“To be sure, to be sure....  But, in passing, permit me to introduce my friend Durtal.”

Durtal, somewhat flustered, made a bow in the darkness.

“Ah, monsieur, how fortunate.  Louis is so anxious to meet you.”

“Where is he taking me?” Durtal wondered as again he groped along behind his friend, now and then, just as he felt completely lost, coming to the narrow strip of light admitted by a barbican, and again proceeding in inky darkness.  The climb seemed endless.  Finally they came to the barred door, opened it, and found themselves on a frame balcony with the abyss above and below.  Des Hermies, who seemed perfectly at home, pointed downward, then upward.  They were halfway up a tower the face of which was overlaid with enormous criss-crossing joists and beams riveted together with bolt heads as big as a man’s fist.  Durtal could see no one.  He turned and, clinging to the hand rail, groped along the wall toward the daylight which stole down between the inclined leaves of the sounding-shutters.

Leaning out over the precipice, he discerned beneath him a formidable array of bells hanging from oak supports lined with iron.  The sombre bell metal was slick as if oiled and absorbed light without refracting it.  Bending backward, he looked into the upper abyss and perceived new batteries of bells overhead.  These bore the raised effigy of a bishop, and a place in each, worn by the striking of the clapper, shone golden.

All were in quiescence, but the wind rattled against the sounding-shutters, stormed through the cage of timbers, howled along the spiral stair, and was caught and held whining in the bell vases.  Suddenly a light breeze, like the stirring of confined air, fanned his cheek.  He looked up.  The current had been set in motion by the swaying of a great bell beginning to get under way.  There was a crash of sound, the bell gathered momentum, and now the clapper, like a gigantic pestle, was grinding the great bronze mortar with a deafening clamour.  The tower trembled, the balcony on which Durtal was standing trepidated like the floor of a railway coach, there was the continuous rolling of a mighty reverberation, interrupted regularly by the jar of metal upon metal.

In vain Durtal scanned the upper abyss.  Finally he managed to catch sight of a leg, swinging out into space and back again, in one of those wooden stirrups, two of which, he had noticed, were fastened to the bottom of every bell.  Leaning out so that he was almost prone on one of the timbers, he finally perceived the ringer, clinging with his hands to two iron handles and balancing over the gulf with his eyes turned heavenward.

Durtal was shocked by the face.  Never had he seen such disconcerting pallor.  It was not the waxen hue of the convalescent, not the lifeless grey of the perfume-or snuff-maker, it was a prison pallor of a bloodless lividness unknown today, the ghastly complexion of a wretch of the Middle Ages shut up till death in a damp, airless, pitch-dark in-pace.