"There is not much longer to wait," he said, neither grim nor humorous, simply unvarying. "The sun already has dipped. Soon the big bell speaks when all will be paid."
And in fact it became clear to Cloots that this affair would have to be solved on the spot. He was not minded to stand any more of it nor to leave Moung Poh Sin in train to repeat such performances. He had lost that perfectly ripping new love toy of a girl. A very jolly evening had been ruined for him, and his confident balance most inexplicably and painfully shaken. And here this insignificant relic of a discarded past was undertaking to block his steps. This flute-toned, slab-faced little heathen was presuming to threaten him, to name the moment when a superior white, with his strength and his vision, with his civilized capacity for perceptions and enjoyments, should suddenly cease to be....
He shifted both fists easily to his belt and took a watchful survey of the figure by the doorway—and he did some rapid calculating.
Outside on the platform between west and east, between flame and dark, Shway Dagohn showed now like one cutting from a jasper opal. Each flake and streak of coloring had mellowed. And, with that, all sounds seemed mellower too, as if they came more resonantly on the burdened air. Everywhere, all about, the pagoda bells were ringing: bells of bronze and silver and gold, bells hammered by devout and lusty celebrants, bells insistently jangled by begging priests, bells that tinkled and sighed to any stray breeze. And the whole tide of color and of sound was drawing to an end, a definite climax: presently the tropic night would fall like a curtain, and presently the huge central bell, Mahah Ganda, "the great sweet voice" which is the voice of a continent, would bestir itself ever so slightly for an instant at the touch of its monstrous battering-ram and wake brazen thunder far and wide.
Cloots reckoned that he had perhaps five minutes before the stated limit. It was to be a sort of test, as he saw and accepted. He would have to decide how well, after all, he did understand the ancient half of the earth to which he and others like him went swaggering as conquerors and masters. He would have to demonstrate which of the various ways and ways and just how seriously he was going to take this ancient people and their self-sufficing and queerly keyed formulas, so strange and vivid and charming. And whether he was going to be laid under some kind of psychic blackmail every time he chose to snatch a delicious interpretation.
If he meant to be quite sure of that essential white superiority of this, the time had come to make it good.
He smiled again as he swung the right lapel of his twill jacket a little farther to the right....
"Moung Poh Sin," he began, almost amiably, "with the rest of these matters which seem so well and so fully known to thee, is it also known where I have been since I went away?"
"No, Shway."