"On no account start or stir. The report will be very loud. Hold on to the thwarts. I am going to fire!"
Blended with the earlier portion of this speech, the echoes gave back a sharp battering sound like that of throwing metal from a height. This was the cocking of the gun.
When this sound ceased, the echo whispered:
"Fire!"
A jagged rod of flame and luminous smoke shot outwards and upwards into the black void from the boat aft, and cleared the black space for a moment.
Then the clash and clangour of a thousand shattered echoes close at hand bore downward on the head and bent the head, while out of far-reaching caverns thunders were torn with shrieks and yells and flung against concave-resounding roofs, until the whole still air of the monstrous hollows roared, and secret off-spring tombs of darkness, never seen by man, answered with fearful groans and shrieks of the Mother Cave.
Paulton let go the thwart, bent his head, flung his arms up, and crossed them over his head.
Here was the solid earth riven through and through with prodigious thunders of all the heavens!
The roar of sound fell to a shout, the shout to a groan, the groan to a mutter. Then all was still, stiller than before--still with the silence of annihilation accomplished. Nothing that had been was. The echoes were dead, and would speak no more. The material had failed to be, and only darkness and the unweary spirit of man remained.
A voice whispered, "Watch."