There was another silence before the awful voice spoke the command:
“Let these bones live!”
Through the moments of silence that followed, the sound of the sea was borne by a fitful breeze over the cliff face and swept purring through the valley.
Then came the moment of marvel. There was a quivering here and there—something like the long indrawing of breath of a sleeper who has slept for long but now awakens—a slow heaving as of a giant refreshed, and then in mysterious, dread silence, with no rattling of hollow skeleton limbs, there came the great moving among the dry bones, and they rose up, an exceeding great army.
Life had come triumphant out of the midst of
Death. That was what the voice said. The whole valley, which had been silent an hour before, was now vibrating, pulsating with life—the tumult of life which flows through a great army—every man alert, at his post in his rank—waiting for whatever might come—the advance of the enemy, the carrying out of the strategy of the commander.
Life had come triumphant out of the midst of death, and who would dare now to say that the deepest spiritual life might not lie hidden from sight among the bleaching heaps of dead bones that strewed the valley from cliffy to cliffs—hidden but only waiting for the voice to cry aloud:
“Let these bones live!”
“Oh, that that Dread Voice would speak through me!” cried the preacher.
That was the first time he became conscious of the sound of his own voice, and he was startled. He had heard that other voice speaking, carrying him away upon the wings of its words down through the depths of that mystic valley, but now all was silent and he was standing with trembling hands and quivering lips, gazing out over no valley of mystery alive with a moving host, but over a Cornish vale of crags; and yet there beneath his eyes were thousands of faces, and they looked like the faces of such as had been newly awakened after a long sleep—dazed—wondering—waiting....