The darkness, meanwhile, began to lift.  It moved upwards in spirals that, as they rose, hummed and sang.  A soft blaze of violet like the color of the robe he wore became faintly visible in the air.  The chamber, he perceived, was about the same size as his own bedroom, and empty of all furniture, while walls, floor, and ceiling were draped in the same shade of violet that covered his shoulders; and the sound he uttered, and thought, called forth the color and made it swim into visibility.  The walls and ceiling sheeted with wax opened, so to speak, their giant lips.

Mr. Skale made a movement and drew him closer.  He raised one arm into the air, and Spinrobin, following the motion, saw what at first he imagined to be vast round faces glimmering overhead, outlined darkly against the violet atmosphere.  Mr. Skale, with what seemed a horrible audacity, was reaching up to touch them, and as he did so there issued a low, soft, metallic sound, humming and melodious, that dropped sweetly about his ears.  Then the secretary saw that they were discs of metal—­immense gongs swinging in midair, suspended in some way from the ceiling, and each one as Skale touched it emitted its beautiful note till all combined together at length into a single chord.

And this chord, though Spinrobin talks whole pages in describing it, apparently brought in its train the swell and thunder of something beyond,—­the far sweetness of exquisite harmonics, thousands upon thousands, inwoven with the strands of deeper notes that boomed with colossal vibrations about them.  And, in some fashion that musical people will understand, its gentler notes caught up the sound that Spinrobin was uttering in his mind, and took possession of it.  They merged.  An extraordinary volume, suggesting a huge aggregation of sound behind it—­in the same way that a murmur of wind may suggest the roar of tempests—­rose and fell through the room, lifted them up, bore them away, sang majestically over their heads, under their feet, and through their very minds.  The vibrations of their own physical atoms fell into pace with these other spiritual activities by a kind of sympathetic resonance.

The combination of power and simplicity was what impressed him most, it seems, for it resembled—­resembled only—­the great spiritual simplicity in Beethoven that rouses and at the same time satisfies the profoundest yearnings of the soul.  It swept him into utter bliss, into something for once complete.  And Spinrobin, at the center of his glorified yet quaking little heart, understood vaguely that the sound he uttered, and the sound he heard, were directly connected with the presence of some august and awful Name....

VI

Suddenly Mr. Skale, he was aware, became rigid beside him.  Spinrobin pressed closer, seeking the protective warmth of his body, and realizing from the gesture that something new was about to happen.  And something did happen, though not precisely in the sense that things happen in the streets and in the markets of men.  In the sphere of his mind, perhaps, it happened, but was none the less real for that.