“The Rhamda!”
“Yes. The Rhamda Geos.”
XXX. — THE PLUNGE
The woman left him. For a while Chick reflected upon what she had said. In full rush of returning vigour his mind was working clearly and with analytical exactness.
For the first time he noticed a heaviness in the air, overladen, pregnant. He became aware of a strange, undercurrent of life; of an exceedingly faint, insistent sound, pulse-like and rhythmical, like the breathing undertones of multitudes. He was a city man, and accustomed to the murmuring throbs of a metropolitan heart. But this was very different.
Presently, amid the strangeness, he could distinguish the tinkle of elfin bells, almost imperceptible, but musical. The whole air was laden with a subdued music, lined, as it were, with a golden vibrancy of tintinnabulary cadence—distant, subdued, hardly more than a whisper, yet part of the air itself.
It gave him the feeling that he was in a dream. In the realms of the subconscious he had heard just such sounds—exotic and unearthly—fleeting and evanescent.
The notion of dreams threw his mind into sudden alertness. In an instant he was thinking systematically, and in the definite realisation of his plight.