of the old tower uttering such a terrible note as that which had proceeded from it. They believed that the lofts of the tower were merely decayed wood. It was well known that the bells had been long ago removed, and as there had been in that tower, so far as the frequenters of Porter Street knew, nothing which could with profit be stolen, the interest in that tower to them had been less than in the Monument. To people of this class the Monument was something like the rainbow or the Milky Way. It had no effect on life, no influence upon wages, and, consequently, was altogether unworthy of consideration. Rain and hail and snow influenced wages in so far as they impeded work, but not the Monument, not St. Prisca's Tower, not the rainbow, not the Milky Way, controlled work, and therefore each, while it might be a matter for dreamy speculation under the influence of tobacco, was absolutely indifferent to the workmen frequenting Porter Street.