“My dear fellow,” he shouted through the night, “at the Word of Power of a true man the nations would rush into war, or sink suddenly into eternal peace; the mountains be moved into the sea, and the dead arise.  To know the sounds behind the manifestations of Nature, the names of mechanical as well as of psychical Forces, of Hebrew angels, as of Christian virtues, is to know Powers that you can call upon at will—­and use!  Utter them in the true vibratory way and you waken their counterpart in yourself and stir thus mighty psychic powers into activity in your Soul.”

He rained the words down upon the other’s head like a tempest.

“Can you wonder that the walls of Jericho fell flat before a ‘Sound,’ or that the raging waves of the sea lay still before a voice that called their Name?  My discovery, Mr. Spinrobin, will run through the world like a purifying fire.  For to utter the true names of individuals, families, tribes and nations, will be to call them to the knowledge of their highest Selves, and to lift them into tune with the music of the Voice of God.”

They reached the front door, where the gleam of lamps shone with a homely welcome through the glass panels.  The clergyman released his companion’s arm; then bent down towards him and added in a tone that held in it for the first time something of the gravity of death: 

“Only remember—­that to utter falsely, to pronounce incorrectly, to call a name incompletely, is the beginning of all evil.  For it is to lie with the very soul.  It is also to evoke forces without the adequate corresponding shape that covers and controls them, and to attract upon yourself the destructive qualities of these Powers—­to your own final disintegration and annihilation.”

Spinrobin entered the house, filled with a sense of awe that was cold and terrible, and greater than all his other sensations combined.  The winds of fear and ruin blew shrill about his naked soul.  None the less he was steadfast.  He would remain to bless.  Mr. Skale might be violent in mind, unbalanced, possibly mad; but his madness thundered at the doors of heaven, and the sound of that thundering completed the conquest of his admiration.  He really believed that when the end came those mighty doors would actually open.  And the thought woke a kind of elemental terror in him that was not of this world—­yet marvelously attractive.

III

That night the singular rushing sound again disturbed him.  It seemed as before to pass through the entire building, but this time it included a greater space in its operations, for he fancied he could hear it outside the house as well, traveling far up into the recesses of the dark mountains.  Like the sweep of immense draughts of air it went down the passage and rolled on into the sky, making him think of the clergyman’s suggestion that some sounds might require airwaves of a hundred miles instead of a few inches, too vast to be heard as sound.  And shortly after it followed the great gliding stride of Mr. Skale himself down the corridor.  That, at least, was unmistakable.